Public Service Announcement re 'Oh no! Something has gone wrong' screen in GNOME 3

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2011-04-20 at 23:14 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On 04/20/2011 11:00 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > Hey, all. If you're running F15 with updates and after a recent update
> > you find that you keep getting the Shell's 'Oh no! Something has gone
> > wrong' screen (informally known as the fail whale),
> 
> This type of error can apparently happen for any number of other reasons
> and GNOME Shell doesn't give you any more information other than a log
> out button.  Not very helpful if you want to report a bug or find out
> what the heck went wrong.  This seems a weak point that needs to be
> rectified quickly

I'm told that the conditions for the fail whale to hit are that anything
controlled by gnome-session crashes more than once within a short time
after session start. Generally, debugging starts by looking at
~/.xsession-errors to see what's crashing.

(Someone else noted you can actually close the fail whale screen with
alt-f4, to get a look behind it. Presumably this only works if mutter is
still up.)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net