Help! Gnome-Shell segfault.

[Rich Boyce]

On 14/12/11 12:54, Arthur Dent wrote:
>> On 14/12/11 09:18, Arthur Dent wrote:
>>>> Hello all,
>>>>
>>>> Urgent help required!
>>>>
>>>> I have turned on my Fedora 16 machine today. It booted quite normally
>>>> to
>>>> the
>>>> GDM login screen. When I selected one of my 3 users it started to login
>>>> to
>>>> the account as usual, but got no further than loading the background. I
>>>> CTRL-ALT-BKSPC'd back to the login screen and tried each of the other
>>>> accounts. Same problem. I can start a terminal session with CTRL-ALT-F2
>>>> and login to any user account in that terminal - and it is from there
>>>> that
>>>> I am sending this (using Mutt). I have tried googling using a text
>>>> based
>>>> browser, (but that is quite hard work) and all I have come up with is
>>>> this
>>>> bugzilla https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=753666 which
>>>> describes my symptoms perfectly (I am also using the nvidia akmod
>>>> driver)
>>>> but there is no resolution for me in that bugzilla.
>>>>
>>>> Unlike that report I have updated nothing since Sunday (11 December)
>>>> and
>>>> it
>>>> worked fine yesterday (12 December). Here is an extract from dmesg:
>>>>
>>>> [   39.204161] gnome-shell[1458]: segfault at bc955315 ip 42325db4 sp
>>>> bfadd520
>>>> error 6 in ld-2.14.90.so[42319000+21000]
>>>>
>>>> Below I list a (long) extract form /var/log/messages. There is some
>>>> very
>>>> fishy
>>>> looking stuff in that, but I have no idea how to fix it. Please help me
>>>> to
>>>> get
>>>> back to a working gnome-shell!
>>>>
>>>> Thanks
>>>>
>>>> Mark
>>>
>>> I don't wish to appear desperate - but...
>>>
>>> ...I am desperate!
>>>
>>> Any ideas?
>>
>> It's a bit of a shot in the dark, but you could try removing the
>> proprietary nvidia drivers, and rebooting. It would be something like
>>
>> yum erase \*kmod\*nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia\*
>>
>> That would probably get you back to the nouveau drivers.
>>
>> If that doesn't work, there might be a hint in your /var/log/Xorg.0.log
>>
>> Rich
>
> Well thanks for that. I was actually thinking about removing the nvidia
> driver.
>
> As it happens, I gave up on the machine for the moment and went to work. I
> therefore no longer have physical access to the machine. I can, however
> ssh into it. While I was wondering about removing or re-installing the
> nvidia driver I noticed that there is a new kernel available in yum
> (3.1.5-1.fc16.i686.PAE) so I did a yum update. This will of course cause
> the akmod module to rebuild the driver.
>
> I have rebooted, and the encouraging thing is that dmesg now has no
> reference to a gnome-shell segfault!

Well that's very encouraging!

> Unfortunately I will not be home again until Thursday evening so I can't
> actually try to log in to gnome-shell to see if it has worked (are there
> any command line tricks to test if gnome-shell is working?).

Hmm. You could run 'ps fax' and look for a gnome-shell process, or a gdm 
process (I'm not sure what the login manager shows up as). If you see it 
there, that shows that it's running.

HTH,
Rich