eighty-twenty

I’m running Debian testing, with gnome-flashback. At present, it has installed gnome-flashback 3.20.2-1 alongside gnome-settings-daemon 3.21.90-2.

Symptoms

By default, there are some problems:

• The “Displays” section of the config tool says only “Could not get screen information”. This prevents GUI access to a lot of functionality, including arrangement of multiple monitors.

• The brightness adjustment keys do not work.

The root of the problem is that the DBus interface org.gnome.Mutter.DisplayConfig changed between GNOME 3.20 and GNOME 3.21; the GetResources method produces an additional result in 3.21 that is not present in 3.20’s version of the same interface.¹

If you see messages similar to the following from stderr of gnome-settings-daemon at startup, you are suffering from this problem too:

(gnome-settings-daemon:7149): power-plugin-WARNING **: Could not create GnomeRRScreen: Method 'GetResources' returned type '(ua(uxiiiiiuaua{sv})a(uxiausauaua{sv})a(uxuud)ii)', but expected '(ua(uxiiiiiuaua{sv})a(uxiausauaua{sv})a(uxuudu)ii)'
(gnome-settings-daemon:7149): wacom-plugin-WARNING **: Failed to create GnomeRRScreen: Method 'GetResources' returned type '(ua(uxiiiiiuaua{sv})a(uxiausauaua{sv})a(uxuud)ii)', but expected '(ua(uxiiiiiuaua{sv})a(uxiausauaua{sv})a(uxuudu)ii)'
(gnome-settings-daemon:7149): color-plugin-WARNING **: failed to get screens: Method 'GetResources' returned type '(ua(uxiiiiiuaua{sv})a(uxiausauaua{sv})a(uxuud)ii)', but expected '(ua(uxiiiiiuaua{sv})a(uxiausauaua{sv})a(uxuudu)ii)'
(gnome-settings-daemon:7149): common-plugin-WARNING **: Failed to construct RR screen: Method 'GetResources' returned type '(ua(uxiiiiiuaua{sv})a(uxiausauaua{sv})a(uxuud)ii)', but expected '(ua(uxiiiiiuaua{sv})a(uxiausauaua{sv})a(uxuudu)ii)'

Fixing the problem

To fix the problem, I patched and rebuilt gnome-flashback with these commands:

sudo apt-get build-dep gnome-flashback
apt-get source gnome-flashback
wget "https://eighty-twenty.org/files/gnome-flashback-hack-20160918.patch"
patch -p0 < gnome-flashback-hack-20160918.patch
(cd gnome-flashback-3.20.2; fakeroot ./debian/rules binary)

After these steps, you should have a new gnome-flashback binary, gnome-flashback-3.20.2/gnome-flashback/gnome-flashback. You can now move the existing one out of the way and install it:

sudo mv /usr/bin/gnome-flashback /usr/bin/gnome-flashback-AS-INSTALLED
sudo cp gnome-flashback-3.20.2/gnome-flashback/gnome-flashback /usr/bin
sudo chown root:root /usr/bin/gnome-flashback

Now restart both gnome-flashback and gnome-settings-daemon. (You should arrange for gnome-flashback to be started after gnome-settings-daemon.)

You should no longer have the stderr output complaining about the RR screen DBus signatures, and both the “Displays” section of the config tool and the brightness keys should work.