Subject: bug#27264: gnome-shell-3.24.2 consistently dies during initialization

From: Leo Famulari <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2017 13:45:41 -0400

On Thu, Jun 08, 2017 at 07:29:06PM +0200, Catonano wrote:
> I'd love to help with testing the Gnome desktop
> 
> The reason why I abstain is because if the desktop environment turns out to
> be broken, like in this case,  I wouldn't know how to work around that

In general, you can always do a hard reboot and select an earlier GuixSD
generation from the GRUB menu if something goes wrong. It's not great to
do a hard reboot, but contemporary filesystems like ext4 tend to handle
it well enough.

> I'm lost in the command line, I'm not even sure I could manage to access
> the so called consoles or that I could open an alternative desktop
> environment
> 
> If I had a spare computer I would use that.
> 
> Unless using a qemu based virtual machine is a good enough solution
>
> If it is, then here I am

I think QEMU is a fine test environment for GNOME as long as you can use
the Kernel-based Virtual Machine in QEMU, which allows the VM to run at
near-native speed. When starting QEMU you'd pass '-enable-kvm'. Older
hardware may not offer KVM, unfortunately.

> Send me an email, indicate me a branch and I'll test it

Thanks, I'll keep you in mind :)