Help! Gnome-Shell segfault.

[Arthur Dent]

> 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!

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?).

Thanks for the help so far. Any other advice, hints or tips will be
gratefully received...

Mark