Can't launch GNOME

[wsbankenstein]

wayland gnome sessions just refuse to launch
excerpt from journalctl

the key line in there may be

Jan 19 13:57:57 thinkenstein gnome-session-service[548]: Could not get session id for session. Check that logind is properly installed and pam_systemd is getting used at login.

considering the reason for the service fail is a session being looked for and not found
(logind is indeed working properly)

ly also suffers from this problem, generally GNOME doesn't like being launched by anything other than gdm, i think it's something to do with dbus?

[grialion]

Works on my machine.
I'm on Void Linux, lidm v1.2.3 (latest stable release).
Just installed gnome-core package and selected wayland: GNOME
X.org sessions will get merged next stable release, for now please stick to Wayland.

This is my GNOME.desktop entry:

Comment=This session logs you into GNOME
Exec=/usr/bin/gnome-session
TryExec=/usr/bin/gnome-session
Type=Application

Does manually launching gnome-session work for you?

[wsbankenstein]

nope :)

Arch Linux, gnome installed via archinstall (likely the gnome package group but i don't know for sure), lidm compiled locally from git

manually launching gnome-session from tty produces the same result as launching it through lidm, i.e. nothing

(i'm assuming gnome is picky about systemd/dbus things, which would explain it working on void)

oh also, it's a Wayland session i'm trying to run

[javalsai]

(i'm assuming gnome is picky about systemd/dbus things, which would explain it working on void)

Oooooooooooooh, didn't gnome add a hard dependency on systemd lately???? Can still be compiled out but would explain why it's much more picky on a proper dbus setup.

[javalsai]

manually launching gnome-session from tty produces the same result as launching it through lidm, i.e. nothing

Hmmm, but the error help message does only ask for logind and pam_systemd. Is there any systemd mention in /etc/pam.d/login??

Still the agetty login should provide both of those.

[javalsai]

I'll mark this as question until we figure out what gnome is missing.

[wsbankenstein]

/etc/pam.d/login calls /etc/pam.d/system-local-login which calls /etc/pam.d/system-login which contains the following line:

-session   optional   pam_systemd.so

where the dash in front means "disable logging if this library doesn't get loaded"
i suppose that would explain why the tty output when i try to launch gnome is... a single line, namely:

** Message: 16:14:45.514: Starting GNOME session target: gnome-session-wayland@gnome.target

[grialion]

Please try the master branch of lidm (beware that it installs now to a different location, so remove the leftover files from the old install first).
It now loads the environment list from PAM, which should fix issues like this.
About you not being able to launch it from the TTY, try launching with gnome-shell --display-server (and --wayland, if you don't explicitly specify XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland, which lidm will do for you).
CORRECTION: you'll need to launch it with gnome-shell and not gnome-session.

If this is confirmed working, just edit the .desktop file in the wayland-sessions directory to include this argument.

[javalsai]

It now loads the environment list from PAM

Something changed and I can't even get XDG_RUNTIME_DIR in old commits it was supposed to work in smh.

[javalsai]

This could have been fixed after #114, can you check if it still fails?

[wsbankenstein]

nope, exact same results. one line in tty and then back to lidm

@grialion launching gnome-shell from the tty works, in fact when gnome first refused to launch i wrote a .desktop file to do that (and put it in /usr/local/, which is how i discovered that lidm didn't look at /usr/local/).

however, gnome-shell as a wayland display server isn't the same as a proper gnome session:

• gnome's session management doesn't work so the only way to exit the session is to kill gnome-shell
• gnome's settings app doesn't open (gnome-control-center[10422]: Running gnome-control-center is only supported under GNOME and Unity, exiting)
• custom keyboard shortcuts don't work

Feb 08 17:50:28 bankenstein-desktop systemd[732]: Started GNOME Session Manager (session: gnome).
Feb 08 17:50:28 bankenstein-desktop gnome-shell[2652]: Running GNOME Shell (using mutter 49.3) as a Wayland display server
Feb 08 17:50:28 bankenstein-desktop gnome-shell[2652]: Failed to setup: Failed to find any matching session
Feb 08 17:50:28 bankenstein-desktop systemd[732]: org.gnome.Shell@wayland.service: Failed with result 'protocol'

so yes, gnome-shell --display-server=wayland is a solution, but not a very good one