I recently installed Ubuntu 8.10 on an older machines. The idea was to show people that Linux could be reasonably friendly and run on their older hardware. I was surprised to find that many common utilities and application were not installed(e.g., vim. gvim, nfs, smbfs ). This simply required some work on my part, as well as customized /etc/rc.local, customized ~.bash_profile, etc. What I cannot figure out is why gdm will not save the current desktop environment (running applications) even though I set this true for sessions in the configuration. I'm not all that familiar with Gnome (I use KDE on my other Linux systems) so I don't know if this a Gnome or Ubuntu problem.

Note, the computer worked just fine on OpenSuse 10.3 and even OpenSuse 11.1 (albeit slow due to the older graphics card).

Try running gnome-session-save manually to see if that works. You can use the --logout or --shutdown-dialog to end the session. This should work from the sessions dialog, but there may be something preventing it form working there.

I tried that when I checked to see if the automatic was set. I have shut down the session using shutdown (I assume this is 'shutdown -h now')and ending the user's session (log out). If I knew where and how the current session was saved (e.g., a file like KDE) or where the session criteria were kept, I would either edit the values or at least monitor them with sar or some other utility. Since Ubuntu seems to have no real concept of run levels in the SVID context, I cannot see how to say boot to RL3 and than telinit 5 to see what is happening when gdm is invoked and shuts down (telinit 3 from the command line when the RL is 5).

The session information should be saved to ~/.gnome2/session if I recall correctly.

In openSUSE 11.1, they included GNOME 2.24 which has a rewritten and not yet functional session manager. But in 10.3 it should have the old GNOME which supports session restoring.