A mystery of Gnome 3.2 and failsafe mode

Marko Vojinovic vvmarko at gmail.com
Thu Jan 26 00:33:14 UTC 2012


On Wednesday 25 January 2012 16:25:50 Aaron Konstam wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-01-25 at 01:26 +0000, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> > This smells like a misconfiguration problem. If 3D acceleration works on
> > the Live F16, it should also work with the regular install, on the same
> > hardware. Besides, you have Intel graphics, which has open source 3D
> > drivers, which should Just Work.
> > 
> > (3) do you have a custom /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (if any)?
> 
> seems to the xorg.conf file that was created by the original
> installation.

This is weird, usually the system should run without the xorg.conf file. I had 
to create it manually on all systems where I needed it. Or it can get created 
by the nvidia binary drivers, which shouldn't be your case.
 
> > (4) does Gnome3 start normally for a freshly created user.
> 
> If normally you mean with Gnome 3.2 , the answer is no.

This means that the problem is system-wide, ie. somewhere in X.
 
> > (5) did you put something funky in the kernel boot parameters, like
> > "nomodeset"?
> 
> I tried that and the system would not boot.

That's ok. There are situations where some people need to use the nomodeset, 
but in general the system works better with KMS. The problem is that some 
people are trying to troubleshoot their X configuration by blindly putting that 
parameter in the kernel boot line, which usually only makes matters worse. :-)
 
> > (7) what does your /var/log/Xorg.0.log say after a failed attempt to
> > start Gnome3?
> 
> there  is no reference to Gnomew3

There is not supposed to be. I meant that it is a good idea to look at that 
file after the failed attemot to start Gnome3, since it should then contain the 
information about the "wrong" state of the X server, which can usually give us 
a clue what is going on. Gnome itself is not (and should not be) mentioned in 
the file.
 
> > If all else fails, back up your data, and reinstall F16 fresh from the
> > Live CD. The configuration which is used during the Live session should
> > be mirrored for the HD install, so you would have a working Gnome3
> 
> Well that sounds like a plan but I am not really interested in getting
> Gnome3.2 to work. I find failsafe mode much preferable. But Gnome3 came
> up in F15 so I just wonder why Gnome3,2 does not.

Should you decide that you want to troubleshoot this, post the contents of 
/etc/X11/xorg.conf, /var/log/Xorg.0.log and possibly the output of xrandr. 
This is basically an X misconfiguration problem, and those files should give 
enough information on what is going wrong.

OTOH, if you are happy with the current situation, then there is no problem. 
;-)

Best, :-)
Marko




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