Project:GNOME/GNOME3 troubleshooting

= Troubleshooting =

Getting backtraces
At first you need to review Gentoo documentation for ensuring affected packages are built with debugging symbols. After that, you need to install and enable its provided unit files to be run at boot time.

GNOME Shell crashed/hung...
Sometimes something fails and you can see GNOME hangs or crashes, for restarting  you can press  +, type   and press. If it doesn't work, you can try to switch to a console and run. If still no luck, you can restart X completely running (in the case of gdm):

Unicode (i.e UTF-8) locale is needed
As reported in (upstream bug#698952), you need to use a UTF-8 locale or, otherwise, you will hit a lot of crashes.

Slow GNOME Shell on NVIDIA card
Sometimes people change nvidia settings using, this can lead to performace or other problems. Before reporting a issue, you should try to remove your changed settings to use defaults again. Settings are placed at.

Desktop unresponsive some seconds under heavy I/O load
Sometimes, under heavy I/O load (like while emerging or copying files), you could experience some stalls for a few seconds. You should consider using different IO Schedulers in your kernel and stick with the one performing better for you. Currently three are offered: cfq, deadline and bfq.

Also setting "fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100000" in sysctl.conf can help as reported in upstream bug#712311 and Fedora bug#1069299. Please read /etc/sysctl.d/README for learning about how to handle sysctl.conf settings.

Video tearing on secondary monitor
Because of a bug with unredirection code in mutter (upstream bug #741376 people can suffer from important tearing on secondary monitor. As a temporal workaround you can disable unredirection each time gnome-shell is started (please note disable tearing forever and unconditionally if neither desired because it would lead to other performance problems with gaming and virtualization for instance):
 * 1) Alt-F2
 * 2) Type "lg" and press Enter
 * 3) Type "Meta.disable_unredirect_for_screen(global.screen)" and press Enter

Cannot terminate X even if I have configured xorg.conf to allow that
GNOME honors XKB options set on xorg.conf.d files if the user doesn't have any configuration yet, i.e. for new user accounts. Otherwise previous users configuration is respected. But please take care GNOME will read configurations files from, not from old style file.

Set window theme to default value
In some cases the old metacity window manager theme is migrated and inherited in GNOME Shell. To reset its value to default value you will need to run:

GDM/GNOME not starting due 3D issues
If you are having 3D problems related with corrupted images, you could have hit a Xorg driver bug. You need to report a bug for that downstream on Gentoo.

Then, you can additionally add your card to the blacklist to force the usage of software rendering. The file you need to change is, and the line you need to append (preceded by a "-") can be obtained running:

If you keep having problems, you should check software rendering is ok. To this end, you could need to temporally use as it doesn't need 3D support or re-emerge  with USE="-gnome-shell fallback", and run, from a desktop or window manager not relying on 3D:

that will likely show you errors loading swrast that could guide us to solve the problem.