GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 322699
gdm doesn't tell you which session doesn't exist
Last modified: 2006-01-07 00:20:00 UTC
If you try to log in to a session which doesn't exist (because of a package upgrade, perhaps), gdm doesn't tell you *which* session doesn't exist, and logs in using the failsafe session. It would be a lot more helpful if it (a) told you the name of the session that it tried to use and (b) allowed you to choose a different one, rather than assuming you want failsafe (which you pretty much never do)
I'm not sure exactly what message you are speaking of. Could you please give the exact text of the message that you would like to see improved to contain the session name?
"The session you selected does not look valid. Running the GNOME failsafe session instead." in daemon/slave.c:session_child_run()
Thanks for pointing me at the right message to update. I noticed that it sent a better message to syslog (via a gdm_error call). Now the same message is sent to syslog and to the dialog, which tells you the session that caused the problem. You might want to test this if you can build from CVS head and let me know if you like how it looks better. For reference this is the message it will now use, where "session" is the session name: _("No Exec line in the session file: %s. Running the GNOME failsafe session instead"), session); That should be nicer. It also tells you the problem is with the "exec" line which is useful (previously it only mentioned the problem with Exec to the syslog).