Gnome panel (taskbar) flaked out

[dishawjp]

Hi All,

My Gnome panel (like the Windows taskbar) has flaked out on me.  I still have some of the icons to the left of the panel (browser, terminals, toolbox, help & etc.) but the area to the right is completely blank.  I used to have icons for "new windows" and some other little things.  They seem to be lost.  I could reinstall I suppose, but is there an easier way to restore everything?

Jim

[voidmain]

I hope I am not misunderstanding your question but if you are using Gnome 1.x your panel ICONS are stored in under the ~/.gnome/panel.d directory. In Gnome 2.x they are stored in under ~/.gnome2/panel2.d.

If the system installation of Gnome is fine and the problem appears to just be an issue a messed up user configuration (i.e. if you log in as a different user and the panel looks right) then you can restore  you user to a default Gnome configuration by renaming or deleting the ~/.gnome and/or ~/.gnome2 directories and logging out and back in. It should recreate a default Gnome desktop configuration for your user just as if it was the first time you logged in.  

But you may not want to lose all of your Gnome personalizations so you might want to try and fix what's missing in that panel.d directory structure.

[Bazoukas]

Do you mean reinstall Gnome or Linux? If so, you dont need to do that.

 Here is what I do.

 I had one time Gnome do that to me when I had 2000 mp3s view as music. It only happens to me when i choose view as music.
 I loged in as root. I copied ALL the files that I made as a regular user to my root name.  Deleted the name in which Gnome gave me trouble and created it again. Transfered  all the files from root to my user account and that was it.


 Of course there might be another way to get your Gnome back working as it was, but am not aware of it yet.

[creedon]

quote:Originally posted by DOSman:
Hi All,

My Gnome panel (like the Windows taskbar) has flaked out on me.  I still have some of the icons to the left of the panel (browser, terminals, toolbox, help & etc.) but the area to the right is completely blank.  I used to have icons for "new windows" and some other little things.  They seem to be lost.  I could reinstall I suppose, but is there an easier way to restore everything?

Jim

Jim,
Take an extra tuck in your truss, spit on your palms and try reconfiguring X-window!  Sounds to me like something happened that X didn't like (it's hard to say what, X is a touchy bastard.)  I can't help with specifics, me being a Debian user, but there is a lot of documentation on the Redhat website, they may have the information you need; if not, they may be able to point you in the right direction.
BTW: this is a rite of passage for almost every new Linux user; we ALL have an X-window crisis at one time or another!

[dishawjp]

Thanks for the replies.  Void Main, I did delete the ~.gnome directory and got my clock, the "new window thing" and now running programs are back on my panel.  What this hosed was some of the icons on my desktop.  I'm not much of an "icon man" anyway, so I just deleted some of them by deleting the files in the .gnome-desktop directory.  The fd0 icon though now appears as a folder rather than the picture of a floppy disk that it formerly was.

Again, this isn't serious since it seems to work ok and when I use my floppy drive I generally mount it through the command line anyway, but I thoght that it looked nice.  Also, even though the CDROM drive works perfectly, I used to get an icon on the desktop when the CD was running.  I also thought that that looked kind of nice even though I've never used it.  

I did try logging on as a different user and the original default icons were all still there.  Are there some files that I can copy from the other user's home directory to my directory to restore these two desktop icons?  The only otehr icon that I'd like to restore is the redhat.com icon.  Again only for looks, I just kind of liked to see it sitting on the desktop. I've never used it to access their site.

If these things are problems, I can live without them.  I do use the panel and the command line for just about everything anyway anyway.

thanks again for the help, the major problem is corrected, but if possible, I wold like to fix the minor ones.

Bazoukas, I'd need to know which files to copy.  Creedon, where would I begin recongfiguring Xwindows?

Jim

[Bazoukas]

Sorry I shoud have been more specific.

Here is what I do in case something goes wrong with one of my user names.

  When I create a user name, all the files I have created (documents, cpp, jpgs, mp3s and so on), I transfer them on my root account.
  If my user name creates a problem (similar to your problem), then I just delete that user name and create it again. Then I copy and paste all the files to the user name and am all set.
  The drawback with this is that you have to customize again your desktop.

  My way is the crude way. Voidmans and creedons way is more educational, and infact I will toy around with the files they said.

[creedon]

As I said, I'm a Debian user, and Deb is now using XFree86 4.0; I think you're using XFree86 3.3.  There are several X configuration apps, and I'm not sure which your vrsion of Redhat uses.  Go to XFree86.org (I think) and there are help files available.

[dishawjp]

Ok, either I'm even stupider than I thought, or somehow my install is hosed.  I've been messing with this problem for days now, and I think that I've finally managed to just about totally kill Red Hat on my computer.

I did, as Void Main suggested, remove the ~/.gnome directory.  That fixed my panel problem, but created a few other problems, which I played around with a few times.  I never did get some of my icons back, but was able to restore the fd0 icon and the one or Midnight Commander.  Everything was more or less working, but when I would put a data CD in, I would get an error message about fd0.  But I could mount or umount the CDROM and it worked perfectly and so did the floppy. But I wanted to get rid of the error messages and have everything right. Sooooo...

