[SunHELP] GNOME 1.4 - unsupported evaluation

[sunhelp at sunhelp.org]

On 25-May-01 at 15:08, Chad A. Chance (chad at ziggadigga.com) wrote:
> Howdy,
>      For those that don't know about this
> http://www.sun.com/software/star/gnome/getgnome14.html
> 
>      Has anybody tried this yet? I downloaded it, it installed fine, but
> when I try to start it up, after about 10 seconds it just drops me back to
> the login, no error messages or clues as to why. I though it might have to
> do with my setup so I created a test user, logged in with it and the same
> thing.

I just downloaded and installed it myself.  When I first tried to log
in, it brought up a black screen with an arrow curor and nothing else.
Removing my old .gnome*, .sawfish, and .esd* files/dirs got rid of that
problem; but then it was flashing and returning to the login prompt,
as you are reporting.  With me, it turned out to be something in my
bash initialization - changing my shell to /bin/sh and creating an
empty .profile fixed it.  The next step was to comment out the BASH_ENV
in my .dtprofile and renamed .bashrc.  (And make sure that the
'...sessionlogfile="/dev/null"' line was commented out.)  That let
me boot with bash as my shell.  Then adding 'set -x' in scripts to
see exactly what it was actually doing.  Eventually, I tracked it
down to 'export XMODIFIERS="@im=None"'.  Apparently that kills the
session manager or something else early in the sequence.  (I was also
getting a core file from gnome_segv; but that was useless...  I really
wish that Sun would take a clue from FreeBSD, et. al. and make their
core files come out as 'core.<progname>' instead of just 'core'.)

Don't forget - the dtlogin process will leave some log info in
~/.dt/startlog and ~/.dt/sessionlogs/*


>      I've been trying to get GNOME to work for over a year now, compiling
> from source & different binary distributions, I have had limited success
> and when it does work it is SO unstable. Is there something about SPARCs
> that makes this such a pain? I have an old 200MMX laptop that I have
> Slackware running on and it handles GNOME just fine.

Clear out all your old gnome-related stuff.  (This has also been a problem
in some other OSes.  Along with some portability issues caused by people
who think that 'portable' means 'I can build and run it on other Linux
distributions'.)

>      By the way, I'm trying to get this to work on a SS20, dual SM61, 288M
> RAM, SX graphics. If anybody has any tips, tricks or magic incantations,
> then please send them my way...

I assume you've verified that your framebuffer is set to default
to 24bit depth.



-Pat