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richie
Asked: 2012-05-14 02:16:25 +0800 CST

Start gnome-shell from another session/terminal/user

  • 772

sometimes my gnome shell gets a weird bug. What I need to do then is to click e.g Ctrl + Alt + F3 When I am there i can login and then

killall gnome-shell

Then I go back to the first Ctrl + Alt + F1 (what do you call them tty1, tty2, tty3 ... )

back there I can sometimes open a terminal and enter:

gnome-shell

but sometimes it doesn't work, like now, because the browser window has the focus and no other windows has, and I can't start gnome-shell from the browser, so that's why I am asking the question now :) .

The thing that I have tried is to export the display when I am in the tty2 or tty3, not the one with graphics in

export DISPLAY=:0.0
gnome-shell

but I guess that the :0.0 display isn't the main display?, anyway I can at least start the gnome-shell but it results in an error. It is not the can't find an X display error, but another one that has something to do with the top-bar and the extensions.

Does anyone know how to start the gnome-shell from another "tty" thing?

gnome

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Please try 

    $ DISPLAY=:0 gnome-shell

    Also you should take a look at your ~/.xsession-errors, finding out as to why gnome-shell crashed. Maybe you can even do a backtrace and report a bug.

    • 5

  2. When gnome-shell starts behaving oddly you can also do the following.

    1. Switch to another console Ctrl + Alt + F2
    2. login using the same account that's running the desktop
    3. Run the command pkill -HUP gnome-shell

    Once the above kill has taken effect, gnome-shell will automatically restart itself.

    • 2

  3. What are you doing it is not possible anymore in wayland sessions, because with Shell having taken the role of the X server, killing it would kill the entire interface. On the bright side shell now is capable or restarting itself when there's a crash or an hang of some sort.

    • 0