Re: The "Oh, No..." error when gdm is trying to start
On Wed, 15 Aug 2012 12:13:53 -0500, Paul Johnson wrote:
> On a student's Debian system, I ran some updates and resulted in gdm
> refusing to start, with the error message that shows a picture of a sad
> computer and a message says:
>
> Oh no! Something has gone wrong.
> A problem has occurred and the system can't recover. Please contact a
> system administrator.
>
> I'm pretty sure this is due to a failure in the video drivers--some
> gnome3 packages installed and the nouveau video driver is not
> sufficient. And I am certain this problem happened when I tried to
> update to the network-manager from wheezy on his Squeeze-based system.
> I hoped some of you might help me think though the problem so I can
> fix that machine, next time it comes to the office.
(...)
Well, I've got that message under two different situations:
- First, as you say, when there's a problem with the VGA card or driver
that cannot enable 3D acceleration properly which is needed by gnome-
shell to start.
- Second, when there's an error (a "syntax" error) in "/usr/share/gnome-
shell/themes/gnome-shell.css" file.
When this happens, you can still login to "GNOME classical" mode instead
and work from there until you correct the problem that makes gnome-shell
to halt. What I've never seen is gnome-shell crashing because of N-M or a
wireless related update :-?
> This crash happens before GDM offers the list of users, so I don't
> understand how it could be related to a config problem in a user
> account. Right? Everybody says "check ~/.xsession-errors", but why?
(...)
Because that file registers the reason of the gnome-shell crash, so what
does it say? :-)
Greetings,
--
Camaleón
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