Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 16891
APM/battery applet crashes panel due to kernel/BIOS issues
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:58 EDT
Dell I5000e ATI M3 video chip. XFree86-4.0.1-0.45 r128 driver 1 system has 15" LCD SXGA+ 1400x1050 1 system has 15" LCD SXGA 1024x768 Gnome panel applet blinks 5 times & then dies (is non-existant) when gnome starts.
Need more clarification: You have this under applets (which are small programs that run within the Panel). Do you mean to have this under gnome-core (which contains the Panel itesef)? Which is crashing the Panel or an applet on the Panel. I doubt this is an issue with the video card so please tell me if this is a fresh install, or an upgrade. If you do not care about the configuration of the Panel try removing ~/.gnome/panel.d and restarting.
It is the panel itself that is dying. Moving to gnome-core. This is on a fresh install + XFree86-4.0.1-0.45.i386.rpm & Xconfigurator-4.4.1- 1.i386.rpm
OK the blinking is the default number of times that the panel is restarted in the gnome session - try logging out, going to a virtual terminal removing all of ~/.gnome and logging back in. Any change? Does it work? No?
Did the above. Panel still dies. Did seem to blink several more times than before.
OK - assigning bug - if you could run $strace panel from a terminal and attach the output here
Daniel, can you log in "Safe Mode" and try running `panel`, and let me know what it says. Thanks
FYI, we got private mail from Dell; the panel/battery_applet seems to be oopsing the kernel when checking battery status, and it seems that it may actually be a BIOS bug in the affected machines.
Panel may be crashing due to APM/battery status applet. Attaching files for tacking purposes. Will move to appropriate component as well.
Created attachment 2978 [details] dmesg
Created attachment 2979 [details] messages
Created attachment 2980 [details] meminfo
*** Bug 20502 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 18113 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Change summary
The general feeling seems to be that it is the kernel that is crashing due to hardware/BIOS bugs, and any fix in gnome-core would penalize users with working laptops. I'm reassigning this to the kernel component - if this problem is fixable there, that's great, otherwise the kernel guy will probably want to close with WONTFIX.