GNOME 3.4 changing remembered automount and display settings

Question

Here's an interesting observation.
My setup is the following: notebook computer + external display.
2 user accounts A and B and I'm using GNOME 3.4 in fall-back mode.
I think it's important to know, account A was created before I bought external display and started using it as a main one. Account B was created when I already used external display.
So, I use only external display at 1920x1200 resolution:
xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1200, maximum 8192 x 8192
VGA-0 connected 1920x1200+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 518mm x 324mm
   1920x1200      60.0*+
   1920x1080      60.0 
   1600x1200      60.0 
   1680x1050      60.0 
   1280x1024      60.0 
   1280x960       60.0 
   1024x768       60.0 
   800x600        60.3 
   640x480        60.0 
   720x400        70.1 
LVDS connected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
   1280x800       60.0 +
   1280x720       59.9 
   1152x768       59.8 
   1024x768       59.9 
   800x600        59.9 
   848x480        59.7 
   720x480        59.7 
   640x480        59.4
I also have a bunch of external USB drives connected to this notebook computer and they get automounted with the help of udisks2 helper:
mount |grep udis
/dev/sdb1 on /run/media/A/9d244934-d9fa-4a8e-8dd7-5c595f5518cf type ext2 (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uhelper=udisks2)
So, I boot my Arch Linux, external display is connected and notebook is configured (by clicking Fn+Display key to choose to output video signal to external display only), I see GDM. So far so good, only external display is used, choosing automatically correct native resolution of 1920x1200.
I enter user account password in GDM, GNOME starts loading.
What happens for user A is that:
- notebook's display gets lit up, showing video output in its native resolution of 1280x800
- external display duplicates the video output apparently in this 1280x800 resolution (because the image is kind of zoomed and unscaled, blurred: because it's not a native resolution)
- I have to click Fn+Display key to switch available modes and choose one when only external display is used. When it's done, native resolution of 1920x1200 is chosen for external display and all is good.
However, when I resume from sleep notebook when logged in as user A, even though the external display is used in native resolution, just as it's supposed to be, I can see that notebook's screen is glowing, but not showing any video output. I need then to turn off power for it pushing Fn+Sun (an icon depicting sun with one half filled, and the other empty signifying on/off modes) .
The USB disks. When GNOME is loaded for user A I can see in Places my drives, but I have to manually click them to get them mounted. When resuming from sleep, I have to do it again. They're automatically detected, but aren't mounted.
All of that shouldn't be normally happening. Why?
Because for user B none of that is true.
External display works as expected on GNOME's start, when resuming from sleep under user B notebook's screen never isn't glowing. USB disks are automounted when user session is loaded, or OS is resumed from sleep.
Obviously, I want the same for user A. But there aren't really any settings to tweak, at least none that I know of or could find myself.
It would seem that something like session settings are different for these two user accounts, but I know really little about session management in GNOME. Might be something else.
I would appreciate it if you shared your insights or ideas as to how to make user A GNOME session to behave much like user B's in respect to displays and mounting of external USB drives.
Last edited by xCrucialDudex (2012-10-13 07:56:41)

Answer 1

I have the same problem as you. I can't access the system settings nor the online accounts thing. I guess we will have to wait till the next patch or something. Here is the bug report.