Comment 2 for bug 427337

Well, on Alpha-6 I have a different behaviour. If GNOME is launched by GDM, it always fails. The desktop is frozen, but the system can be rebooted by SysRq. Somewhere I read that the 830M chipset of Intel is blacklisted. Maybe he fails to follow that order.

Again I disabled GDM and started GNOME by "startx" on a tty. On the first boot the "compiz-real" message is now gone and I have a blank desktop. No panels or icons. But ALT+F2 works and I can run any program like "xterm" or "nautilus". After stopping it by pressing CTRL+C on the tty and restart GNOME, the desktop loads fine. Due to blacklisting the desktop effects cannot be activated (didn't try to force them). He searches for a driver, waits a moment and says "cannot enable desktop effects".

LXDE without compiz works though (as expected).

I am not very experienced in debugging a desktop. Is there a way to enable debugging on GDM and GNOME to see what they do while initializing? A log file can be written by sync+unmount from SysRq.