I don't even know how to search this one out. My grandson got a little free time on my login screen. When I got back I found the right half of the screen was covered with a cascade of zoomed copies of the regular login display. Each layer of the cascade larger that the previous as one moved right across the screen. When I reboot it is still there. I have tried various hotkey combinations in the hopes that I could change this, but with no result. I have looked for files which might have such a pattern saved. I found a file /usr/share/gnome-session/session-properties.ui with a promising name and inside was a series of 'child' entries, but removing all but the first child entry changed nothing. Where should I search? or better yet do you know what is going on, and how to fix it? Functionally I am not handicapped. I can still use the login, but the appearance annoys me, and not understanding what is going on also annoys me.

Is one over the other? Could it be an april fools joke where you are actually looking at a graphic?

Look at the /etc/inittab file and the results of `dsmesg'. Also log into a virtual terminal and see what processes are running. Perhaps something is being called recursively.

I left the login screen just for a moment, and my grandson had access. He loves to play with the keyboard with multiple keys down and sometimes held down if he sees an interesting visual effect. I could not find a file named 'inittab' using sudo find in the root folder. The system claimed it did not recognize the command 'dsmesg' with or without sudo.

That should be dmesg.

I don't use Gnome (or gdm), but if the behaviour persists over reboots
it surely MUST be stored in some file; if you can pin-point the time
& date at which your grandson would have done the keyboard magic, maybe
you can use find to hunt the culprit down?


E.g.: the boy did the change roughly 27h and 10 minutes ago, with a
window of opportunity of 15 minutes ...
Of course, I can't guarrantee that GDM doesn't store it's config file(s)
EVERY time it's (re-)invoked ... but then again - that should be easy
to find by looking at a) very recent modified time stamps & files that
belong to the package that holds gdm ...


Cheers,
Tink