Last night, following bazoukas' advice I decided to delete my account.  I booted to root and did a "userdel" then a "useradd" and put in a password "passwd userid" and rebooted.  I couldn't get into the account. Gnome would ask for a login and password, and would start to load Gnome then die with a blue screen.  No panel, no icons.  I could do a ctrl-alt-F2 and get a virtual terminal though.  So then I rebooted and tried to create a new account name.  Exact same thing.  I tried a lot of other things like editing my /etc/inittab to get the computer to boot to terminal mode and typing "startx" to start Gnome.  Same thing.  I also tried to create the accounts using linuxconf both the text mode linuxconf and the GUI linuxconf and either way, linuxconf would hang and I would have to kill it to exit.  But it DID add the accounts and passwords and all before dying!

Weirdest of all, the old accounts are all still working.  Root, and two other user accounts I had created all work fine.

I tried an "upgrade" reinstall of Red Hat hoping that that would fix things, but no happiness there.  I've tried everything I can think of and want to get this thing back to "normal." There's no important data or anything other than time that I will lose on a fresh install, so if that's the only option, I can live with that.  But I would really rather figure out how to fix it.

As always, thanks in advance for all your assistance.

Jim

[HPC GUY]

interesting, Gnome on my work machine is screwed, so i just use KDE just fine. I have been too lazy to try to fix Gnome. when i boot to gnome all it shows is the desktop and nothing else, weird....

[voidmain]

When you deleted the user account and recreated it did you give the user a password?  Also when you deleted the user account did you also delete the user's home directory? If you wanted a completely clean new user you would backup the users files under his/her home directory and as root type:

# userdel -r username
# adduser username
# passwd username

When you log in for the first time as that user it should create default gnome settings just like it did when you first logged in. You might also after deleting the username and prior to recreating it check the "/tmp" directory for any hidden sock directories containing that user's name.

[dishawjp]

Thanks for the replies.  I don't have KDE installed, so can't switch to that GUI.  The hardware is old and slow and I chose Gnome for that reason.

Void Main, Yes, I did the "userdel" "useradd" and the "passwd username" commands.  As I wrote, I could log in with that name and access the account *in virtual terminal* mode only.  No GUI. Before readding the account, I even went so far as to cd to the /home directory and "rm -rf username" to remove traces of the account from that area.  I also checked the /ect/passwd file to make sure that it had been properly removed from there.  I did not go into the /tmp directory to check there, and probably should have since I think that there are some "orbit-username" type files there, and there may be others.  I also tried to use a new (non-previously used) username and password just in case I'd somehow hosed something that was referencing my original username.  Same difference. In any case, a new account is created; the new user can log in in text mode; when "startx" is entered, Gnome tries to start, enlightenment loads; and then a blank screen. Doing a ctrl-alt-F2 will give a functional virtual terminal, but never a GUI.  It will create the .gnome, .gnome-desktop, .xauth, and similar Gnome related files, but Gnome will not run.

This really has me stumped.  Here I've been telling my students they should dump Windows and go Linux, and I can't even access the GUI in MY Linux account on MY machine.  Embarrassing :-(

Any other thoughts?  It seems to be something more with Gnome, though as I wrote before, even linuxconf seems to be having difficulties, whether run in text mode or from the GUI.  Maybe if I give a step-by step of what I'm doing and what happens...

1) boot the computer to text mode
2) login as root
3) userdel username
4) cd /home
5) ls -a
6) rm -rf username
7) cd /etc
8) more passwd (verify that username is gone)
9) useradd username
10)passwd username (enter password and etc)
11) more passwd (check that username added)
12) cd /home/username
13) ls -a (see that .bashrc and other files there)
14) shutdown -r now
15) login as username (no problem)
16) startx (Gnome starts up, Enlightenment starts.. then a blank blue screen)
17) ctrl-alt-F2
18) login as username
19) cd
20) ls -a (I find .gnome and .gnome-desktop and other proper-looking-to-me Gnome files)
21) rm core (yep, get one of those every time)
22) shutdown -h now (grab another beer or two)
23) reboot and try it again (repeat process with variations like trying to add the account with linuxconfig, copying files from other user accounts to try and make it work, and etc.) until fridge is barren of beer.  
24) Wake up next morning with a hangover and post to this list.

Any thoughts at all?  Maybe I should try a different brand of beer?  That's probably it!

Jim

[dishawjp]

In case anyone else runs into this problem, I fianlly fixed it last night.  What a nightmare!

First I tried a full reinstall of RH 6.2.  No happiness there, so I logged on as root and did a "rm -rf" of /home/username and /etc/X11.  Then I went into the /tmp and deleted all files and directories bearing any relationship to any of the affected usernames.  I deleted linuxconf since that was misbehaving as well, and installed again.  Still no happiness, just a different error message when I tried to enter the GUI.  Sooo I thought that an upgrade to RH 7.0 might work.  An hour or so later (ths is real old hardware) the install was complete.  But I was still getting the same damned error message!  I don't remember the name of the file it was whining about, though it did begin with "e"

Anyway, by this time I figured I had next to nothing to lose and did a good old "mkfs" on hda5, my main partition and reinstalled RH 6.2.  

Amazingly, everything went perfectly and now I'm back up and running.  I still have to configure my ppp dialer and network settings, and get my ~/.pinerc written for e-mail, but all my hardware is configured and as far as I can tell, everything is working well.

I hope to have better hardware in another couple of weeks and will get to have all sorts of fun setting that up.  I think I'll give RH 7.2 a shot and when I can get a really decent box, I want to give RH 8 a try.

Thanks for all the help and suggestions, and maybe someone out there will benefit from my little disaster here.

Jim