Re: gnome-shell not starting

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sun, 2009-01-18 at 01:41 +0100, Mads Villadsen wrote:
> When I try to start gnome-shell using the start-in-Xephyr script all I
> end up with is a Xephyr window containing xeyes and an xterm - no window
> manager or anything else.
> 
> I have attached the output from start-in-Xephyr -v.
> 
> I have also tried running start-replace which kills my panels, tries to
> start, then dies, and my panels get reloaded.
> 
> Any suggestions for a way forward - or a way to get more debug
> information?
> 

Well, first if you've previously built gnome-shell on the system (it's
not a fresh checkout and build), try a 'jhbuild build -afc' to force
everything to be built from scratch. gobject-introspection isn't that
good yet at back compat, and old versions of typelibs can cause weird
crashes.

If that doesn't help, run

 start-in-Xephyr -g

To start the shell under gdb.

Then:

 (gdb) run
 <wait for it to crash>
 (gdb) backtrace

gdb may give you a list of packages to debuginfo-install when starting;
depending on where it is crashing, that may or may not be needed to get
a meaningful backtrace.

- Owen