Hi Simon, Thanks for the detailed response. Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> writes: ... >> Hints about where gdm3 might be logging what happened would be useful. > > You seem to be running systemd as pid 1, so the catch-all answer is > "in the journal" (available via either journalctl or the traditional > syslog interface). Yes -- I thought I'd looked there, but it turns out there was enough other stuff splurged into the journal that I'd missed the needle in that haystack. > Could you please look in the journal and see whether you are getting > an assertion failure something like this? > > May 17 01:20:15 debian gnome-session[952]: (gnome-shell:1092): > Cogl-ERROR **: Failed to create texture 2d due to size/format > constraints Exactly that -- occuring twice. > (systemd blames it on gnome-session because it comes out of gnome-session's > stderr, which is inherited by gnome-shell - but the message is really > from gnome-shell) > > My prediction is that you will. You'd typically see several iterations > of that, before gnome-session gives up hope of successfully starting > gnome-shell and displays the fail-whale instead. I see two of those errors, then it bails out with an Unrecoverable error. ... > From a purely practical point of view, if your hardware is this old, > you might well be better off with lightdm or another non-compositing *DM > instead of gdm, and/or GNOME Flashback or a non-GNOME environment instead > of GNOME Shell. Definitely -- I was aproaching this as a test of what happens if one just goes with the defaults. I wasn't really expecting it to be a good idea, but its a bit of a shame when it fails so completely that one cannot even get to a browser (so a newbie with just one computer would then be forced to give up Debian right there). > On the i865M where I could reproduce #780413, > I was previously using wheezy's GNOME fallback environment (for > which GNOME Flashback is the closest equivalent in jessie), until I > retired it in favour of a second-hand Thinkpad running wheezy's > GNOME Shell. > > Perhaps the jessie release notes should recommend GNOME Flashback > as the upgrade path for GNOME on hardware older than some arbitrary > cutoff? Having just tried Flashback, I think I'd have to recommend XFCE (or LXDE) on that hardware. > Anything with x86-64, and even the more recent 32-bit chipsets (e.g. whatever > is in the Thinkpad X60s), should be fine for GNOME; but older than that is, > realistically, not going to be tested by most developers any more. ... and also will be depressingly slow when compared to the more svelt alternatives we have available. BTW I just upgraded back to the standard mesa packages, and can confirm that lightdm is able to launch Gnome on this machine with the normal packages. Cheers, Phil. -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd. |-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/ |(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY
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