F16 selecting kde and deselecting gnome: gdm-shell error

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2011-10-26 at 10:37 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> 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.

Well, I can't reproduce the most worrying issue here, with TC2: I just
took the TC2 DVD, selected KDE, de-selected GNOME, and got a system with
kdm installed but not gdm. It boots to a kdm login window and I can log
in.

Did you make any other customizations to the package set?

There may be a difference between DVD and net install here somehow, I
guess, but I can't immediately see how.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
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