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Hi list |
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|
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[ Writing this to a) vent frustration and (spoiler alert ;-) ) b) warn about a |
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strange change in x11-wm/awesome (from upstream or Gentoo, I don't know). ] |
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|
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Well, I just finished debugging an issue that cropped up around mid-march that |
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I didn't have time to track down properly, mostly because the logs just didn't |
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reveal anything other than that lightdm-gtk-greeter stopped (well, syslog |
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correctly says "segfault", but the lightdm log says "quit" (why "quit"?!), |
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fantastic). |
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|
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Anyway, the problem was that after some upgrade lightdm-gtk-greeter would |
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SEGFAULT when starting, so I couldn't log in using lightdm. I could still use |
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startx though, so it wasn't of immediate importance. |
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|
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First I thought: |
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|
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"Well, it can't be lightdm or lightdm-gtk-greeter, because I upgraded |
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those before the last kernel update, so they definitely worked fine before, |
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and the upgrade to awesome can't influence lightdm-gtk-greeter, because that's |
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started afterwards." |
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|
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So I went through the packages I upgraded and tried selectively downgrading the |
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recent upgrades that were also dependencies of lightdm or lightdm-gtk-greeter |
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(e.g., gettext), but no luck. Google also didn't help, the most interesting |
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results were things like when the user of the last saved session is deleted |
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from the system, then lightdm-gtk-greeter would SEGFAULT (unless you pressed |
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the arrow keys to go down the user list). Fun stuff like that. ( I tried that, |
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BTW, and it didn't work.) |
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|
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Several weeks pass, then today I decided to rebuild various things in the hope |
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that it was a hidden ABI issue or something, but really I was just unthinkingly |
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flailing around hoping to catch something. |
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|
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Well, after that I finally tracked it down. I finally tried downgrading to |
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lightdm-gtk-greeter-1.1.6 (again, it was running fine before so I didn't expect |
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it to be the problem) and noticed that the "awesome" session was missing from |
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the dropdown list. So I think "Well, let's find the file responsible for |
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that.", and the problem was... *drumroll* the awesome upgrade, after all. WTF!? |
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|
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Well, said upgrade apparently brought a change to the xsession desktop file |
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located at /usr/share/xsessions/awesome.desktop, namely: |
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|
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[Desktop Entry] |
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Encoding=UTF-8 |
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Name=awesome |
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Comment=Highly configurable framework window manager |
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NoDisplay=true |
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^^^^ this should be false!!!!! |
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TryExec=awesome |
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Exec=awesome |
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Type=Application |
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|
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So because of that, lightdm-gtk-greeter ignored the awesome.desktop xsession |
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file, resulting in it trying to load the last session which referenced the now |
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invalid "awesome" session. Then, instead of displaying the next available item, |
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lightdm-gtk-greeter decided to SEGFAULT instead. Hooray! SEGFAULTs for |
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EVERYONE! (Of course, why lightdm-gtk-greeter-1.1.6 worked is beyond me, a |
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regression in 1.3.1 maybe?) |
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|
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Ahem. |
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|
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Anyway, changing that line to "NoDisplay=false" fixed things for me and I was |
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able to upgrade back to lightdm-gtk-greeter-1.3.1-r1. |
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|
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And instead of going to bed I'm venting in this email. I'll probably sleep |
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better for it, though (I hope). |
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|
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But I can't help noticing that of course for *me* the udev-200 update goes just |
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fine and dandy, the new names I chose (wan0 and lan0) make more sense anyway, |
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but then a *window manager* upgrade manages to fsck things up in a hard to |
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track down way!? Just my luck. |
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|
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So now I get to file a bug and ask why the hell that change was made and by |
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whom (oh, and I couldn't find related bugs for either lightdm or awesome on |
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b.g.o). Maybe somebody here knows. But first I'm going to bed (much too late, |
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BTW). |
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|
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Weary of travelling rough terrain and in need of rest, |
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-- |
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Marc Joliet |
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-- |
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"People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we |
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don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup |