Why do I sometimes get a gdm similar to gnome 2's?

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 5:06 PM, Dan Williams <dcbw at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2013-02-28 at 16:13 +0000, Marco Scannadinari wrote:
>> Sometimes, usually when updates are installed, after booting, I get a
>> gdm screen similar to this -
>> http://lippolweblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/gdm.png. It uses the
>> same animations as the new black gdm, but it just has the plain white
>> layout as of the old gdm 2.x.
>> Has anyone experienced this? What is the cause?
>
> The "older" UI is shown when detection that your graphics card has the
> necessary OpenGL support fails.  That includes a timeout.  If your
> machine is starting a lot of services at boot, and if your hard drives
> are too busy loading stuff to run the test tool as quickly as they
> should, this may happen.  It likely won't be shown if you get a faster
> hard disk.  Clearly a bug though.

I'm not sure the speed of the HDD makes much difference. I've got a
SSD and on occasion I get it as well. I also occasionally get a fall
back to the old style dialog when logged into the desktop. One minute
I'll get the new one when I need to unlock a ssh key, the next the old
one when I need to put in some network details and then back to the
new one (not saying it's network, that's an example, can be any
dialog) when it's running g-s fine. Tends to happen more when the
machine has been up for longer.

Peter