GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 126606
"Graphical greeter has crashed, attempting to use another"
Last modified: 2005-03-19 01:34:35 UTC
Last night I started burning a cd while in runlevel 3, and I went to bed. When I woke up a few hours later and checked the computer, of course the cd had finished a long time ago. (I checked the cd, and it appears to be fine) But at the bottom of the screen, I saw a message about "Init" having been run. It was the same message that I see all the time while the system is booting up. So I rebooted, and I got a message something like "Graphical greeter program has crashed, attempting to use another." So it used another greeter, and that one worked just fine. This next part I can't remember exactly what happened, but I got a message, after logging in, that referred to the GDM crashing. So, I chose to submit a bug report, but when I clicked on that button, I got a message that said something like this: "Application "bug-buddy" (process 6034) has crashed due to a fatal error. (Segmentation fault)" So I clicked "Submit bug report again", and I got another message exactly like the one above, except it gave a different PID. I am running Fedora Core 1, with whatever display manager runs by default with Fedora Core 1. KDE is my default desktop. I did a fresh install, and like always, I chose to install every package. Also, "/etc/sysconfig/desktop" says "DESKTOP=GNOME", so I assume that GDM is my display manager. If there is anything I can do to answer any questions you need answered, I would be glad to help.
As an experiment, I switched to GNOME as my default session, and then rebooted and attempted to log in. I then got an error message that said that "Nautilus had crashed", so like before, I clicked on "Submit a Bug Report" and I got the same result as before, another error saying that Bug Buddy had crashed" I was never able to log into GNOME, because Nautilus itself had crashed. So I logged into KDE, and that worked fine. Also, when I attempted to open the Epiphany web browser, I got a message that IT had crashed, and I got the same result I got all the other times when I clicked on "Submit a Bug Report" One thing I forgot to add, is that every error message that I have received this morning says that there was a "Segmentation Fault" I never use GNOME as my desktop, I use KDE, but since this could keep people who use GNOME from using it, I am changing the Priority and Severity ratings of this bug to "High" and "Major" respectively. Our computer is not hooked up to any network, and it wasn't connected to the internet when this problem first started. Also, it started while X wasn't even running, and there was no possibility of anyone but our cat using the machine. (I've never seen him even attempt to step on the keyboard or any other part of the computer :)) In closing, this apparent bug seems to affect GNOME severely, but once I get logged in, which I can only do if I log into KDE, everything works fine, except certain GNOME based appilcations (so far, Epiphany and Nautilus) Also, this is only a minor annoyance to me, but if it's happening to other people, it could keep them from using GNOME at all.
I just tried "rpm -Uvh --force gdm-2.4.4.5-1.i386.rpm", with the result that I got the graphical greeter back. I had forgotten to switch my default desktop back to KDE, so when I logged in, it was GNOME that began initializing. First I got an error about the "Gnome Panel" crashing (I had never seen that one before) (segmentation fault), then I got an error about Nautilus crashing. As usual, when I clicked on "Submit a Bug Report", I got an error about BugBuddy crashing. Now I'm going to try changing /etc/sysconfig/desktop to "KDE" and see what happens.
Does this still happen? I highly suspect that it has to do with a library mismatch or something like that, so I doubt it.
Yes, this problem seems to be spurious and it sounds like the user is having problems with GNOME programs running properly in general. As Christoffer suggests, it sounds like a library mismatch. The person reporting the bug has not commented in 4 months, so I'm closing this bug. A new bug can be re-opened if someone sees this problem and can describe how to recreate it.