From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98) Description of problem: I installed RH 7.2 with "everything" option. When starting a GNOME session a not-very-pretty dialog box showing GNOME text (arial font) and a small "starting gnome" in the bottom is the only thing that appears. Panel doesn't start, icons don't show etc. I have to kill gnome-session to do anything (return to login box). KDE works fine, WindowMaker works fine, GNOME does not. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. graphical login, choose GNOME session 2. Enter username and password 3. Press OK and gnome-session does nothing. Actual Results: The gnome session does not start (nothing happens) but I can go to a text login and manually kill the gnome-session program. Expected Results: I had expected the GNOME session to start. Additional info: It's a brand new machine with AMD DURON CPU 1 GHz, 512MB RAM, 100 GB harddrive, Matrox Mystique graphics card, Asus A7V-series motherboard.
I've never had a report of this; something is munged. Is the dialog you're talking about the splash screen? does it have an image in it? Anything in .xsession-errors during this?
The dialog has no image, just a plain text saying "GNOME". The .xsession-errors file contains "gnome-upgrade.py: No such file or directory", which might be an important clue. But I installed with "everything" option, so I wonder why. The machine has network configured (default gateway and name servers) but is NOT plugged into the network.
If gnome-upgrade.py isn't there then the install is messed up, or your user account has issues. That file should be in gnome-core and it should be in your PATH; maybe your PATH is wrong? If you don't have gnome-upgrade.py, maybe try reinstalling gnome-core - but I'm worried that whatever problem caused it to be missing will cause other weird stuff as well. You might try "rpm --verify" (see "man rpm") to try and verify the integrity of the install.
Some kind of broken installation, AFAICT. Works here. Will need more info if the report is reopened; the rpm verify output, or other investigation into why gnome-upgrade.py is missing, etc.