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#1 2020-04-15 19:37:49

liewkj
Member
Registered: 2020-04-15
Posts: 31

GNOME 3.36 shell/mutter/etc not starting

Hi, I ran up-to-date GNOME shell on EeePC 701 4G with ArchLinux32. Recent update of GNOME 3.36 had broken the system. Just wondering if anyone had experienced the same breakage. I had to downgrade the following packages to keep the system working.

local/gnome-control-center 3.34.4-2.0 (gnome)
local/gnome-desktop 1:3.34.4-1.0
local/gnome-session 3.34.2-1.0 (gnome)
local/gnome-settings-daemon 3.34.2-1.0 (gnome)
local/gnome-shell 1:3.34.4-1.0 (gnome)
local/gnome-shell-extensions 3.34.2-1.0 (gnome)
local/gnome-software 3.34.2-2.0 (gnome)
local/mutter 3.34.4-1.0 (gnome)

From the log, gnome-shell threw an exception from main.js. The same breakage can also be reproduced on QEMU VM. I have other modern laptops running up-to-date ArchLinux official and GNOME 3.36 and they are fine. So this paints the picture that legacy 32-bit x86 architecture is going south in term of software quality and testing.

Last edited by liewkj (2020-04-15 19:40:13)

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#2 2020-04-15 22:46:42

levi
Moderator
From: Yorkshire, UK
Registered: 2018-06-16
Posts: 1,197

Re: GNOME 3.36 shell/mutter/etc not starting

I've not seen a bug reporting this on the arch32 bug tracker yet, so feel free to write one yourself if you feel like it.  Thanks in any case for noticing this; it's not software I've ever run on my 32-bit machine myself; I gave up on gnome shell before it jumped to version 3 when I found I could use more lightweight desktop environments which weren't as flashy but didn't actually impinge on my use of it.

Hmm, main.js; does that indicate it's actually running javascript?  I guess the bindings are in gjs for gnome, but the actual engine could be one of many packages.  I personally have js60 and duktape installed which fit that category for example.  js60 comes from a dependecy from polkit, and I guess duktape is now an orphan.  Yep, pacman -Qdt reports it so I guess I don't need that.  Every little helps.


Architecture: pentium4, Testing repos: Yes, Hardware: EeePC 901+2GB RAM+OS half on the SD card.

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#3 2020-04-16 11:22:43

stronnag
Member
Registered: 2018-04-02
Posts: 4

Re: GNOME 3.36 shell/mutter/etc not starting

GS 3.36 is working OK with Testing / Community-Testing enabled and has been for a few days now. Prior to that it was broken ("something's gone wrong"); probably mutter as Budgie failed in the same way.

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#4 2020-04-16 16:33:06

abaumann
Administrator
From: Zurich
Registered: 2019-11-14
Posts: 1,032
Website

Re: GNOME 3.36 shell/mutter/etc not starting

Yeah, I suppose you are on the pentium4 architecture (on i686 it's really the end for Gnome).
I can confirm that both 'gdm' and 'gnome-session' end in 'ow snap' which is extremly helpful
to find out, what's wrong.

I have to be franck: we test only the GUIs which we personally use (for me this is notion and
xfce). Shiny KDE and Gnome are for new laptops, they don't make much sense IMHO on old
hardware. And the project leaders of those projects seem to think the same.

As for testing: yes, we are _extremly_ low on human resources.. so, any help is welcome.. :-)

mutter itself works just fine. gnome-terminal complains about missing g_memory_monitor_dup_default
when starting a Portal service. gnome-session just starts so many things, it's hard to
tell what's wrong.

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#5 2020-04-16 16:44:25

abaumann
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From: Zurich
Registered: 2019-11-14
Posts: 1,032
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Re: GNOME 3.36 shell/mutter/etc not starting

Yep, just tested, testing works just fine (both gdm and starting a Gnome session) for pentium4.
Most likely a dependency has not been moved to stable, so it breaks on stable, I'm hunting which one..

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#6 2020-04-16 18:43:45

liewkj
Member
Registered: 2020-04-15
Posts: 31

Re: GNOME 3.36 shell/mutter/etc not starting

Look like one just has to bite the bullet of being bleeding edge these days to keep up with less popular 32-bit distro.

Anyway, I enabled "testing", resync and updated, and GDM/GNOME 3.36 started up after manually symlink libffi.so.6 which gnome-shell complained about error loading the library. The package libffi-3.3.3 comes from the testing repo but gnome-shell was still build with the old libffi-3.2.1.

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#7 2020-04-16 18:53:03

abaumann
Administrator
From: Zurich
Registered: 2019-11-14
Posts: 1,032
Website

Re: GNOME 3.36 shell/mutter/etc not starting

Ah, thanks for testing that. libffi.so.6 is bugging us for a while now in various places. So I'll check through the
gnome-session dependencies to see, what package still depends on libffi.so.6 and needs a rebuild:

lddtree /usr/bin/gnome-shell

            libwayland-client.so.0 => /usr/lib/libwayland-client.so.0
                libffi.so.6 => /usr/lib/libffi.so.6

but, I rebuilt wayland against libffi.so.7.

I seem to have trouble to publish things to stable.. :-(

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#8 2020-04-17 06:24:20

abaumann
Administrator
From: Zurich
Registered: 2019-11-14
Posts: 1,032
Website

Re: GNOME 3.36 shell/mutter/etc not starting

So, try now. I just tested lightdm with a gnome session and also gdm directly.

Make sure you are using the pentium4 architecture on the eeepc, the i686 just barely works with Gnome.

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#9 2020-04-17 15:31:41

liewkj
Member
Registered: 2020-04-15
Posts: 31

Re: GNOME 3.36 shell/mutter/etc not starting

Thanks, yes it works now. Here's what I did:
- remove Testing repo from pacman.conf.
- remove libffi.so.6 symlink.
- run "pacman -Syyuu" to resync and downgrade packages from Testing, if any.

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#10 2020-04-17 23:15:54

liewkj
Member
Registered: 2020-04-15
Posts: 31

Re: GNOME 3.36 shell/mutter/etc not starting

Look like gnome-tweaks also has dependency on libffi.so.6

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/gnome-tweaks", line 13, in <module>
    import gi
  File "/usr/lib/python3.8/site-packages/gi/__init__.py", line 42, in <module>
    from . import _gi
ImportError: libffi.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

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#11 2020-04-18 06:08:14

abaumann
Administrator
From: Zurich
Registered: 2019-11-14
Posts: 1,032
Website

Re: GNOME 3.36 shell/mutter/etc not starting

Rebuilt and pushed python-gobject..

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