GDM Wierdness

Rebooted my desktop for the first time in a while (needed to change a light fitting so had to turn off the electric). When it came back up, GDM had reverted to the Circles GNOME theme as opposed to the usual Ubuntu Human. I’ve noticed before that, whilst shutting down, GDM flicks briefly to the Circles theme before shutting down but I’ve never got round to investigating further.

Previously I’d thought that I perhaps had 2 instances of GDM running. That doesn’t look like it is the case though, as I can’t spot any extra processes running on that machine compared with my laptop. Both are running Gutsy. Rather, I think it may be due to the fact that you can select multiple themes simultaneously in the theme chooser and after a reboot GDM has reverted to the first in the list. I’ve yet to confirm it though. Why would you need/want to select multiple themes, anyway?

My second problem was seemingly caused by a conflict between GDM and GNOME Power Manager’s GConf settings. I usually remove the “Shutdown”, “Reboot”, “Hibernate” and “Suspend” buttons from the logout dialog to prevent other members of the family shutting down my desktop – as it also doubles up as a server and besides, it just dies if you try to suspend/hibernate it. The first time you try to logout, only the required buttons show (Logout, Lock and Switch User), however, if you cancel and hit the logout button again, the dialog now has the unwanted Suspend and Hibernate options.

Previously I’ve removed the unwanted options by specifying:

AllowLogoutActions=

in /etc/gdm/gdm.conf. It seems that now, whilst this removes the buttons from the initial login screen, it doesn’t do so from the user’s logout dialog, at least not totally. In order to do that, you also need to unset the can_hibernate and can_suspend GConf keys in /apps/gnome-power-manager/general