Bug#542687: gnome-panel does not interact with mouse over VNC

[Rob Mahurin]

On Aug 20, 2009, at 5:15 PM, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le jeudi 20 août 2009 à 15:41 -0400, Rob Mahurin a écrit :
>> I am running GNOME under VNC.  For no obvious reason the panel has
>> recently become unresponsive.  To demonstrate I make a .vnc/xstartup
>> containing only 'xterm &', start a vnc session, and connect to it.
>>> From that xterm I can start metacity (or not), and the gnome-panel.
>> The panel appears but doesn't respond to clicks, and if it is  
>> obscured
>> (by for instance restarting metacity, so titlebars appear) it does  
>> not
>> redraw the obscured part.
>>
>> Below my system information is a backtrace from running and  
>> interrupting
>> under gdb, with gnome-panel-dbg installed.
>> (gdb) bt
>> #0  0xb7f90424 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
>> #1  0xb75c1321 in connect () from /lib/i686/cmov/libpthread.so.0
>> #2  0x080a96ae in gdm_init_protocol_connection (data=0x80bcf7c)
>>     at panel-gdm.c:252
>
> This backtrace is very clear, but I have no idea what happens here.  
> The
> panel is trying to make a connection to the GDM socket, which lies
> in /var/run/gdm_socket.
>
> It appears that this connect() call locks up. If it doesn’t exist (GDM
> not running), the syscall should fail immediately. Could it be that  
> this
> socket was left here after some previous GDM invocation, while it  
> is no
> longer running? This is the most obvious case for which this could
> happen.

If, within my VNC session, I /etc/init.d/gdm restart, the panel  
works.  If I restart VNC width GDM running, the panel is frozen.  I'm  
far from the machine so I don't know whether GDM is working on the  
physical display.  It was a month ago.

I can disable GDM and get back to work, but I'm happy to provide any  
extra debugging information.

Rob

-- 
Rob Mahurin
University of Manitoba, Dept. of Physics & Astronomy
at:	Oak Ridge National Laboratory	865 207 2594
	Oak Ridge, Tennessee		rob at utk.edu