On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 11:13:14PM EST, John Jason Jordan wrote: > On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:10:06 -0500 > Rob Owens <[email protected]> dijo: > > > On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 01:14:23PM -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote:
[..] I just noticed this thread, so please ignore if you have already been through this. > Tony suggested polluting my new user alter ego with the gnome > configuration files from my regular self. I started by just > renaming .gconf, .gnome2 and .gnome2_private, then logging out and back > in again as myself. There was no change - metacity and gnome-panel > still did not start. To be on the safe side, rather than logging out and back in again, you should have rebooted. We don't know if gnome keeps a copy of the contents of these files (or part thereof) in storage across logins. The heavier desktop environments like to keep stuff around so they can come back up faster than the competition. > Yet they do start for my new user alter ego. So I used Tony's > suggestion and copied my original .gconf, .gnome2 and .gnome2_private > files to the new user, then logged in as the new user. The new user > still had metacity and gnome-panel. > > Conclusion: The problem is somewhere in my configuration files, but > not in .gconf, .gnome2 or .gnome2_private. Since you write that you logged out and logged back in, I assume that you were in gnome when you renamed the files. Or did you su to root under your test user, rename the files and then logged out and logged back in as yourself? In any case, when you logged back in as yourself, the three directories had been recreated, right? If you did the renaming under your own user, how do we know gnome had not recreated these directories when you logged out, possibly using some of the stuff you had in memory to populate them - rather than recreated them from scratch when you logged back in? Even if you did it from another user, how do we know gnome did not keep configuration data from your last session around and used that to recreate your config files? Whatever the case, you may want to boot into Squeeze, log in as another user, su to root, rename the gnome/gconf stuff in your regular user's home directory and log back in as yourself - or do the renaming off of another system if you have one available on this box. > Logged in as myself and having started metacity and gnome-panel > manually from the terminal, I reinstalled gnome-panel and metacity and > all their libraries and dependencies with Synaptic. No joy. Which tends to suggest that the problem is indeed with your config files. Maybe, maybe not.. but that's definitely the first place to look. > I have spend hours googling trying to figure out where exactly > metacity and gnome-panel start after the login window. Google's usefulness in this respect is directly related to how closely and 'exclusively' your keywords match the problem. Maybe this has already been suggested by somebody else, but I would check the contents of a file called ~/.xsession-errors and look for suspicious messages relative to 'metacity' or 'gnome-panel'. Since you have at test user that does not have the problem, you could display that user's .xsession-errors side by side with yours and see if you can spot any useful differences. If there are any, the messages may be too cryptic to draw conclusions, but they may provide something that you can use to google for a solution. Large programs such as gnome usually have a searchable bug-tracking system. If google does not provide anything conclusive, or too many hits, it may be worth taking a look. http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ I didn't see anything that looked clearly related to your problem, but sometimes while looking at currently open bugs, you may run into one that reminds you of something that you saw and either had forgotten, or thought might not be relevant, and that might put you on the right track. > They must be started by a script, a config file, or something. But > exactly how must be a state secret. Did you check if they were actually running? $ ps -Alf | grep -i metacity $ ps -Alf | grep -i gnome-panel > Still trying to figure out how to fix the problem. > > I could wipe out testing and reinstall, but this is the second time I > have installed it and exactly the same thing happened last time. If I > reinstall probably the same thing will happen again. s/probably/certainly/ Actually, there are over 28,000 hits in google with keywords 'gnome panel disappeared' and though they are mostly for ubuntu, this might be the same issue, since my understanding is that ubuntu is pretty much a rehash of debian testing with additional updates and cosmetics (?) > Either I have to get to the bottom of it or I have to give up on > Squeeze. Absolutely. > I don't mind working around the occasional bug, but you can't do much > without a window manager and a panel. Please note, that I haven't been near gnome in 3-4 years and only used it for a few weeks at the time, but oddly enough, I do remember having lost icons, maybe even the panel at some point. CJ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
