Observations on Gnome-2.14

Kevin Oberman oberman at es.net
Mon May 1 18:50:12 UTC 2006


> Date: Mon, 01 May 2006 13:53:24 -0400
> From: Joe Marcus Clarke <marcus at FreeBSD.org>
> 
> Kevin Oberman wrote:
> > I have one system running V6-stable that is now running Gnome-2.14. Some
> > things are really nice about it, but there are some oddities and some
> > things that need touching.
> >
> > When I first started 2.14, I got messages that several icons
> > (gnome-calculator, logout, screen-lock) could not be found and were
> > displayed as white icons with a red 'X'. But after acknowledging the
> > message, all of the icons appeared and work fine. 
> 
> I have not seen this on any of my machines.
> 
> > 
> > This might be a race as I am running i386 on an AMD dual-core 4400+
> > Athlon-64 processor and it may be getting something done before things
> > are ready. This is also intermittent. It happens about half the time
> > when I start Gnome. (I use startx, not gdm.)
> 
> Maybe, but that seems fishy.  I guess gnome-settings-daemon could be
> taking a long time to startup.

I suspect you are right. On my 2GHz Pentium-M system I see the
gnome-settings-daemon come up fairly late. My terminal windows are up
and looking ugly and then the daemon starts and they all snap to the
correct fonts and set-ups.

Also, on two of my starts I also got the window stating that
gnome-settings-daemon did not start. These also had the missing
icons. But gnome-settings-daemon IS started. So this would appear to be
the problem.

> > gnome-terminal has sometimes crashed on logout from Gnome. I have not
> > tried to debug this at all. I do see that the contents of
> > .gnome2/session no longer have information on all of the gnome-terminal
> > windows. Just a simple command, so I guess gnome-terminal is storing
> > this somewhere else. (I need to find out where to debug why at least one
> > window never restarts.)
> 
> For GDM sessions, it's ~/.xsession-errors.  I thought startx would
> output to the calling VTY.

You misunderstood the issue. I am not looking for errors (they are on
the VTY) but the configuration information that tells gnome-terminal how
to open windows. Things like the geometry, profile, and application, if
any. That all used to be saved in the .gnome2/session file but now
appears to be someplace else. There are references in .gnome2/session to
/gnome-terminal-ev6bR2/ and I assume that this is a gconf db key or
reference to a file. I just have not found it.

> > Sessions are a bit messed up. As already reported, all manually
> > startup-sessions are gone after the upgrade and must be re-entered. No
> > longer is there an ordering option, but this might be settable via the
> > "Current Session" tab. I'll paly around with it if I get a little time.
> > 
> > The logout tool no longer has a check-box to save the session. I THINK I
> > saved it by going into the "Sessions" prefs and selecting to
> > automatically save the session on logout and logging out. I then logged
> > back in and de-selected that option. There is still an option (which is
> > selected) to "Ask on logout". It appears to be a no-op in 2.14, though.
> 
> Correct.  It looks like they axed this for 2.14.  As a workaround,
> gnome-session-save --gui will save your current session.

Thanks! This helps. I tend to leave my startup session alone and only
save it on rare occasion, so this should work.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634


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