Panels fail to appear on Gnome startup on Averatec notebook running 11.04 alpha1

[Peter Belew]

Binary package hint: gnome-panel

I have installed 11.04 'natty narwhal' beta-1 on my Averatec 3280 notebook, and have updated it daily through this morning. (2010-12-12).

This has a Unichrome display which only supports Gnome in 11.04. This display has had a number of problems with previous versions of Ubuntu, mainly documented in bug #495553, but on the initial release of 11.04, most of the problems seemed to have been solved. (See the last few comments in that bug report for details).

Starting yesterday, 11 December 2010, a new problem has surfaced. When the Gnome display comes up, after logging in, either neither panel appears, or just the bottom panel appears. Once in a large number of trials, both panels will appear. Currently neither shows up. Yesterday, after this started happening, I add the Main Menu to the bottom panel, then created desktop icons for a number of common programs (Terminal, Firefox, Update Manager, Synaptic, etc.) so I could continue testing and reporting on the system.

I had previously installed an ssh server and some other shell utilities to make it easier to access the system when display problems occur.

I am attaching the current output of apt-show-versions to show the current state of the system. A xorg.conf file has been installed to solve a screen resolution detection problem - that and some Xorg.0.log files are attached to the #495553 bug report.

Linux distro/version and kernel version
Ubuntu natty (development branch)
Linux cupid 2.6.37-8-generic #21-Ubuntu SMP Sun Dec 5 17:57:05 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux
model name : Mobile AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 2800+
cpu MHz : 800.000

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

I tried a brief test of Safe Mode instead of Classic mode. The panels appear properly in Safe Mode, but not (necessarily) in Classic (Gnome) mode. I just tried 3 times:

Safe Mode: Panels ok
Classic Mode: only bottom panel
Safe Mode: Panels ok.

Just logging out between tests, not rebooting.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

The behavior is the same as in comment #2 after rebooting.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

Some new issues:

When I boot in safe mode. I can't use the wifi interface (configured with network-manager), but the eth0 interface works (configured in /etc/network/interfaces). Apparently network-manager is disabled in safe mode.

When booting into the normal Gnome mode, the previously-configured wifi interface (wlan0) does work, if it was set up before this bug appeared with parameters for the local wireless access point.

On one start of Gnome, even the desktop icons I had created previously did not appear. But I could use ctr-alt-F2 to switch to a text shell and restart gdm, after which those icons reappeared.

On the last few boots today, I never got either the top or the bottom panel to appear.

I did update the system a few times today.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

seems either an xorg or compiz issue

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

The problem with the initial screen res of 1600x1200 is now covered by Bug #186103.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

How can one disable compiz on this system?

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

If the bottom panel does appear (this is kind of random), one can create another panel after right-clicking on it. Such a panel will appear first on the side of the screen, rather than the top. If one right-clicks on the new panel, and tries to move it to the top, using the Properties selection, it will appear below where the top panel should have been.

Note that there was just an update of Compiz today -

$ apt-show-versions | grep compiz
compiz/natty uptodate 1:0.9.2.1+glibmainloop3-0ubuntu3
compiz-core/natty uptodate 1:0.9.2.1+glibmainloop3-0ubuntu3
compiz-fusion-plugins-main/natty uptodate 0.9.2.1-0ubuntu6
compiz-gnome/natty uptodate 1:0.9.2.1+glibmainloop3-0ubuntu3
compiz-plugins/natty uptodate 1:0.9.2.1+glibmainloop3-0ubuntu3
compizconfig-backend-gconf/natty uptodate 0.9.2.1git101213-0ubuntu1
libcompizconfig0/natty uptodate 0.9.2.1git101125-0ubuntu3

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

There were a number of updates today,, including the following updates of Compiz -

$ apt-show-versions | grep compiz
compiz/natty uptodate 1:0.9.2.1+glibmainloop3-0ubuntu5
compiz-core/natty uptodate 1:0.9.2.1+glibmainloop3-0ubuntu5
compiz-fusion-plugins-main/natty uptodate 0.9.2.1-0ubuntu6
compiz-gnome/natty uptodate 1:0.9.2.1+glibmainloop3-0ubuntu5
compiz-plugins/natty uptodate 1:0.9.2.1+glibmainloop3-0ubuntu5
compizconfig-backend-gconf/natty uptodate 0.9.2.1git101213-0ubuntu1
libcompizconfig0/natty uptodate 0.9.2.1git101125-0ubuntu3

However this bug is unaffected.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

Also, now when I log in I get a top panel but no bottom panel. This is the reverse of the most common situation.

Also there has been a regression in Bug #495553 - text consoles don't work now again.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

Bug #495553 seems to be fixed today, if I build and install r.491 of the openchrome driver. However the top and bottom panels only appear in safe mode - in normal Gnome mode they don't appear, or only one appears.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

Top & bottom panels still don't appear on this system except in safe mode, as of an upgrade this morning.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

Top & bottom panels still don't appear on this system except in safe mode, as of an upgrade this morning. So this bug is still not fixed.

I noticed that there was a problem with my swap partition not mounting properly, and thought that might be a cause of the display problem. But after reformatting and remounting the swap partition, the panels don't appear except in safe mode. (This system has 512MB of RAM, and the swap partition is 1GB, so it was reasonable to suspect lack of swap space as a cause of this bug).

Note that Bug #495553 seems to have gone away, as the updated Openchrome driver has been checked into the repositories.

If Compiz is indeed involved in this bug, is there a way to try some other version or otherwise check it?

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

This has some resemblance to Bug #682986 (compiz) and Bug #687660 (unity). But this system won't run Unity, so it's possibly a Compiz problem.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

With some updates today, in the past few hours, this problem seems to have improved. The top and bottom panels now appear most of the time in 'legacy gnome' mode. Sometimes they don't appear right after a reboot after and update, but they are appearing most of the time now.

I'm attaching the output of apt-show-versions.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

This problem seems to have gone for some time now in the mode I normally use. (This is 2011-01-28). I normally use "Ubuntu Classic Desktop (No effect).

HOWEVER, if I choose just "Ubuntu Classic Desktop", I get no panels at all (I only tried that once - it's possible that panels will appear at random).

BTW I think it would be more correct to say [there are] "No effects" - using the plural.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

On choosing just "Ubuntu Classic Desktop", I get either no panels at all or just one panel. So that aspect of the bug still stands.

[jhfhlkjlj (fdsuufijjejejejej-deactivatedaccount)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner. There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. It would help us a lot if you could test it on a currently supported Ubuntu version. When you test it and it is still an issue, kindly upload the updated logs by running apport-collect <bug #> and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

This problem indeed disappeared in later versions. I have been running most recently xubuntu 11.10 and now the corresponding version of Linux Mint, neither of which uses Gnome. So there's no point in continuing with this bug any longer.

Thank you!