HEADS UP: Summarize the reports of GNOME crashes

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Sat, 03 Jul 2010 09:34:25 -0400
> From: Byron Campbell <wa4geg at netscape.net>
> Sender: owner-freebsd-gnome at freebsd.org
> 
> On 07/02/2010 10:26 PM, Joe Marcus Clarke wrote:
> > There have been a few threads which seem to be describing the same
> > issue.  That is, users are reporting that when starting GNOME through
> > startx that the panel takes a long time to come up, polkit may crash,
> > etc.  I want to see if I can tie together some commonalities to help
> > make troubleshooting easier.
> >
> > First, have all users experiencing this installed EVERYTHING from
> > packages?  That is, if a user builds all GNOME bits from ports do they
> > see the problem?  Are all users seeing slowness or crashes in GNOME
> > using startx (or some other non-GDM way of starting GNOME)?  If they use
> > GDM does the problem go away?
> >
> > If a user using packages starts GNOME with GDM, does the problem go away?
> >
> > Joe
> >
> 
> 1. For Gnome started w/ gnome_enable="YES" in rc.conf
> 
> * launches quickly, < 15 secs. from GDM to desktop.
> 
> * PROBLEM: Workspace Switcher: stuck on one workspace
>    and settings for additions workspaces are not honored.
> 
> 2. For Gnome started w/ startx:
> 
> * SLOW: 57 seconds from startx to fully loaded desktop
> 
> * WORKSPACE SWITCHER now WORKS AS IT SHOULD
> 
> 3. In the tail of dmesg I see "dbus was not started properly" when I
> only have gnome_enable="YES" in /etc/rc.conf. The error message goes 
> away when adding dbus_enable="YES" and hald_enable="YES".
> 
> These exact problems occur for me with clean installs, both
> for a system using all ports and a system using all pkgs.
> 
> How-To Duplicate: Do a complete fresh / clean install of everything,
> including FreeBSD.
> 
> So far I've tested all of the following, all being FreeBSD AMD64
> on an AMD Athlon 64 3800 box, with all up to date ports db:
> 
> 8.1 RC-1, fresh install, xorg and Gnome from pkgs only
> 8.1 RC-1, fresh install, xorg and Gnome from ports only
> 8-Stable, fresh install, xorg and Gnome from pkgs and ports
> 8.1 RC-2, fresh install, xorg and Gnome from pkgs only

Another thing I ust noticed w/ startx. Nautilus is also VERY slow to
start and the panel seems to start up fairly soon after nautilus. I
don't know if the pannel start is waiting for nautilus or they are both
waiting on some other resource, but both seem to take quite a while to
start with almost nothing going on while waiting.

OTOH, gnome-terminal and gkrellm both start fairly quickly. The coe up
in just a few seconds. Then there is a long pause (about 30 seconds) and
nautilus fires up followed in about 10 seconds (or a bit less) by the
panels. Some applets (battery charge applet and weather applet) start up
quickly, but the menus and some launchers in have added to the panel
take much longer to start. makes me think of some sort of DNS timeout,
but I know DNS is working right and I doubt these apps are even using it
(while weather probably is). So I suspect it is something else timing
out from some attempt at inter-process communication. (hal? dbus?)
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634
Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4  EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751