X looks strange after restarting it

[Coleman Kane]

Pietro Cerutti wrote:
> Hi list,
> I don't actually know how to explain this problem in an understandable
> way...
> I have an external 24' Sun monitor running at 1280x800 plugged into my
> laptop (1280X800).
> I start X without the external monitor, I plug it in, and press the keys
> combination to enable it on my laptop. Everything looks fine on it.
> Then, I exit X, restart it, and some applications looks differently.
> Please look at [1] and [2] for partial screenshots before and after
> restarting X, at [3] for my xorg.conf and at [4] for my Xorg.0.log
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Thanks very much!
>
> [1] http://www.gahr.ch/FreeBSD/misc/before.png
> [2] http://www.gahr.ch/FreeBSD/misc/after.png
> [3] http://www.gahr.ch/FreeBSD/misc/xorg.conf
> [4] http://www.gahr.ch/FreeBSD/misc/Xorg.0.log
>
> P.S. x11@ please CC me
>   
Pietro,

I have seen this behavior typically occur when gnome-settings-daemon 
doesn't shut down properly from my previous session, before I start up 
GNOME again. In addition, this is how all of my GNOME apps look when I 
try running them without gnome-settings-daemon. I suspect that when you 
X server restarted, your apps were not able to contact 
gnome-settings-daemon over DBUS and defaulted their fonts/rendering.

Try this:
1) Start X.org again, after a fresh reboot
2) Exit X.org
3) Use ps auxww to see if there are any gnome related programs still running
4) Kill them all (a good trick I use is to log in as 'root' in another 
VT, and "killall -9 -u myusername")
5) Log in as your user again and try starting X.org (and the fonts 
should look like [1])

--
Coleman Kane