SUMMARY: GNOME startup issues

Kevin Oberman oberman at es.net
Mon Jul 12 13:35:21 UTC 2010


> Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2010 13:39:48 -0400
> From: Joe Marcus Clarke <marcus at freebsd.org>
> Sender: owner-freebsd-gnome at freebsd.org
> 
> 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.

I patched and re-built consolekit, re-booted and re-started Gnome. I see
no changes in behavior. I see a delay in the panel start and attempting
to add to a panel results in a panel freeze for exactly 25 seconds
during which the panel is completely frozen, including the portion of the
popup menu showing most of the selected "Add to Panel..." item. After
exactly 25 seconds, the panel re-draws properly and the Add to Panel
window appears. (The individual applets DO update, though.)

There is no change in this from pre-patch system.

I do see one change which may or may not be a result of the patch. My
netspeed applet crashes immediately and attempting to re-add it results
in "The panel encountered a problem while loading
"OAFIID:GNOME_NetspeedApplet"." 

Again, this may not be tied to the consolekit applet as it has been a
bit unstable since I updated to 2.30, but it seems completely broken
since the patch.
-- 
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


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