Bug#454097: After upgrade, gdm can start only Failsafe xterm session

[Jonathan Guthrie]

On Mon, Dec 03, 2007 at 01:59:46PM +0100, Loïc Minier wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 03, 2007, Jonathan Guthrie wrote:
> > I have both a .profile and an /etc/profile and after some trial and
> > error, it turns out that commenting out a single line in .profile causes
> > my normal gnome session to work.  I am much happier now, if somewhat
> > more puzzled.
 
> > The line I commented out is "alias ls='ls --color=always'"
 
>  Hmm, a bit surprizing that this fails; what's your /bin/sh?

husky:~> ls -l /bin/sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2007-01-28 07:12 /bin/sh -> bash
husky:~> 

The bash in question is 3.1dfsg-8, which has been around a while.

>  Perhaps we shouldn't read these files and simply spawn the user's shell
>  instead, or perhaps we should force bash.

I don't know because I don't know why those files are read.  While it
seems odd to me that aliasing ls would have an effect like that, that
implies that it's getting used by the login process somewhere and
perhaps replacing a raw "ls" with "/bin/ls" in whichever script it is 
would be appropriate because it would bypass the aliasing.
-- 
Jonathan Guthrie (jguthrie at brokersys.com)
Sto pro veritate