GNOME Boxes fails to create virtual machine: "UNIX socket path '…' is too long

I bought an ASUS X515J notebook with preinstalled Endless here in Brazil, for my to son to study from home. It’s working pretty well overall, but I found this problem which seems to result from both an upstream problem and what might be an Endless decision. The problem was last reproduced today, after updating Endless to 4.0.4.

The computer has three users: there’s the shared account, mine, and his. I’m the only one with admin rights, and his account was created latter and is under parental control. I don’t remember choosing this username, so I just followed the default or perhaps didn’t even have a choice. Anyway, his username is 24 letters long, and not by (our) design. In turn, my username is

The problem appears when I try to create a virtual machine with GNOME Boxes. The only VM I tried creating was Android x86 9.0, from the r2 ISO downloaded from the website. After clicking + to create a VM, “create virtual machine from a file”, choosing the ISO file, selecting Android x86 9.0 from the Model dropdown list and hitting Next, the Review and Create step has an endless waiting spin when the options should be.

If I do so opening from GNOME Terminal, this is the output I get:

redactedredactedredacte@endless:~$ flatpak run org.gnome.Boxes 
Gtk-Message: 17:21:09.619: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 17:21:09.620: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"

(gnome-boxes:2): Gtk-WARNING **: 17:21:09.680: GtkFlowBox with a model will ignore sort and filter functions

(gnome-boxes:2): Gtk-WARNING **: 17:21:09.681: GtkListBox with a model will ignore sort and filter functions
Boxes-Message: 17:21:12.469: media-manager.vala:304: Error connecting to host Tracker Miners: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.portal.Tracker was not provided by any .service files

(gnome-boxes:2): Boxes-WARNING **: 17:21:12.471: media-manager.vala:309: Error starting local Tracker Miners: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.portal.Tracker was not provided by any .service files

** (gnome-boxes:2): CRITICAL **: 17:21:39.916: osinfo_media_supports_installer_script: assertion 'OSINFO_IS_MEDIA(media)' failed

(gnome-boxes:2): Boxes-WARNING **: 17:21:40.423: review-page.vala:44: Box setup failed: Unable to get domain capabilities: internal error: Failed to start QEMU binary /app/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 for probing: qemu-system-x86_64: -qmp unix:/sysroot/home/redactedredactedredacte/.var/app/org.gnome.Boxes/config/libvirt/qemu/lib/qmp-ZCXGK1/qmp.monitor,server=on,wait=off: UNIX socket path '/sysroot/home/redactedredactedredacte/.var/app/org.gnome.Boxes/config/libvirt/qemu/lib/qmp-ZCXGK1/qmp.monitor' is too long
Path must be less than 108 bytes


(gnome-boxes:2): Boxes-CRITICAL **: 17:21:40.423: boxes_assistant_review_page_populate: assertion 'machine != NULL' failed

The problem does not happen if I try to create the virtual machine in my own account, nor in the shared one.

I’m not knowledgeable enough to know whether this 108 characters restriction lies, and whether it could/should be removed. I guess the problem would not have appeared without the coincidence of flatpak and the long username. Perhaps Endless might warn the appropriate upstream project about the issue?

I don’t remember when I last used GNOME to create an account, so I don’t know how much of this “full name username” is an upstream and how much is Endless. I would not say it is error, but the behavior does seem to have its unintended consequences. If it’s an upstream issue, might you please point me to the corresponding GNOME component?

Sorry for not running the Endless’ standard log, would it make a difference?

Thanks for the detailed report.
This is definitely a bug, but a little hard to know where the optimal place to solve it is.
However, a similar issue was previously found and fixed:

That issue was with a different socket - monitor.sock instead of qmp.monitor seen here. I presume thye are different. In any case, you could try opening a bug report at the above gnome-boxes repo and see if any solutions are proposed.

A workaround would be to rename that long username to something short.
If you are comfortable with terminal commands, https://askubuntu.com/a/34075 has some guidance.

Thank you, will do so!

Username altered with success. Issue created:

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