Date: June 10, 2011

Introduction

I just finished an upgrade from fedora 14 to fedora 15 on my x86_64 desktop machine, and after the reboot to fedora 15, real trouble starts.

I get a gdm login chooser, but as soon as I try to login as any user, I get a frowning terminal with a childish message, "Oh no, Something has gone wrong".

My system has an Nvidia 6800 XT card (which has the NV42 chipset, or at leas that is what the messages in /var/log/Xorg.0.log tell me). I run the nouveau driver in a dual head setup.

As a point of interest, I booted the Fedora 15 live CD, and it runs Gnome 3 just fine, so I don't know what is screwed up with the system I updated.

There are lots of details in ~/.xsession-errors, some of which follow:

(gnome-power-manager:31793): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_cairo_should_draw_window: assertion `GDK_IS_WINDOW (window)' failed
      JS LOG: GNOME Shell started at Fri Jun 10 2011 16:31:15 GMT-0700 (MST)
Window manager warning: Log level 16: get_all_cb: couldn't retrieve system settings properties: (2) The name org.freedesktop.NetworkManager was not provided by any .service files.
Window manager warning: Log level 16: The program 'gnome-shell' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation)'.
  (Details: serial 809 error_code 1 request_code 153 minor_code 179)
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

gnome-shell-calendar-server[31874]: Got HUP on stdin - exiting
gnome-session[31625]: WARNING: Application 'gnome-shell.desktop' killed by signal

(gnome-power-manager:31793): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_cairo_should_draw_window: assertion `GDK_IS_WINDOW (window)' failed

(gnome-power-manager:31793): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_cairo_should_draw_window: assertion `GDK_IS_WINDOW (window)' failed

(gnome-power-manager:31793): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_cairo_should_draw_window: assertion `GDK_IS_WINDOW (window)' failed
      JS LOG: GNOME Shell started at Fri Jun 10 2011 16:31:16 GMT-0700 (MST)
Window manager warning: Log level 16: get_all_cb: couldn't retrieve system settings properties: (2) The name org.freedesktop.NetworkManager was not provided by any .service files.
Window manager warning: Log level 16: The program 'gnome-shell' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation)'.
  (Details: serial 805 error_code 1 request_code 153 minor_code 179)
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

gnome-session[31625]: WARNING: App 'gnome-shell.desktop' respawning too quickly
gnome-shell-calendar-server[31892]: Got HUP on stdin - exiting
gnome-session[31625]: WARNING: Application 'gnome-shell.desktop' killed by signal

(gnome-settings-daemon:31761): updates-plugin-WARNING **: failed to open directory: Error opening directory '/run/udev/firmware-missing': No such file or directory

(gnome-settings-daemon:31761): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_unref: assertion `G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed
[1307748670,000,xklavier.c:xkl_engine_start_listen/] 	The backend does not require manual layout management - but it is provided by the application

(evolution-alarm-notify:31790): Gdk-WARNING **: evolution-alarm-notify: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.


(gnome-screensaver:31800): Gdk-WARNING **: gnome-screensaver: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.

g_dbus_connection_real_closed: Remote peer vanished with error: Underlying GIOStream returned 0 bytes on an async read (g-io-error-quark, 0). Exiting.
g_dbus_connection_real_closed: Remote peer vanished with error: Underlying GIOStream returned 0 bytes on an async read (g-io-error-quark, 0). Exiting.
I don't know what to make of all this.

Stand by for developments, for now I have switched to running xfce4 and find that I like it pretty well.

It looked like this, but actually wasn't

At first I thought that this might be what is described in this "public service announcement". Namely that there is some screwup with the gnome-shell and gnome-menus packages. Apparently if you are getting the pair gnome-shell-3.0.0.2-2.fc15 and gnome-menus-3.0.0-1.fc15 you are screwed, and you need to go to the updates-testing repository and get gnome-menus-3.0.0-2.fc15. This was reported back in 4-20-2011, so you would think that by 6-10-2011 things would be squared away. The packages I see on my system are:

gnome-shell.x86_64                       3.0.2-1.fc15                   @updates
gnome-menus.x86_64                       3.0.1-1.fc15                   @fedora
This is not exactly what he describes, but does he have too many zeros? I looked in the updates-testing repository for a newer version of gnome-menus (and there was none), and then I tried yum downgrade gnome-shell which took me back to version 3.0.1, but still my system will not run gnome 3.

I think this reported issue (being back in April) was only relevant prior to the official fedora 15 release, and he probably does have the package numbers right.


Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org