Gnome 3.8 + OpenBSD 5.4 - error on login (GDM)

[harishankar]

Installed gnome3 on OpenBSD 5.4, i386 both on my desktop system and on virtualbox on my debian laptop, I get this error on the login screen (See screenshot).

Not sure what the issue here is.

I followed the instructions on the /usr/local/share/doc/pkg-readmes/gnome-*

Screenshots attached.

I am sure hardware 3d is not required to work with Gnome 3 in failsafe/fallback mode. So not sure if the log file is the relevant error. On Debian I was able to install GDM + Gnome 3 on the same desktop system (ATI Rage XL video card) and it had no issues (Except gnome works only in failsafe/fallback mode)

[jggimi]

From the pkg-readme for the gnome-3.8.3p0 meta package:

GNOME requires a 3D accelerated display.

[harishankar]

Hmm... strange that OpenBSD requires 3D acceleration in Gnome. It worked without 3d support under Debian (although in failsafe mode) so I assumed it would be the same in OpenBSD.

[jggimi]

I'm not a Gnome user -- although I've installed and configured it in prior years -- the last was for OpenBSD 5.0 and that was Gnome 2.32.1.

You might try operating it without GDM. Create an .xinitrc that executes gnome-session, and use startx(1) instead of a display manager. You may get different results.

[harishankar]

Tried that too. Still fails with the same message.

For some reason the gnome-session-fallback executable is not present in Gnome in OpenBSD, but the same executable exists in my Debian installation.

Probably the same was not ported to OpenBSD?

Addendum: apparently the --failsafe flag in gnome-session is not the same as the fallback mode.

[jggimi]

I note that in http://callfortesting.org/gnome3/ that the Gnome Shell requires it. Per https://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic...31797&p=191770 it appears that the initial implementation of Gnome 3 on OpenBSD (and only on OpenBSD) could use Fallback mode, and this was corroborated in the CVS logs for gnome-session on OpenBSD, where patch 1.219 for Gnome 3.6.1 mentions it as going away in the next release: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvswe...ssion/Makefile

[harishankar]

Hm... apparently there exists the files in /usr/local/share/gnome-session/sessions/* for the fallback mode in OpenBSD as well.

Maybe I should launch gnome-session with those files instead of the default. will give it a try.

[harishankar]

It does appear that gnome-panel is missing in 5.4 which was present in 5.3. This means Gnome on OpenBSD 5.4 does not work in fallback/classic mode.

Unfortunate, since I think that it does exist in Gnome 3.8 (i.e. fallback mode)...

[jggimi]

As far as I can tell (by looking through CVS logs), gnome-panel was replaced by gnome-shell and this transition completed with Gnome 3.8, in March of this year (between 5.3 and 5.4).

[harishankar]

I read in other forums (mainly Linux based ones) that Gnome 3.8 still has the fallback option

It's a pity that functional and feature rich desktops are depending on 3d hardware acceleration when they could well do without it.

Perhaps Xfce is the only hope. Too bad. I use Gnome regularly on Linux and I was happy to see gnome 3 in OpenBSD as well.

On a related note, I did edit the file /usr/local/share/gnome-session/hardware-compatibility file to enable software rasterizer, and gdm loads (though slowly) but gnome-shell still doesn't. The original error was gone, though.

In my search, I did find this page: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Featu...ware_rendering

which seems to be of interest, but it is a Linux focussed article on the topic.

[LeFrettchen]

Originally Posted by harishankar

Perhaps Xfce is the only hope.

Or any Windows Manager : Lxde, Kde, FluxBox...