Remove “System Program Problem Detected” Messages From Ubuntu

One of my Ubuntu systems would pop up the following message multiple times after logging in:

System program problem detected

Do you want to report the problem now?

It was really annoying as simply closing the messages would cause them to return after a reboot.

This was happening due to a number of files in the /var/crash/ directory. After removing these, the problem went away. I did so from the command line as follows:

[chris@home ~]$ sudo rm /var/crash/*
[chris@home ~]$ 

While the idea of a crash report helping fix problems is nice, I really question whether they are that valuable. Personally, I’d rather never have to deal with them.

To ensure that I never have to deal with them again, I disabled the apport service that is responsible for generating these crash reports.

To disable the service, first edit the /etc/default/apport file:

[chris@home ~]$ gksu gedit /etc/default/apport

# 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

Then change enabled=1 to enabled=0:

# 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=0

Save and close the file.

Finally, stop the still-running apport service:

[chris@home ~]$ sudo stop apport
apport stop/waiting
[chris@home ~]$ 

http://chrisjean.com/2014/03/19/fix-system-program-problem-detected-messages-from-ubuntu/