SUMMARY: GNOME startup issues

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

Okay, I have been spending time trying to recreate the problems people
have been reporting with GNOME.  The problems are:

* polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 crashes at startup
* gnome-panel takes too long to start
* Workspace Switcher does not work

Sadly, I was unable to recreate what I would consider any problems.  I
tested the following configurations:

* FreeBSD i386 RELENG_8 from July 4 with ports from July 4
* FreeBSD i386 -CURRENT from July 4 with ports from July 4
* FreeBSD amd64 -CURRENT from July 5 with ports from July 5
* FreeBSD i386 RELENG_8 from June 17 with ports from June 18 (in VMWare
Fusion 3.0 on a Mac)

I tested by starting GNOME from GDM and using startx.  My ~/.initrc has
simply this:

#!/bin/sh

exec ck-launch-session gnome-session

My locale is en_US.UTF-8.  I have procfs mounted, and I can perform:

ping `localhost`

Successfully.  I am not running ANY firewalls, and I have not enabled
any blackholes for TCP or UDP.

When I run GNOME from startx, I do see a delay of about 10 seconds while
waiting for the panel to appear.  This is because gnome-panel is trying
to contact GDM to determine if shutdown/reboot support is enabled.  This
delay is expected in a startx configuration.

Workspace Switcher has always worked for me.  I tried switching
workspaces with the keyboard shortcut and by clicking on the space in
the lower panel.  Both worked.  I was also able to bring up properties,
and add an additional workspace.

I was able to see a problem with polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 in
ONE instance.  A core was produced.  This problem seems to occur when
GDM switches the user to the logged in user.  I didn't notice any other
problems related to this, though.

For those still seeing workspace switch problems, rebuild gnome-panel
with debugging symbols, then bind gdb to workspace switcher, and get a
backtrace when it appears to be hung up.  That's after making sure all
of the above is inline as much as possible with my test machines.

Joe

-- 
Joe Marcus Clarke
FreeBSD GNOME Team	::	gnome at FreeBSD.org
FreeNode / #freebsd-gnome
http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome