Hi.
I've been troubleshooting a weird problem with X2Go for a while, when connecting to Gnome sessions in virtual machines the top and bottom panels are displayed but the desktop/background never shows up and the mouse pointer never stops spinning. It's like the Gnome session startup reaches 99% and then just waits forever for something.
It turns out it's related to VMWare Tools. I use VMWare Hypervisor (ESXi) 5, I can't say if the problem started when I upgraded from ESXi 4 to 5, but it's fairly recent.
I discovered that there are two instances of vmtoolsd running, the process list looks something like this when the X2Go session reaches "wait forever" state:
root@labblinux:~# ps auxw | grep vmware dali 12906 1.4 1.4 174604 14588 ? S 18:47 0:00 /usr/lib/vmware-tools/sbin64/vmtoolsd -n vmusr dali 12956 1.4 0.3 174604 3680 ? S 18:47 0:00 /usr/lib/vmware-tools/sbin64/vmtoolsd -n vmusr root 12971 0.0 0.0 7556 860 pts/0 S+ 18:47 0:00 grep vmware
If I "kill -1 12906" the other vmtoolsd (12956) dies(!):
root@labblinux:~# kill -1 12906 root@labblinux:~# ps auxw | grep vmware dali 12906 0.4 1.4 174604 14616 ? S 18:47 0:00 /usr/lib/vmware-tools/sbin64/vmtoolsd -n vmusr root 13041 0.0 0.0 7556 860 pts/0 S+ 18:48 0:00 grep vmware
Simultaneously the X2Go/Gnome session startup successfully finishes.
Starting a Gnome session locally on the virtual machine console successfully finishes. I've tried using xrdp instead of X2Go and had no problems starting sessions, both using X11rdp and X11vnc on the server side. There's only one vmtoolsd running unless it's a X2Go session.
I've unsuccessfully tried to figure out what the root cause is. It seems related to X2Go login/startup, somehow vmtoolsd starts twice and there's a conflict blocking Gnome startup.
I did however find a workaround; uninstall VMWare Tools and install the open-vm-tools package from the Debian repository (contrib has to be added). No problems with X2Go so far and VMWare seems happy with the open source tools (Shutdown/Restart Guest is available in vSphere Client).
I posted this to both x2go-user and x2go-dev for informational purposes. Maybe a wiki page would be the best place for this info? The wiki is however in a sad state and needs some serious cleanup. I personally don't think the template used is aesthetically pleasing and would prefer the default template or Arctic template which I've used extensively in all my DokuWiki installs.
Cheers, Daniel