F16 selecting kde and deselecting gnome: gdm-shell error

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2011-10-26 at 18:18 +0200, Gianluca Cecchi wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 3:46 PM, Gianluca Cecchi  wrote:
> 
> > Installation completed but at first boot I completed the normal user
> > definition and sent profile, but then instead of login window I get a
> > window with message:
> >
> > failed to load session "gdm-shell"
> >
> > and a logout button
> > I would expect kdm instead of gdm.... and kdm has been installed
> > [root at f16tc2 ~]# type kdm
> > kdm is /usr/bin/kdm
> 
> 
> While writing /etc/sysconfig/desktop with
> DISPLAYMANAGER=KDE
> didn't work on first boot run session (even pressing Ctrl-Alt-Backspace).
> Setting it and rebooting the system lets kdm start.
> But the session is by default set to gnome (that I didn't select
> during install), and it seems I cannot select the "session type"
> option.
> At second attemp to click on it I get an X Windows System restart...
> the same trying to click on "Menu" option
> 
> At second click when X restrts:
> Oct 26 18:17:28 f16tc2 kdm[886]: X server for display :0 terminated unexpectedly
> Oct 26 18:17:28 f16tc2 kdm: :0[1609]: Fatal X server IO error:
> Interrupted system call
> Oct 26 18:17:28 f16tc2 abrt[1620]: saved core dump of pid 1604
> (/usr/bin/Xorg) to /var/spool/abrt/ccpp-2011-10-26-18:17:28-1604
> (3424256 bytes)
> Oct 26 18:17:28 f16tc2 abrtd: Directory
> 'ccpp-2011-10-26-18:17:28-1604' creation detected
> Oct 26 18:17:28 f16tc2 abrtd: DUP_OF_DIR:
> /var/spool/abrt/ccpp-2011-10-26-18:09:50-1212
> Oct 26 18:17:28 f16tc2 abrtd: Dump directory is a duplicate of
> /var/spool/abrt/ccpp-2011-10-26-18:09:50-1212
> Oct 26 18:17:28 f16tc2 abrtd: Deleting dump directory
> ccpp-2011-10-26-18:17:28-1604 (dup of ccpp-2011-10-26-18:09:50-1212),
> sending dbus signal
> 
> 
> BTW: switching to a console window gives only garbage characters on
> all over the screen....

Yike. There's clearly a bug here, yes. Probably more than one.

One of the bugs you're hitting is the one that's currently tracked here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=746693

gdm has got a bit complicated lately. If you have GNOME Shell installed
and it works, login isn't actually handled by gdm itself at all: GNOME
Shell runs in a special mode and handles login. This
is /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/gdm-shell.session .

If you don't have GNOME Shell installed, or your hardware doesn't
support Shell, you
get /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/gdm-fallback.session , which is
actually gdm. However, it seems to have grown a dependency on metacity
(whether it really needs one or not). So *that* bug is: gdm's 'fallback
mode' doesn't work if metacity isn't present, but gdm doesn't depend on
metacity.

Then there's the issue of why you're getting gdm at all when you
de-selected GNOME and selected KDE, and why when you get it working it
thinks there's a GNOME session available. I suspect that's
dependency/comps problems we'd need to figure out. It would help to have
the logs of what packages actually got installed, but I should be able
to reproduce that fairly easily. I'll look into it.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net