Bug#650741: gnome-session-fallback: gnome-session-fallback displays useless message and quits (gdm3)

[Marcus Comstedt]

Package: gnome-session-fallback
Version: 3.0.2-3
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

After upgrading packages in testing yesterday, which among other
things installed gdm3, normal gnome sessions do not work anymore.

The new "gnome" session, which runs gnome-shell, seems to work, but
when I try to use the "gnome (fallback)" session, all I get is the
message "Oh no!  Something has gone wrong.  A problem has occurred and
the system can't recover.  Please log out and try again.", which is
useless because it does not say what the problem is, and offers no
advice on how to find or fix it (logging out and trying again makes
no difference of course).

To make sure that the problem was not cause by anything in my own
session, I enabled the failsafe flag (i.e. running
"gnome-session --session gnome-fallback --failsafe"), but the
result was the same.  The following is the contents of
.xsession-errors from that run:

---8<---
/etc/gdm3/Xsession: Beginning session setup...
script for none started.

** (gnome-settings-daemon:31688): WARNING **: Ignoring unknown module 'org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.gconf'

(gnome-settings-daemon:31688): updates-plugin-WARNING **: failed to open directory: Error opening directory '/run/udev/firmware-missing': No such file or directory
gnome-session[31625]: WARNING: Application 'gnome-wm.desktop' failed to register before timeout

(gnome-panel:31722): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: /tmp/buildd/glib2.0-2.30.2/./gobject/gsignal.c:2295: signal `size_request' is invalid for instance `0xd692a0'
gnome-session[31625]: WARNING: Client '/org/gnome/SessionManager/Client3' failed to reply before timeout

(gnome-settings-daemon:31688): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_unref: assertion `G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed
[1322831503,000,xklavier.c:xkl_engine_start_listen/] 	The backend does not require manual layout management - but it is provided by the application

(notification-daemon:31725): Gdk-WARNING **: notification-daemon: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.


(gnome-panel:31722): Gdk-WARNING **: gnome-panel: Fatal IO error 0 (Success) on X server :0.
---8<---

The "IO errors" at the end are presumably because the X server was
killed when I acknowledged the "Oh no" screen.  The other messages
seem nonfatal; if I run gnome-settings-daemon, gnome-panel and
update-notifer manually from a sawfish session, they print the same
things but appear to be working fine anyway.

Could we please have the "Oh no" screen replaced with something which
actually gives a clue as to what is wrong?

Thanks


  // Marcus


-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.0.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=sv_SE.ISO-8859-1 (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages gnome-session-fallback depends on:
ii  gnome-panel            3.0.2-1   
ii  gnome-session-bin      3.0.2-3   
ii  gnome-session-common   3.0.2-3   
ii  gnome-settings-daemon  3.0.3-3   
ii  metacity               1:2.34.1-2
ii  notification-daemon    0.7.3-1   
ii  policykit-1-gnome      0.105-1   

Versions of packages gnome-session-fallback recommends:
ii  gnome-power-manager  3.0.2-3

Versions of packages gnome-session-fallback suggests:
ii  desktop-base      6.0.7  
ii  gnome-keyring     3.0.3-2
ii  gnome-user-guide  3.2.2-1

-- no debconf information