Login screen no longer fades to desktop

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

Ubuntu Karmic, all updates installed

1. Log in to Ubuntu.

What happens: The login screen changes suddenly to the desktop.
What should happen: The login screen should fade in to the desktop.

This was working until a few days ago.

Fixing this might also fix bug 442056.

[Rick Spencer (rick-rickspencer3)]

mpt - thanks for the bug report. Could you please confirm that in fact you are seeing xsplash disappear rather than fade away, rather than the GDM greeter? Thanks.

[Rob Speer (rspeer)]

I have auto-login set up, so it should fade straight from xsplash to the desktop without the GDM interface being involved. I can confirm that the change is very sudden. It may in fact be attempting to crossfade, but it does so when there is a lot of disk I/O going on.

Sometimes I see one frame of crossfade in between, but it seems to be crossfading to *black*, which makes it look oddly like the spotlight has suddenly gone out.

This may be caused by bug 435522 -- xsplash is disappearing before the desktop is actually ready.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Yes, I did mean xsplash, sorry. Anyway, this is fixed with latest updates. gnome-panel appears over top of xsplash before it fades away, which looks weird, but that's a separate problem.