GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 471978
at-spi-registryd not starting automatically during gdmlogin in Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 development
Last modified: 2007-09-17 18:57:58 UTC
Please describe the problem: During the gdmlogin session, at-spi-registryd should be automatically started when Assistive Technology is enabled (I don't know for sure whether it should also be automatically started if Assistive Technology is not enabled.) It does start automatically in Ubuntu 7.04,but it does not start anymore in 7.10. (I am connecting remotely through NX from nomachine.com to gdmlogin) However, if I define a gesture to start at-spi-registryd in the dwell gesture configuration of gdm, I can start it without a problem. This shows that it is probably not a problem of gdm and at-spi-registryd running simultaneously. Steps to reproduce: 1. Enable Assistive Technology using the Accessibility tab gdmsetup 2. Set the theme to Plain with the Style menu in the local tab of gdmsetup 3. Set the Style to "Same as local" in the Remote tab of gdmsetup 4. Restart your computer and if you want to start a program that needs at-spi-registryd during gdmlogin (for example by a dwell gesture), it will complain that at-spi-registryd is not running). Another way to check it could be to login remotely through ssh and type "ps aux". Actual results: Programs that require at-spi cannot be started by a gesture. Expected results: Programs requiring at-spi should also work during gdmlogin. Does this happen every time? Yes, it does happen all the times. Other information:
On the gdm-list mail list, this issue was tracked down to the fact that the code for launching the at-spi-registryd (which lives in gui/gdmcommon.c) assumes that at-spi-registryd is in LIBEXECDIR. On the distro where this problem is happening, they install at-spi-registryd to a different location. Therefore a configure option is needed to specify the directory that contains at-spi-registryd. Or the distro can simply patch the code to hardcode the directory they are using instead of LIBEXECDIR.
I've fixed this in GNOME 2.20. Now you can use --with-atspi-dir to specify the location of the at-spi-registryd daemon. The distro will need to make sure to use this flag when configuring GDM to fix the problem, though.