GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 471479
brings back login screen if reboot is chosen
Last modified: 2010-06-04 20:21:46 UTC
Make sure your system halt scripts don't execute too fast (e.g. insert a "sleep 20" at the beginning of gdm's init script) and then choose reboot from the login screen of gdm-2.19.6. Expected behavior: gdm's login screen and X should disappear, linux console should appear. Gdm should no longer show its login screen since it knows that the system is being shut down (even though the halt scripts haven't reached the step where they kill gdm). Actual behavior: gdm's login screen disappears for a moment, the X server is reseted or restarted and then gdm's login screen starts up again. When the halt scripts kill gdm, it disappears again. Furthermore, this new "temporary" login screen doesn't seem to honour most of the configuration options, no matter if I set them in /usr/share/gdm/default.conf or /etc/gdm/custom.conf. The only setting it seems to honour is whether I'd like "gdmlogin" or "gdmgreeter" to be executed. But the graphical theme, the welcome text etc. are those built into gdm, not what I've set in the config files, so this screen may look completely different from my real gdm. Note that I first saw this bug when I rebooted my system after a few days of uptime, when a lot of services were already swapped out. Hence it took a long time for the halt scripts to terminate them. So I really saw this bug appearing in real life even without that artificial "sleep" mentioned above. That "sleep" is only an easy way to trigger this bug.
This does sound annoying. It sounds like the system will eventually halt/reboot, though. So note sure this is a real high priority issue. Probably would be good if GDM set a longer timeout value for considering restarting the GUI after starting the shutdown/reboot sequence. I'd be happy to accept a patch to make this work better.
I got this too and was also annoyed because a gdm with a /different/ theme came up! My understanding is that gdm receives some signal early when the shutdown starts and restarts: if this signal is sent by shutdown perhaps gdm can be forewarned that it shouldn't restart if it gets any signal? That is shutdown sequence could be: - user selects shutdown - gdm takes note that it shouldn't restart if it receives a signal - gdm launches shutdown
*** Bug 493942 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I can confirm this bug and its reproducibility, on 2.20.1 (x86_64 2.6.21-gentoo). This bug never used to occur until gnome was updated to 2.20.1.
(In reply to comment #4) > I can confirm this bug and its reproducibility, on 2.20.1 (x86_64 > 2.6.21-gentoo). > This bug never used to occur until gnome was updated to 2.20.1. > I now have some additional information which might help the devs. In my case GDM respawns X and GDM with the default theme on both shutdown and restart. This problem occurs only in 2.19 > 2.2.1 as rolling back to 2.18.4 fixes this bug. A error message shows on VT1 (default shutdown screen) along the lines of gdm_connection close assert [conn != null ]: failed. This suggests to me that it is a script problem rather than a actual program error although the script could be catching a error.
I suspect this bug is the same, or related to bug #517526, but not sure.
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. However, you are using a version that is too old and not supported anymore. GNOME developers are no longer working on that version, so unfortunately there will not be any bug fixes for the version that you use. By upgrading to a newer version of GNOME you could receive bug fixes and new functionality. You may need to upgrade your Linux distribution to obtain a newer version of GNOME. Please feel free to reopen this bug if the problem still occurs with a newer version of GNOME.