~/.profile stomps on /etc/gdm/Xsession $1 (session name)
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| gdm (Ubuntu) |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
We were tracking a bug where customizations to a user's .profile would prevent them from logging in correctly. Initially we got a zenity warning dialogue "Xsession: unable to launch "noglob" X session --- "noglob" not found; falling back to default session."
Then, I determined that the users were unable to log into KDE, they could only log into gnome.
The answer turns out to be that /etc/gdm/Xsession relies on $1 containing the users' chosen session ('', '/usr/bin/
My workaround was to do the following in lines 105-114 of /etc/gdm/Xsession:
---
PREVIOUSPARAM=$1
# First read /etc/profile and .profile
test -f /etc/profile && . /etc/profile
test -f "$HOME/.profile" && . "$HOME/.profile"
# Second read /etc/xprofile and .xprofile for X specific setup
test -f /etc/xprofile && . /etc/xprofile
test -f "$HOME/.xprofile" && . "$HOME/.xprofile"
if [ -n $PREVIOUSPARAM ] ; then set $PREVIOUSPARAM ; fi
---
But a general solution of using a named parameter for the session instead of $1 would probably work better, and be less prone to side-effects. Thanks, -Daniel
| Paul Holcomb (noptys) wrote | #1 |
| Kees Cook (kees) wrote | #2 |
| Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote | #3 |
I'm having a problem with ~/.profile and ~/.xprofile as well....
A user's ~/.profile or ~/.xprofile can set aliases or modify paths and
affect further execution of Xsession.
example:
--in run_parts() --
for F in $(ls $1); do
if expr "$F" : '[[:alnum:]_-]\+$' > /dev/null 2>&1; then
if [ -f "$1/$F" ]; then
echo "$1/$F"
--
but if a user has set in their ~/.profile
alias ls='ls -CF'
then run_parts() breaks.
In my example, gnome-power-manager complained about the dbus service because /etc/X11/
I propose moving the the ~/.profile and ~/.xprofile stanza later in
the script. Although a better solution might be to path-qualify all
the shell commands.
I've attached the patch for the change that worked for me.