Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Evolution - "Timed out trying to get lock file"

Here is how I solved this problem.

So this morning I got this error on my Evolution mail, the first thing I tried was to restart evolution as this normally would solve a lock problem, but in this case it didn't work, evolution kept complaining about the lock and I was unable to access one of my mail folders while the other ones worked.

Then as I normally would do I searched google in hope someone else have had a similar problem and found a solution on this, but was not able to find any answers that solved this problem only suggestions, but none of them worked.

I gave up on google and looked in the .evolution directory starting with

$ find ~/.evolution/ -name *.lock

and found a .lock file on the folder i was unable to access.

So I shutdown evolution.

$ evolution --force-shutdown

and removed the .lock file.

$ mv ~/.evolution/.lock ~/Desktop

and started up evolution again, then did no longer get the error message and my folder was yet again accessible.

This solved it for me.