GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 607703
selecting failsafe session becomes default for future logins, but should not
Last modified: 2010-06-19 13:56:26 UTC
Created attachment 151963 [details] [review] Don't save failsafe session in .dmrc From https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdm/+bug/509182: I've been unable to use Ubuntu normally for months, until I noticed that I was unintentionally using always using a failsafe session, which I had selected just once to overcome a problem; it had since become my default! It shouldn't have, that's not what the failsafe session is for. Here's the longer story After upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10, I could not log into an ordinary Gnome session for some reason that I (still) ignore. I could however login to gdm using the Gnome failsafe option. That resolved the login problem, but there were many other problems that became apparent: sound was not working, I could not open any graphic application from a command line, except via sudo, lock screen failed, no notification of updates,... All this turned out to be because after selecting my name at the gdm chooser, the failsafe session was automatically selected; this happens in such a discrete manner that I had never noticed. In fact the default setting is apparently recorded elsewhere than in the user home directory, because when I reinstalled Ubuntu onto a fresh disk partition while mounting a /home partition, the problem had disappeared, but the old (upgraded) Ubuntu still made me login using a failsafe session. So please, if selecting a failsafe session in gdm, don't make it the user default, nobody wants to continue using it indefinitely. ---- You can find enclosed the patch to fix that. Failsafe session is either define as having "failsafe" in session name (as in gnome-failsafe) or "failsafe" in session file comment (don't depends on locale). Of course, the detection is done unsensitive. I've tried to keep as closed as possible to upstream's code (that is to say, gnome-session-direct send a dbus signal to gdm-session-worker, which set the value to a failsafe gdm-session-settings Tell me if I can help an anything related to this patch (or other :)). Here is the patch
we should probably either 1) Key off X-GDM-BypassXSession in the desktop file or 2) add a new X-GDM-RememberSession key
That should be difficult, I also noted that X-GDM-Failsafe exists, we can maybe take that one to say "I don't want to store that session"? Just tell me and I'll rework my patch :)
where do you see X-GDM-Failsafe ? It was a proposed key that was never added.
Oh, sorry, this is a distro patch. X-GDM-RememberSession seems to be the more reasonable, if you ack on it, I can add this to my patch.
We don't have failsafe sessions upstream. Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. However, this application does not track its bugs in the GNOME Bugzilla. We kindly ask you to report the bug to the application authors. For a selective list of other bug tracking systems please consult http://live.gnome.org/Bugsquad/TriageGuide/NonGnome. If the affected third party application has a bug tracking system you should investigate whether a bug for the reported issue is already filed in this system. If it has not been filed yet please do so. Also ensure that both bug reports contain a link to each other. Thanks in advance!