Skip to content

Wheezy's GNOME crashes randomly after Greeter login

That is, before the desktop is shown, a picture with a sad computer screen appears with the message: “Oh no! Something has gone wrong. A problem has occurred and the system can’t recover.” and there’s a “Logout” button. Sometimes you can still see the usual start-up notifications (e.g. for time syncing, available wireless network, etc.).

anonym has seen it in the following occasions:

  • once in a VM that I had artificially starved the CPU on. Persistence was not enabled (running from DVD actually). I couldn’t reproduce it in 4-5 reboots afterwards, though.
  • twice when having the experimental Windows 8 camouflage (#6342 (closed)) activated (in a VM)
  • another case I’ll discuss below since it’s more interesting.

In all of the above occasions (including the “interesting” case I omitted to describe here), clicking “Logout” and redoing the Greeter login results in a functional Tails desktop.

intrigeri:

  • once when running the test suite, in scenario “Booting Tails from a USB drive upgraded from DVD with persistence enabled”.

Now, the “interesting” case mentioned above: it’s on a quite powerful (4-core 4th gen intel i7) bare metal system, when running Tails from a USB drive, with a 60 GB persistent partition.

  • Persistence enabled: 7/7 trial boots results in the GNOME crash.
  • Persistence disabled: 5/5 trial boots do not result in the GNOME crash.

There’s a noticeable extra delay after the Greeter in the crash case compared to when not crashing, and possibly something in GNOME times out. Indeed, in .xsession-errors I see this only when GNOME crashes:

gnome-session[7848]: WARNING: Application 'gnome-settings-daemon.desktop' failed to register before timeout

Searching for this string will probably help us solve it:

Subtasks

Related issues

Original created by @anonym on 7323 (Redmine)

To upload designs, you'll need to enable LFS and have an admin enable hashed storage. More information