Bug 1282874

Summary:	GNOME Shell crashes after su
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Cedric Sodhi <manday>
Component:	systemd	Assignee:	systemd-maint
Status:	CLOSED WORKSFORME	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	high	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	23	CC:	johannbg, jsynacek, lnykryn, msekleta, s, systemd-maint, zbyszek
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Last Closed:	2015-11-18 08:48:38 UTC	Type:	Bug
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Cedric Sodhi 2015-11-17 17:05:52 UTC

I encountered a bug described here [1] by Gawain Lynch. I will quote the content of that page:

>I hit a rather interesting 'feature' in systemd recently where doing an ` su - 
` and then running a GUI application before switching back and executing one as your normal user will cause GNOME shell to lock-up.
>
> Examining /var/log/messages I found a series of messages similar to:
>
> gnome-session[NNNN]: CRITICAL: unable to create file '/run/user/1000/dconf/user': 
> Permission denied. dconf will not work properly.
>
> [...]
>
> What in effect happens, is that the file /run/user/1000/dconf/user becomes owned by the root user
> [...]
> Fortunately the workaround is quite easy. Simply add this to the root users .bash_profile :
>
> export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/0

[1] http://gawainlynch.com/gnome-shell-crashes-after-su

Comment 1 Jan Synacek 2015-11-18 08:48:38 UTC

Sorry, but random rants from the Internet are not the way to file bug reports.

Anyway, I can't reproduce this.

1) su -
2) gedit
3) exit
4) gedit

Nothing locks up, things work as expected.

Comment 2 Cedric Sodhi 2015-11-18 09:25:54 UTC

When I said "I encountered" I meant that I actually experienced that bug myself, several times. It's only that the cited page (which I found searching for "/run/user/1000/dconf/user Permission denied" and "systemd" on Google) seems to give a reasonable explanation, though I can not yet confirm with absolute certainty that the workarround does the trick.

To my knowledge, to reproduce this will have to follow a login/boot, so that no other GTK (dconf?) application ran before? I will try in more detail when I have time, in the meantime someone else may want to try.