Gnome-shell broken since quantal upgrade

[Harry P]

see also http://askubuntu.com/questions/203552/quantal-upgrade-broke-my-gnome-shell/

Symptoms:

- attempting to log in using GNOME session brings up a desktop, shows a notification, but then fails to bring up the normal gnome-shell functionality -- windows key does not bring up menu, there's no menubar or notifactions area... I can do a few things, like bring up a terminal with ctrl+alt+t, and launch gui programs like firefox from there.

I have tried uninstalling/purging gnome-shell + gdm, and also using lightdm as the windom manager. same results.

am v happy to help debug, run diagnostic tools, whatever it may be. Unity is working OK in the meantime.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: gnome-shell 3.6.1-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-17.28-generic 3.5.5
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-17-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu3
Architecture: amd64
CheckboxSubmission: 6773223c32833b6c4e7d6d26e3b03b59
CheckboxSystem: b633b4f40868d491c2ae5b50030ce6f3
Date: Sat Oct 20 15:53:54 2012
DisplayManager: gdm
GsettingsChanges:
 b'org.gnome.desktop.interface' b'gtk-theme' b"'Adwaita'"
 b'org.gnome.desktop.interface' b'icon-theme' b"'ubuntu-mono-light'"
SourcePackage: gnome-shell
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to quantal on 2012-10-20 (0 days ago)
---
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu3
Architecture: amd64
CheckboxSubmission: 6773223c32833b6c4e7d6d26e3b03b59
CheckboxSystem: b633b4f40868d491c2ae5b50030ce6f3
DisplayManager: gdm
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
GsettingsChanges:
 org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme 'Adwaita'
 org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme 'ubuntu-mono-light'
Package: gnome-shell 3.6.1-0ubuntu1
PackageArchitecture: amd64
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-17.28-generic 3.5.5
Tags: quantal
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-17-generic x86_64
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to quantal on 2012-10-20 (0 days ago)
UserGroups: adm admin cdrom debian-tor dialout lpadmin plugdev sambashare

[Harry P (hjwp2)]

apport information

[Harry P (hjwp2)]

apport information

[Harry P (hjwp2)]

apport information

[Harry P (hjwp2)]

Added some additional logs from apport-collect, collected while I'd actually logged into a broken gnome-shell, just in case they show the errors more accurately -- I ran the original ubuntu-bug command from a successful unity login.

[Harry P (hjwp2)]

Okay, having looked through the two gdmSessionLog.txt files, I found this line:

gnome-session[3819]: WARNING: Failed to start app: Unable to start application: Failed to execute child process "/usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1" (No such file or directory)

I did an apt-get install policykit-1-gnome, and it seems to have fixed the issue.

Here's a similar sounding bug:
https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7554

So, does that mean the problem was there is a missing dependency for the gnome-shell package? That it should add policykit-1-gnome as a dependency?

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Do you have ubuntu-desktop installed (or alternately, ubuntu-gnome-desktop)?

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu. I apologize that we are not always to respond to bug reports promptly. Ubuntu 12.10 reached End of Life in 2014. See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

Please upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and re-test. If the bug is still reproducible, increase the verbosity of the steps to recreate it so we can try again.

Do feel free to report any other bugs you may find.