Problems Loading Crashplan GUI in Debian Jessie (or GNOME 3) on Linux

I use Crashplan now for my backup provider, and ran into a small snag while upgrading to Debian Jessie (I also use Crunchbang #!, and yes, that’s all google bait for other people who have the same problem.)

The thing is, it’s actually pretty well documented on the Crashplan website… I’m just enough of a moron to try searching the internet and forums first… and the terminology I used wasn’t the same as theirs.

So my GUI would launch and then almost immediately crash with an error in libsoup. Turns out that’s because I accidentally pulled in GNOME3 during the upgrade (yeah, that annoyed me), and apparently didn’t get rid of all of it.

The fix is actually really simple: add this to the second line in run.conf:

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.DefaultType=mozilla

Which means that you’ll end up with something like this:

SRV_JAVA_OPTS=”-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -Dapp=CrashPlanService -DappBaseName=CrashPlan -Xms20m -Xmx512m -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Dsun.net.inetaddr.ttl=300 -Dnetworkaddress.cache.ttl=300 -Dsun.net.inetaddr.negative.ttl=0 -Dnetworkaddress.cache.negative.ttl=0 -Dc42.native.md5.enabled=false”
GUI_JAVA_OPTS=”-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -Dapp=CrashPlanDesktop -DappBaseName=CrashPlan -Xms20m -Xmx512m -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Dsun.net.inetaddr.ttl=300 -Dnetworkaddress.cache.ttl=300 -Dsun.net.inetaddr.negative.ttl=0 -Dnetworkaddress.cache.negative.ttl=0 -Dc42.native.md5.enabled=false -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.DefaultType=mozilla”

And BDAOW.

While we’re at it, I’ll also share my other tips for Crashplan on Linux:

1. I stopped the system service.

sudo /etc/init.d/crashplan stop
sudo update-rc.d crashplan disable

2. I set up sudoers to run the Crashplan Engine without requiring the password. This is the “you need to do enough research to understand what you’re doing” portion.
3. I use ionice to reduce the disk i/o demands so I’m more willing to let it run in the background instead of killing it when it interferes with my games. 🙂

ionice -c 3 /usr/local/crashplan/bin/CrashPlanEngine

This helps my system startup time, and then I can configure the engine to start a few seconds later once everything else is going.