Panda3d F14 buildbot + dependencies kills GDM

Installation
1

So it seems that either the Panda3d RPM or one of its dependencies is killing GDM on a Fresh Fedora 14 64 bit install. Took me several days of troubleshooting to come to this conclusion and get to this point of asking for help.

But so that we’re on the same page troubleshooting wise: heres what I’ve done on this install so far:

  1. Install F14-64 Live CD to clean partitions (/boot, /, and /home all are on their own respective partitions; not using LVM, although it really doesn’t matter)

  2. Updated system via yum update; System is now at 2.6.35.10-74.x86_64 for the kernel. Rebooted. Everything is honky dory

  3. Installed rpmfusion repositories and kmod-nvidia drivers; these work fine and great. Everything works just fine after reboot.

  4. Downloaded ‘panda3d-1.7.1-44.fc14.x86_64.rpm’; ran ‘yum localinstall panda3d-1.7.1-44.fc14.x86_64.rpm --nogpgcheck’

Step 3 installed the following dependencies along with panda3d:

fftw2-2.1.5-21.fc14.x86_64
libgfortran-4.5.1-4.fc14.x86_64
atlas-3.8.3-18.fc14.x86_64
opencv-2.1.0-5.fc14.x86_64
librtmp-2.3-2.fc14.x86_64
openal-soft-1.12.854-1.fc14.x86_64
lame-libs-3.98.4-1.fc14.x86_64
libCg-3.0.0007-2.fc14.x86_64
ode-0.11.1-4.fc14.x86_64
mesa-libOSMesa-7.9-5.fc14.x86_64
x264-libs-0.0.0-0.28.20100706gitd058f37.fc14.x86_64
xvidcore-1.2.2-1.fc14.x86_64
libva-freeworld-0.31.1-1.sds4.fc14.x86_64
ffmpeg-libs-0.6-4.20100704svn.fc14.x86_64

Everything installs fine according to yum.

Now nothing else has been installed, not even during the period of time when it was still running as a Live CD. Reboot the pc.

  1. Upon reboot, Fedora boots up fine, goes through all the motions, nothing stands out in the detailed bootup process. Nvidia logo flashes as expected, Machine gets to the point where it goes to a blackscreen with the Gnome ‘hourglass’ mouse tooltip; mouse can move around the screen, but no login prompt whatsoever.

  2. ctrl-alt-f2 to get to console and login as root; investigate both X server logs and gdm logs; X server logs are clean, no issues with X. GDM greeter logs are clean, :0.log looks normal, no errors or issues stand out. However :0-slave.log has the following lines:

gdm-simple-slave[1566]: WARNING: Could not spawn command: Failed to execute child process “/usr/bin/dbus-launch” (Permission denied)

gdm-simple-slave[1566]: WARNING: Unable to launch D-Bus daemon: Failed to execute child process “/usr/bin/dbus-launch” (Permission denied)

gdm-simple-slave[1566]: WARNING: Could not spawn command: Failed to execute child process “/usr/bin/gnome-session” (Permission denied)

gdm-simple-slave[1566]: WARNING: Could not start command ‘/usr/bin/gnome-session --autostart=/usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/’: Failed to execute child process “/usr/bin/gnome-session” (Permission denied)

  1. Run ‘ps axw |grep gdm’ and confirmed that 1566 is the pid of gdm-simple-slave

1566 ? S1 0:00 /usr/libexec/gdm-simple-slave --display-id /org/gnome/DisplayManager/Display1 --force-active-vt

(Oh, if i kill that process it simply restarts with a new pid and the :0-slave.log is updated with the same messages but new pid.)

now does anybody have any clue as to what the hell is going on to mess up GDM? Appears to be a permissions issue, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how, why, or where. I’m on about my 6th iteration of repeating these same steps trying to track down how to fix it, and I’ve come up with nothing. I really really don’t think it has anything to do with the kmod drivers. Those should only really be touching X anyway, and theres nothing here to indicate this is an issue with X; but rather limited to gnome and one of those dependencies that have been installed and/or the panda3d rpm itself.

2

Oh, wow. I can’t really think of anything that Panda3D installs that could affect the X11 installation.

I don’t have a Fedora installation myself, so I can’t easily find out. I guess I could stop releasing Fedora builds for now.

3

Yeah, like I said; fairly certain its not X11 that’s being affected, but just GDM. I mean I have display and everything, just no Gnome login screen… There’s at least gnome tooltips for the mouse loading, so I don’t think there’s an overall problem with Gnome itself, there’s just something somewhere stopping the Gnome login screen and/or modifying the permissions of something to prevent gnome from operating properly.

Honestly I don’t think its the Panda3D rpm itself causing the issue, I was just posting here with the hopes that somebody, anybody has come across this issue before. My next step is to start over with yet another clean install and install each of those dependencies in order one by one, while rebooting after each one to see at what point GDM breaks. Installing KDM and KDE gets me a login screen, but logging in accomplishes nothing, it just resets back to the login screen, so I definitely think somewhere along the lines it goes beyond a GDM/Gnome issue as well. I’ll probably also do a fedora install in virtualbox and see if the result is the same and theres not some crazy weird hardware issue going on as well(probably should have done this already, now that I think of it)

4

Perhaps the Panda3D RPM accidentally changes the permissions of something important, such as /etc or so. You could try running it through rpmlint to see if there are obvious issues.