With Jessie 8.6, gdm3 and XDMCP, the GDM face browser is built but not displayed (without the attached file)
Hello,
I have sent yesterday the following message (slightly modified this
morning) but committed the mistake to attach a too big file (I thought
that a file of 27700 bytes was not too large - Sorry...). Maybe some of
you have already received it, but I think that it is not the case for
most of you. So I send it again, without the attached file that can be
found at:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2016/10/msg00417.html
This attached file contains lines extracted from /var/log/system and
/var/log/debug (uncompress it with bunzip2 after having renamed it in
something.bz2)
We used during 2 years Gnome and gdm3 on a server with Debian Wheezy to
let users open sessions from their Windows PC via Cygwin and xlaunch
(xdmcp). It worked well till the upgrade to Jessie 8.5, for these
Windows PC, as for the system console. The upgrade to Jessie 8.6 didn't
solve the problem. I have already tried to describe these problems the
09th of september ("gdm3 doesn't work any more after the upgrade from
Wheezy to Jessie 8.5") :
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2016/09/msg00301.html
As users were satisfied by the environment provided with gnome, when the
server ran on Wheezy, I am still trying to launch gdm3.
The story is the same for the console (when the system restarts) and for
the Windows PC (at each launching of xlaunch): I get during a split
second a gray background screen, probably corresponding to the GDM face
browser, followed during a new split second by a nice blue screen
(debian 8 on the bottom-left corner, date and time on the middle, and a
few icons on the upper left which are able to display information about
the connection to the network), followed by a dark screen, till the
first mouse or keyboard event, that activates definitely the blue
screen. For the console the dark screen is very ephemeral and has
appeared only once, before the blue screen is displayed. I have tried to
understand what happens really and read carefully the /var/log files. It
is clear that the GDM face browser with the list of all users is being
built, but I have not yet understood why it is not displayed : warning
and errors traced in these files should be more understandable for a
person more expert than me in Gnome and gdm3. I have prepared a file
with extracts from /var/log/system and /var/log/debug, compressed with
bzip2 ...
I have read the warning about the upgrading from wheezie to jessie:
5.10. The GNOME desktop requires basic 3D graphics
The GNOME 3.14 desktop in Jessie no longer has fallback support for
machines without basic 3D graphics. To run properly, it needs either a
recent enough PC (any PC built in the last 10 years should have the
required SSE2 support) or, for architectures other than i386 and amd64,
a 3D-accelerated graphics adapter with EGL drivers.
It could mean that was I am trying to do is no more possible. But during
the 3 first days just after the upgrading to Jessie 8.5 I had a degraded
but nearly working situation with Windows PC: a few minutes to get the
GDM face bowser, again a few minutes to get the session, which was then
normal but impossible to close, and sometimes nothing. My attempts to
improve the situation lead to a much clearer one: what I get now is
always this nice blue screen, maybe built by gnome-screensaver (I am not
sure at all). That was not exactly my aim... But it lets me think or
hope that I am not in the case reported in the warning 5.10.
Today I don't ever know whether the problem I try to solve may be solved
or not, and if it is due to an error of installation (lacking packages
to install or packages to uninstall), or an error of configuration
(despite my attempts to compare the new and the previous ones for gdm,
pam, ...), an error in Cygwin installation (lacking packages) or,
possibly, a bug of Jessie.
It would be nice if someone could answer that it works on his system :
Jessie, gdm3 with xdmcp enabled and Windows PC emulating a X11 server
with xlaunch (through Cygwin or another free software) to open sessions.
The problem is not important for the console, as I can leave the blue
screen with Ctrl-Alt-F1 and open a non-graphical session on tty1, which
is enough for my needs. It is more annoying for the Windows PC.
Many thanks in advance ! Best regards,
Jean-Paul
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