Description of problem: Suddenly greeter application has decided to crash, and there is no way how to disable endless loop. Work on VC is hard and anoying because of dialog with OK button. Do you think that after 6 attempts it suddenly starts? (suddenly something fixes itself) Unfortunatelly after 2 minute timeut starts torment again ... After 10 minuts of described torture a new unexperienced user decides to delete Fedora 8 from his hard drive because of this. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gdm-2.20.2-2.fc8 How reproducible: always At least disable loop button is fix for the problem.
Created attachment 289732 [details] screenShot
Created attachment 289733 [details] No, no I don't want to click 6-times OK button again! A disable button wanted.
/sbin/init 3 may help somewhat. fwiw, in F-9, we're getting rid of the curses thing entirely. why is gdm crashing though? can you attach /var/log/messages ?
I would like to attach mentioned log file, but unfortunatelly vmware image with Fedora 8 went to hell yesteday ... I know (because I know from past), `/sbin/init 3` is solution for the situation, but try to imagine a nervous Linux beginner without google and without time, how can he guess that the runlevel change stops endless loop ... My bug report was actually about wrong logical flow without end. Endless loop without "special" button isn't good solution as reaction on unrecoverable situation.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=289733 At least similar help sentence expected: "To fix your problem change runlevel to 3 `/sbin/init 3`, back to graphics environment change the runlevel to 5 `/sbin/init 5`.
We're going to get rid of the text mode dialogs entirely in F9. Probably not going to change anything in F8 (changing strings would require getting translations, etc). Unfortunately, for a lot of users, even learning about `/sbin/init 3' won't be enough to recover the system. It's a pretty hard problem (No doubt the looping is silly though, we've taken that out for F9).