Teams fails to load on Linux.

Murray Jones 51

Hello,

I have been using Teams on Linux for online learning for the past few months. Up until this morning, it has been working without issue.

As of this morning, when attempting to open Teams the following issue occurs:

White rectangle the size of teams window briefly appears, then vanishes.
Several seconds later, the system tray icon appears.
Finally, the blue window shown below appears, and continues to do nothing. It's not using any CPU, and I have tried just waiting. Nothing had happened after half an hour.
I have tried running teams as the root user for both of the above options, as well as without root permissions.
Yes, I've tried restarting the computor :)

131310-image.png

The only thing that I can Identify as having changed since Teams stopped working is that I ran an application update (sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade).

Here's what I have tried so far. None of these have made any difference:

Uninstalling Teams, and reinstalling from the .deb download on Microsoft's website.
I've also tried everything on this thread: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/35736/teams-on-linux-silently-crashes-my-linux-machine.html

Some stats about my system:

I am running Ubuntu 21.10 with the Xfce desktop environment.
Kernel is x86_64 Linux 5.13.0-14-generic
I am not short on RAM, CPU, or disk space - Teams has run just fine until today.

Here are the logs, as retrieved through the button in the system tray icon.

131279-logs.txt

Teams forms the basis for my year 12 online learning, so it's pretty important that I can get a quick resolution to this.

Thanks,

Murray.

Sharon Zhao-MSFT 25,056 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2021-09-13T07:43:04.977+00:00

@Murray Jones ,

It is suggested to use Teams web client(https://teams.microsoft.com) as a urgent workaround.

From your log file, I find the following error message -- getInstallOrUpdateTime failed. It seemingly points to your update operation(sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade).

I cannot get further more solutions for this now. We will research the log file carefully and do some more tests. If there is any update, I will share here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
Knevah 21 Reputation points

2021-09-13T08:43:21.453+00:00

What does the message "getInstallOrUpdateTime failed." actually mean, as a quick search online shows it is extremely common in almost every place a log is posted from Teams, most of which are taken from Windows....

I'm sure it "points to the update operation", in that we updated the client and the new one has a bug, but I think that error is very likely a red herring, given how common (and not platform specific) it appears to be.
Knevah 21 Reputation points

2021-09-13T16:42:38.657+00:00

Whatever the issue is, it's tied to "settings.json" which gets written to ~/.config/Microsoft/Microsoft Teams if you don't log in, it writes around a 70K file, and then it can load again... but if you log in it writes around a 140K file and cannot load teams again.

If settngs.json is restored to a pre-logged in state then it can load again.
Sharon Zhao-MSFT 25,056 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2021-09-15T08:19:58.12+00:00

@Knevah , @Murray Jones ,
Agree with Knevah-5715, update should be a red herring because the client has already on the latest version.
Currently, we cannot repro this problem. And we are trying to install same OS version to try again. Any update I will share here.
Kristoffer Andergrim 6 Reputation points

2021-09-15T08:37:52.703+00:00

For me the problem occurred after updating from Ubuntu 20.04 to 21.10. Deleting the ~/.config/Microsoft directory before starting works, but I'm running the browser based version for now.
Knevah 21 Reputation points

2021-09-15T15:19:06.57+00:00

I've spent a while looking at this, and I found 1 other software project that was impacted with the same error, looking at the stackdump generated by teams, it appears to be an identical problem... which is stems from glibc being more critical of incorrect types for "stacksize".... it's hard to be precise, but the release for glibc notes say:-

2.1. Non-constant PTHREAD_STACK_MIN

In order to better support architectures that need a variable stack size for scalable vector registers the constant value for PTHREAD_STACK_MIN has transitioned to a non-constant value e.g. sysconf call.

You may no longer use PTHREAD_STACK_MIN in a way that treats it like a constant value. The value returned for PTHREAD_STACK_MIN is now of type long and so may generate compiler warnings when compared against an unsigned value e.g. size_t.

This will affect a lot of users in about 6 weeks when they start upgrading Ubuntu, but it seems only one other project was affected and they pushed the fix a bit more than 2 months ago.

I checked the dates that Teams on Linux has been updated:-

2020-10-05 22:13:01
2020-12-02 15:58:54
2021-03-09 23:18:50
2021-04-02 02:31:13
2021-06-08 11:55:11

Any chance this means we're overdue an update?
K

Accepted answer

Rudolf Tomori 401 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2021-09-16T09:25:50.713+00:00
Thank you for reporting this issue. As already mentioned in the posts here, the problem is related to glibc 2.34 not being compatible with our implementation. While we look into the issue, we suggest you to use teams from the snapstore. You can install and run it this way:

snap install teams

snap run teams
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Sharon Zhao-MSFT 25,056 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2021-09-21T13:04:52.657+00:00

@Murray Jones ,

Do you try the solution provided by RudolfTomori-MSFT?

If it works, please accept this reply as answer to benefit more people with the same problem.

Have a nice day!

