Gnome in Fedora 9 Part 1

EricMesa

July 31, 2008 - 3 minutes read - 601 words

First of all, I guess we got all jealous of Ubuntu because we have a startup sound now. There goes signing in with the speakers on late at night or early in the morning. Second, I apparently no longer have any functionality in Gnome. There are no panels, I can’t right-click the background. I can rotate a cube, but that’s about it. Oh, and I can move my mouse around. Time to figure out what went wrong.

Apparently it’s some kind of metacity bullcrap because Gnome with Openbox gets me panels. Also, I’m getting two error boxes that are completely whited out. I’m pretty sure if I could read the error that I’d be able to figure out what was going wrong. Or at least have more information to ask others. I think it’s possible something that’s supposed to load into the panels is causing problems. Now things have locked up. I’m thinking it could possibly be a fight between updatesd and packagekit, but I’m not sure. I think this may be so because when I tried to do something in yum, it said another app was using yum. The IRC was, as usual, not much help. I have something like a 5% success rate there. I rebooted just in case that might clear up the problem with yum. I think I’ll first start with Gnome/Openbox and see if it freezes up again. chmodding 775 my .gnome2 directories improved things somewhat in that now I get some, but now all of my panels. There may be other files with the wrong permissions somehow. Eventually I just do a chmod 775 .* after noticing there were other files with seemingly wrong permissions. I had a promising start when GDM now finally showed my login picture. It hadn’t showed it until now and I hadn’t realized. But still no luck with Gnome.

When I looked in my .xsession-errors file I saw some sabayon errors. Specifically “No profile for user ‘username’ found. Perhaps that’s the true source of the problem? I looked online and sabayon has something to do with profiles for Gnome. So I typed in sabayon and it asked for my root password. Then I created a profile and associated it with my user account. Let’s see if it works now!!!

Nope, looks like that was a different, unrelated problem. So on the advice of someone from the mailing list I installed and ran gconf-cleaner. Then rebooted. Would this be it? No, this did not solve the problem either. I guess I’ll come back to this once I figure it out.

Trawling through .xsession-errors I see that mugshot is part of the problem. It’s a bit annoying and I can always come back to it later. So I decide to yum remove it. This also removes bigboard, online-desktop and online-desktop-gmail *-google-calendar, *-google-docs and *-google-reader. The online desktop never did work correctly for me, so good riddance.

yum install xorg-x11-fonts* on a whim from something online. Afterall, it’s either a font or a color that’s wrong. If this doesn’t work, it’s possible that my xorg.conf file might be causing the problem by referring to a font server that’s been deprecated. That’s the next thing I try…. Ok, I try getting rid of my xorg.conf to see if this fixes things - it appears this was an error with other Fedora users. So hopefully it finally works and I’ll have a solution to my problem. HOLY COW! That’s all I needed to do all along! I feel like pulling out my hair!

Well, at least it’s fixed!!! Now to get dual-screen, etc working again.