On 10/08/2012 09:56 PM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote: > ---------------- > Oh no! Something has gone wrong. > A problem has occured and the system can't recover. > Please log out and try again. > [Log Out] > ---------------- [...] > I find that if i add the "Print Server" task from tasksel, log out, > and then log back in again, i don't get this mysterious message.
i've narrowed this down further. If the cups service isn't running when
the user logs in, they get this unhelpful error message and are
prevented from doing anything else in their login.
This seems like an dangerous bug in gnome -- if the CUPS service is
stopped (for whatever reason, including it not being installed, or
having crashed, or simply being), then no gnome login is possible.
... a bit more digging around ...
i find the same crash even if cups is running, as long as
/var/run/cups/cups.sock is not present or just isn't accessible to the user.
This is pretty clearly an unacceptable failure mode for a graphical
environment used by regular people. If CUPS crashes or refuses to
respond, the appropriate thing to do is to disable printing. It is not
appropriate to disable the rest of the entire desktop environment.
--dkg
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