[PLUG] FC6 GNOME login issues- SOLVED

[Matt McKenzie]

On 7/6/07, Matt McKenzie <lnxknight at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 7/6/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb at cesmail.net> wrote:
>
> > Matt McKenzie wrote:
> > > OK this one seems kind of simple at first, but the obvious fixes don't
> > seem
> > > to fix it.
> > >
> > > I have a dual boot system (acutally multi boot, but only use 2 often),
> > XP
> > > and Fedora 6.
> > > Everything was going hunky-dory, I was using Fedora just yesterday,
> > and I
> > > rebooted into XP for a while.
> > > Now today I go back to Fedora, try to login to GNOME, and it crashes,
> > and
> > > goes back to the GDM greeter login.
> > >
> > > I try KDE, which I have on there but don't use very much.  It works
> > fine.
> > >
> > > So back to trying to debug GNOME issue, since it isn't an X issue.
> > >
> > > I remove the ~/.gnome2/session and copy the default one in its place.
> > > Still
> > > same thing.
> > > I rename the whole .gnome2 directory to .backupgnome2, and try again,
> > still
> > > no dice.
> > > I have recently been using Beryl, which is my next place to look for
> > > issues-
> > > but it has been working fine with Beryl for a while now.  Just started
> > > acting up today.
> > >
> > > My only other guess right now is a recent package update that could've
> >
> > > messed things up, I was running yum updates yesterday.
> > >
> > > I am also going to try to upgrade to Fedora 7 at some point soon, but
> > I
> > > want
> > > to at least try to get this issue resolved before doing so, since I
> > want to
> > > do an upgrade instead of a clean install.
> > > If it comes down to it, I have /home as a separate partition so I can
> > just
> > > do a clean install, but I would prefer to try an upgrade first to keep
> > all
> > > the settings etc.  Even when keeping /home on a separate partition,
> > with a
> > > clean install there are still several things that need to be tweaked
> > > afterward to get things running just right.
> > >
> > > TIA
> > >
> >
> > I don't know much about Gnome, but it's really strange that things got
> > icky after you used XP. Do you by any chance have some Linux state in a
> > shared (FAT32) partition that both Linux and XP can access? That could
> > be a source of problems. I have a shared partition on my dual-booted
> > laptop, and about the only thing that's there now is a copy of
> > /boot/grub, so I can change the menu.lst from either Windows or Linux.
>
>
> No there is nothing really "shared" between them, except the fact that the
> GRUB bootloader resides on the Windows drive.  And I have booted back and
> forth between them many times, it doesn't seem to me that XP has anything to
> do with it, more likely some configuration issues or something.  I am
> starting to lean towards an issue with Beryl.
>
> Here's a question- how can I change it so that GNOME uses regular Metacity
> instead of Beryl, without being able to log in to GNOME?  Is it some config
> file I can change?  I'll do some digging on my own but if anyone knows
> offhand... :)
>


By the way, I *really* like Fedora 7. If I hadn't gotten Gentoo
> > engrained in my muscle memory, I would probably build a Fedora machine.
>
>
> I will hopefully upgrade this thing to Fedora 7 in the near future, one
> way or another ;)
>
>
OK So I did figure out what happened, more or less.

Probably during updates, one of the symlinks or possibly an actual file for
GLX got hosed.

I am running NVidia binary drivers, have been for a long time, they work
well but sometimes when updating X packages, especially ones dealing with
GL, GLU, GLX, etc, it just hoses the NVidia stuff.
So I just re-ran the NVidia installer, it replaced the missing symlinks, and
badda bing badda boom, I can log in to GNOME again.  It came up with some
kind of error concerning bonobo, which I killed as the error msg suggested,
and restarted nautilus.

My guess is GNOME wouldn't start because it is setup to use Beryl, which
relies on 3D acceleration, which needs GLX.
So long story short, GNOME is happy again, and Fedora 7 here I come! :)

I still haven't found where I can switch back to Metacity instead of Beryl
without being able to just change it from within GNOME, using config files
or whatnot.  That's on my list... but at least now I can move forward with
F7.

Now comes the fun part, whether it can cleanly upgrade from F6 to F7, or if
not I'll nuke it from orbit and do a clean install (separate /home
partition).

-- 
----------
Matt M.
LinuxKnight