fedora 18 gnome-shell core dumps before live system starts

[Joe Zeff]

On 05/01/2013 03:03 AM, Bram Mertens wrote:
> Now I do get a graphical login screen but after I log on I still get
> the "oh no something has gone wrong".
> It is still trying to start Gnome 3, and gnome-shell is still getting
> killed by signal 4.

If all were working properly, when you select your account from the list 
(assuming there's more than one account to select) there should be a 
little drop-down list allowing you to select from all the DEs you have 
installed, and defaulting to whatever you used last.  Presumably, it 
says GNOME right now.  If you do see that, try changing to a different 
one, because the error you're getting is very Gnome 3 specific.

If that doesn't work, the error might be in gdm, the Gnome greeter, that 
shows the login window.  It's supposed to be possible to select a 
different one from a CLI, but I've never had it work; probably because 
lightdm, the one I want, isn't supported.  If all else fails, you can 
always use a CLI to install a different greeter, such as lightdm or (I 
think) kdm and remove gdm.  Then, when you reboot, nothing starts that's 
part of Gnome unless you either select it as your DE, or you run a 
program that needs it, and the latter shouldn't get you that message. 
Not ideal, I know, but if nothing else it will get you running until you 
can track down what's causing that error.  Good luck, and if you do find 
out, please let us know; that's one of the least helpful error messages 
I've ever run across[1], and having some idea of what it means would be 
a great help to everybody using Gnome.

[1]Possibly the least helpful was one used by a friend of mine: 1=2.  Of 
course, he was a genius[2] and he had the source code.  And, to be fair, 
he only used it to indicate that something unanticipated had happened.
[2]Look up Dan Alderson in Wikipedia for more information.