The Apport system creates crash report files in the /var/crash directory. These crash report files cause an error message to appear every time Ubuntu boots. After removing all the crash report files, the error message should stop popping up. However if a new crash takes place then it will appear again in future.
Apport is responsible for detecting such crashes and upon user consent, reports these crashes to developers so that they can fix it.
However, these error messages can be rather annoying for everyday users and you may wish to disable them.
1 Check the status of apport
Open the GNOME Launcher, click on Terminal and run the following command:
cat /etc/default/apport
This will output something similar to the following:
# set this to 0 to disable apport, or to 1 to enable it
# you can temporarily override this with
# sudo service apport start force_start=1
enabled=1
This will determine if the apport is 1, enabled or 0, disabled.
2 Remove crash report files
The reason for the apport message appearing is due to the existance of crash dump files existing in the /var/crash directory. This is to allow you to diagnose the application that has crashed and to allow analysis of the cause of crash.
cd /var/crash
ls
This will list the crash files (if any) in the crash dump folder.
_usr_bin_gnome-shell.1000.crash _usr_lib_gvfs_gvfsd-smb.1000.uploaded
_usr_lib_gvfs_gvfsd-smb.1000.crash _usr_lib_virtualbox_VirtualBox.0.crash
_usr_lib_gvfs_gvfsd-smb.1000.upload
3 Remove crash report files
Removing these report files will stop the apport from displaying notifications after a system reboot. This is useful if you have removed the offending application or resolved a fault.
sudo rm /var/crash/*
Note: After removing these files the error message should stop appearing; however, if a new crash takes place then the message will return.
4 Turn off apport
To turn off the apport error messaging system, perform the following:
sudo sed -i 's/enabled=1/enabled=0/g' /etc/default/apport
Note: For the change to take effect a reboot is required; however, you can reload apport without a reboot via:
sudo service apport restart
5 Turn apport back on
To turn apport back on, perform the following commands:
sudo sed -i 's/enabled=0/enabled=1/g' /etc/default/apport
sudo service apport restart
These commands will update the enabled switch and restart the apport service.