login fails; freezes after selecting user from the face browser

Here's what seems to be the relevant log segment.

It seems that GDM itself is the cause. Whenever it updates the /var/cache/gdm/$user/dmrc, it adds some useless utf8 marker to the locale e.g. my locale is fi_FI.UTF-8 which gets mingled into fi_FI.UTF-8.utf8 and that is what prevents the login from taking place. Editing that dmrc from vcons to remove the extraneous .utf8 components fixed the GDM login process for good.

Hi Martin-Éric,

Thanks for reporting this issue. I don't think it's a GDM bug, though, but the problem seems to be caused by the incorrect LANGUAGE value "fi_FI.UTF-8". You are not expected to use a complete locale name to denote a language in the LANGUAGE priority list, and neither ".utf8" nor ".UTF-8" shall be included.
http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/manual/gettext/The-LANGUAGE-variable.html

The latest released GDM version (2.32.0-0ubuntu7) would not have stopped you from logging in, but that's actually a coincidence. No program will protect you fully from mistakes when you edit config files manually. ;-)

Sorry, you've got that one wrong. I never needed to manually edit anything until this issue came up.

Really? My apologies if I was too hasty, but when I saw "ProcEnviron: LANGUAGE=fi_FI.utf8" in the description above, I assumed that you have something like:

export LANGUAGE="fi_FI.utf8"

in ~/.profile, and it shouldn't be possible that language-selector wrote that line.

Anyway, could you please try the latest development packages of GDM and language-selector at https://launchpad.net/~gunnarhj/+archive/language-menus, and let us know if the problem you reported persists?

The problem is gone since I have edited out the extraneous .utf8 that has been appended by GDM. My current dmrc looks like:

[Desktop]
Session=gnome
Language=fi_FI.UTF-8
Layout=fi
Langlist=fi_FI.UTF-8:fi
LCMess=fi_FI.UTF-8

... and it works.

I have never used any language selector since the system defaults to the correct language (Finnish) for me.

I see. However, I can't reproduce the behavior you described without manual editing, so there is really nothing to do. Closing the bug again.