Metacity fails after updates

[Kevin Oberman]

On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 9:08 AM, Kevin Oberman <rkoberman at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 12:16 PM, Koop Mast <kwm at rainbow-runner.nl> wrote:
>
>> On 14-6-2013 20:55, Kevin Oberman wrote:
>>
>>> I am no longer able to start Gnome on my desktop. I updated  lot of the
>>> ports while I was working remotely for a few months. When I got back,
>>> metacity failed to start. My apps start and look OK, but with no window
>>> manager, it's pretty useless.
>>>
>>> When it tries to start, metacity sends out the following:
>>> metacity:ERROR:ui/ui.c:752:**meta-_ui_get_default_icon: assertion
>>> failed:
>>> (default_icon)
>>> LibGTop-Server: pid 5978 received eof.
>>>
>>> This repeats every few seconds, ad infinitum.
>>>
>>> I have re-built metacity and all of its dependencies with no improvement
>>> and i am baffled.
>>>
>>> I have a full Gnome installation running on FreeBSD 9.1-Stable (r249034).
>>> All ports are up-to-date. Any ideas on where to look or what to kick? It
>>> works fine on my other systems.
>>>
>>
>> No clue about this, but the function in your quoted line suggests
>> something involved icons? I currently don't have a gnome2 desktop setup to
>> test.
>>
>> -Koop
>>
>
> This one is getting frustrating. Re-built and re-installed ALL ports and
> it is still happening! Maade one BIG error, though. I allowed the
> portmaster run to use available packages. Re-building 1100+ ports from
> source takes a long time, but I guess I'll start. :-( Should be done is two
> or three days if I do the really drastic step of deleting ALL ports,
> cleaning out /usr/local, and starting from scratch.
>

I'd just like to close this out. I tracked down the problem and it involved
several twisty little passages making it unlikely that many people will hit
it, though I know that some have, at least on Linux systems.

The base issue is that the default icon set used when the
gnome-settings-daemon does not get run. The error is actually pretty clear.
The default theme (since one was not set) no longer has a default icon, so
metacity dies. Prior to the round of gnome updates to gnome early this
year, it did, but no longer. No idea why.

But why is the gnome-settings-daemon not setting the theme? It's a race
condition that was caused by my stunningly slow old graphics card. Quite
simply, when the gnome-settings-daemon ran, the graphics system was still
setting things up, so the daemon exited without setting a theme. In the
past (when there was a default icon in the default theme, all I had to do
to get things set correctly was to select System->Preferences->Appearance
which would immediately fire up the setting-daemon and, like magic,
everything looked fine.

I found that, if I just killed all of the windows that block the top panel,
I could still select System->Preferences->Appearance and metacity would
start, but instead I did somehting better. I swapped in an old nVidia 9800
graphics card and now all is well.

I'd love to know why no default_icon is available when the theme has not
been set, as it would have made this easier to deal with, bugt at least it
is now documented in case someone else hits this.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com