Options/Alternatives for GNOME's uninformative white screen of death?

quequotion · 2014-05-03 14:51:36

If a gnome-session fails to start for any reason, and isn't configured for a fall-back session or the fall-back session also fails, a big white lockout screen that says "Something has gone wrong" with the option to "Log Out" appears.

This does absolutely nothing to tell users what has gone wrong and, by locking out the desktop, actually inhibits the possibility of discovering what may be wrong. Of course the idea behind this is probably that the desktop hasn't been loaded properly and is most likely in an unusable state, which is often true. It is possible to do some things though, like start individual desktop components from a tty with "DISPLAY=:0.0 cmdhere"; which I often find myself doing to probe what part of the desktop may be broken.

Sometimes it's an unsymlinked opengl library, other times the session script was misconfigured, once in a while a particular component failed to start for whatever reason. I've run across a variety of problems with accordingly varied solutions, but all with the same game-stopping white screen of doom at the beginning. Lucky me, I've had to deal with this kind of problem chronically (proprietary drivers, experimenting with DEs, etc) and can usually deduce what's gone wrong after a while; but it would save me a lot of time if gnome-session would just tell me what went wrong.

Is there any way to get more output from this screen or is it possible to change this behavior (ie, fall-back (from fall-back?) to full-screen terminal, just to save a few key presses)? I know GNOME isn't big on verbose output or end-user serviceability, but this screen is only slightly better than being dumped into a void or bounced back to the desktop manager (lightdm in my case, which does happen once in a while when things are really borked)

Arch Linux

#1 2014-05-03 14:51:36

Options/Alternatives for GNOME's uninformative white screen of death?

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