gnome-panel as a fallback

[Bryce Harrington]

On Mon, Jun 06, 2011 at 09:46:51AM +0200, Didier Roche wrote:
> > I'd like to know if Unity 2D will also be used for for FailsafeX sessions.
> 
> Not sure about that one as different people means different things about
> "FailsafeX" sessions. if it's session without 3D acceleration, right,
> that's what is already the case in oneiric. FailsafeX as "no driver has
> been able to be loaded/X can't start (bulletproof X), that's more a
> question for the Xorg guys :)

A session without 3D I wouldn't call 'Failsafe-X', that's more of a "2D
fallback session" I suppose.

Failsafe-X traditionally has been a completely trimmed down X session
with no window manager at all, that runs with the vesa driver, and
displays a single application which conceptually you'd use to analyze or
fix X problems that prevent you from getting into a regular X session.
Originally it was envisioned as a way to redo your xorg.conf in case
something in the config was wrong, but xorg.conf-related problems are
quite rare now.

Btw, I'm trying to get away from the term 'Bulletproof-X' and use
'Failsafe-X' instead.  I think the latter term sets expectations a bit
more realistically.  ;-)

Going forward, I'm open to changing around the design a bit of
Failsafe-X to make it more relevant to the types of boot-time graphics
problems people experience these days (i.e. kernel lockups in drm and
blank-screen-on-boot problems).  It would be nice to have a bit more
window management included (window decorations at least), but there can
be advantages to keeping the session functionality to a bare minimum.

Ultimately, it needs to be very robust, and needs to not take much
ongoing maintenance or testing effort, since it's all an error handling
mechanism that needs to work in less than ideal circumstances.

Bryce