Gnome 3 - GDM

[onevision]

So I have a box I just installed Gentoo on from scratch, set to use systemd and Gnome 3. I've upgraded my systems at home from Gnome 2 and openRC to Gnome 3 and systemd, so I'm not completely unfamiliar with some of the issues that can arise. I'm a little lost as to what to look at with this problem however, and it's most likely something small that I'm missing or overlooking.

So currently I have GDM disabled, so I can manually start it if I like, which is necessary since when GDM runs it just produces a blank black screen with no cursor or mouse cross hairs. If I login as a regular user and just use 'startx' to start my session, it gives me me an analog clock and 3 xterm windows - but not the Gnome desktop. If I enter 'gnome-control-center', a new window pops up just like you'd expect with all the system settings options - like normal. So why am I getting no desktop and why is GDM choking completely?

I've looked at the error logs, and Xorg.0.log looks good with no failures. The only error I'm able to find is in /var/log/gdm/:0.log, which states:
(EE)
Fatal server error:
(EE) Server is already active for display 0
If this server is no longer running, remove /tmp/.X0-lock and start again
(EE)

No such file exists, nor any other file in /tmp, but when I start the GDM service I get nothing. Given time it will switch to a blank light blue screen, and given more time will switch back to black. Sometimes it will even have a large underscore cursor blinking, although you can't type anything or have any effect on it. When in this state, I can't exit or shutdown the GDM service, so my only recourse is a 3 finger salute to reboot the system. I'm sure this is just me missing something blindingly obvious, although I can't seem to find it. Could someone point me in the right direction? Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.

-Davey

[TomWij]

[onevision]

Exactly, and I suppose in a very simple way my X server is running - it's just not Gnome 3, so much as it's a super basic window manager of some sort. Feels almost like something necessary isn't installed, although I don't know what that would be. The Xorg.0.log file looks perfect with the correct device driver being used (ATI fglrx driver) and evdev picks up all the other devices just fine. No errors of any kind, which I suppose makes sense, as nothing is really failing - so much as just not working as expected. lol I also used 'equery check gdm' and 'equery check gnome' to verify that at least both of those packages were installed correctly, which they look good. Not sure what else to really check?

-Davey

[TomWij]

Check `journalctl -rb` right after you've tried to get into GNOME; the newest messages will be at the top and errors will be in red, feel free to redirect it to a file and share it with us.

[onevision]

I of course couldn't check using 'journalctl -rb' when trying to run GDM, due to being locked in the WM state, but was able to use it when using 'startx'. It did return some interesting information, although I'm not entirely sure what it encompasses:

Failed to open private bus connection:

Not sure what that all means, but I did also find an entry in dmesg that I either overlooked before, or it wasn't present, which is:

systemd-udevd[1636]: Error calling EVIOCSKEYCODE: Invalid argument

I'm not sure, but I believe that may just be a non-volatile keyboard key mapping failure - especially since I'm using a keyboard with many extra keys.

-Davey

[onevision]

So while I did previously make sure everything was installed and reverse dependencies checked good, I decided to do a sync with portage and update packages (this would be since I installed it a week or so ago, at which point I also did it then). It updated like 40 packages, most of which were unrelated to this problem I've been having. Apparently one of the packages updated did the trick however, as now I can start up GDM and everything works beautifully. I did notice that using 'startx' still does not start up Gnome for me, but this is good enough for me.

-Davey