Murray Jones 51 Reputation points

2021-09-21T23:25:35.8+00:00

Thanks, this does indeed work :). It seems a lot slower to load that the previous .deb was, but that's not really a big deal - might be just my computer.

Sharon Zhao-MSFT 25,056 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2021-09-22T06:40:29.067+00:00

@Murray Jones ,
It is really good news.
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15 additional answers

Knevah 21 Reputation points

2021-09-22T13:37:19.41+00:00

I turned off the "start at boot" within Teams, created a shell script which deletes "settings.json" and before running teams, then configured "startup applications" in the OS to run this script.

Apparently the saved login information is not stored in setttings.json, so this seems fine as long as the default settings work for you.

I also do support the solution above to use the snap package version, but I don't know who packages that, and/or how long it lags behind so for the moment, I am happy with deleting the settings.json file before each start.... this may also be beneficial since thankfully I don't have to use teams very often, and so it is nice in a way to have everything back to defaults each time I use it.
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Sharon Zhao-MSFT 25,056 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2021-09-23T06:36:26.38+00:00

@Knevah
Thanks for your kindly sharing. It is very useful.
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Peter Allebone 1 Reputation point

2021-09-24T15:39:05.617+00:00

I changed to the snap version as it seems better anyway. Easiest way to solve the problem and avoid this again in the future.
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Rudolf Tomori 401 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2021-09-30T09:06:27.177+00:00

Hello, yesterday we released a new teams-insiders package version 1.4.00.26453 that fixes the issue. The published deb package can now be used also on Ubuntu 21.10.
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Tim Adams 1 Reputation point

2021-09-30T10:04:28.397+00:00

I don't see it yet, either through apt or from https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-teams/download-app#desktopAppDownloadregion

Rudolf Tomori 401 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2021-09-30T11:44:33.523+00:00

It is available on https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/ms-teams/pool/main/t/teams-insiders/teams-insiders_1.4.00.26453_amd64.deb

Tim Adams 1 Reputation point

2021-09-30T12:49:51.547+00:00

Ok, got it, thanks.

I'll do a bit of testing, and let you know how it goes.

Tim Adams 1 Reputation point

2021-09-30T13:19:17.37+00:00

Seems ok.

I logged teams-insider onto my O365 account, closed it, restarted it and it auto logged onto my account fine.

I restarted my system, and starting teams-insider worked fine.

I did some basic tests in teams-insider on a wiki and onenote stored on my O365 onedrive, they seem fine.

I edited some word, excel and powerpoint docs within teams-insider, that seemed ok.

I don't use conferencing much in teams, but starting a meeting seemed fine.

Thanks for the fix.

Knevah 21 Reputation points

2021-10-12T13:36:56.427+00:00

Confirmed that the new version just released via the repo added by the original installer is now working correctly, as others have observed. I just have one question... after ~3 years, why is it still listed as "preview" ?

Knevah 21 Reputation points

2021-10-12T14:21:18.1+00:00

As someone who spent many days reverse engineering Windows 3.1 to identify why it generated seemingly random errors when running on Digital Research DOS, only to find that it was a deliberate attempt to discredit Digital Research... and lived through the "browser wars", where Microsoft used underhand tactics and abused monopoly power to kill the competition, leaving us stuck supporting what could possibly be the worst browser ever created for a decade.... as well as the "Linux is a cancer" episode... and many others, I have a lasting dislike for Microsoft, and all that it has stood for.

HOWEVER... I have to applaud them for providing some of their office suite on Linux, and credit where credit is due, this patch was released publicly prior to Ubuntu 21.10 being officially released. Now, if you really want to impress people, lets have the rest of the components required to use Linux in a heterogeneous environment with Windows and Linux working together depending on user preference. Then we can really begin to put the issues of the past behind us.
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Haris 1 Reputation point

2022-01-21T19:16:42.157+00:00

Similar problem for me, I am in Year 8, using Teams for study, and for online study, I got a Chromebook, and I installed the Android version of Teams, but after a week, that stopped working. I can live with the web version, but it isn't exactly the most convenient way to use Teams, so I decided to get the Linux client for desktop, since I turned on Linux development environment (using Debian 11 Bullseye), but even though the .deb file installed in 10 seconds, it didn't launch. I uninstalled it and re-installed it but nothing changed. Since I lost hope for that, I tried to install the Snapstore as an alternative, since it was mentioned previously, so I used the following commands:
sudo apt install snapd
sudo snap install core
The terminal's response was:
error: system does not fully support snapd: cannot mount squashfs image using "squashfs": mount:
/tmp/sanity-mountpoint-215714669: mount failed: Operation not permitted.
So that wouldn't work either. I hope you will have a solution!
Thanks,
Haris
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Haris 1 Reputation point

2022-01-21T19:45:40.207+00:00

Found out some more information about the problem, when I installed Teams with gnome-software-plugin-snap, I pressed the 'Launch' button in the 'Software' app store, and it outputted this:
Sorry, something went wrong: ldconfig failed, exit status 256
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