XCFE Stopped Working Right After a Reboot

[billquinn]

I'm running F15 and generally use XCFE for my desktop. I got it working pretty much the way I wanted (what icons on the desktop, what icons in the top panel, what wallpaper, etc.). XCFE has been working for a few months now through many reboots.

Today when I rebooted, it suddenly stopped working. Here are most of the symptoms:

(1) The wallpaper is wrong.

(2) The icons on the desktop are not positioned correctly. One is missing.

(3) When I open an application window, say Thunderbird, it opens in the highest point of the upper-left hand corner of the monitor, thereby covering XCFE's "Application" button for its main pull-down menu as well as the icons in the panel and on the desktop.

(4) You cannot grab the window and move it. It does not respond.

(5) There are no "x", "+", "-" buttons on the right-hand side of the top of Thunderbird's window. So you can't close the window by clicking the "x" which isn't there!

(6) Putting the mouse over the "File" menu item of Thunderbird opens up the pull-down submenu, but as soon as you move the mouse downward to go to the "Close" option, the submenu disappears. Thus there is now NO way to close Thunderbird at all. I have to manually use the reset switch on the case to reboot.

Has anyone seen this behavior? What in the world is going on? How can it be fixed?

Thanks.

Bill

[DBelton]

you are probably getting bit by the same thing I have been fighting for a couple of weeks.

Look in your ~/.xsession-errors file and see if you are seeing a bunch of lines that have errors in them, something like Gconf daemon is shutting down.

Mine got much worse with the update last night, but has been happening for a few weeks.

I switched to using a different desktop manager and solved my issues. Changed from GDM to KDM for now. So far it seems to have stopped the problems I was having.

[PabloTwo]

Bill, if you can open a terminal (right-click on empty space on desktop to bring up applications menu) then try entering xfwm4 or perhaps xfwm4 --replace and see if that brings you any relief.

Edit: DBelton is probably more "on to it" than I am. My F16/XFCE has been running peachy keen with no problems. I'm currently in F12/OpenBox.

[DBelton]

I have no idea what initially is causing the Gconf daemon issue, but there are a number of people being hit with it, while others have no problems at all.

I sure haven't found any fix to it, though. I just found a workaround that works for me.

As I said in another post someplace..

If Gnome can't get the #$#% together, throw it out like hte garbage it is.

It appears that this issue is hitting sometime in the GDM/Gnome session, and switching to KDM fixed it for me, even if I decide to start a Gnome shell session from KDM.

[billquinn]

This is all extremely depressing. Fedora used to be a great OS. Now I spend an excessive amount of time trying to get things to work that used to work fine. But the developers of Fedora and Gnome are now operating under the principle, "If it ain't broke, break it."

I've got a dual boot system, and I'm in Windows 7 now just to access the forum. But I did go back into Fedora and opened a terminal window. .xsession-errors was very long. I didn't see anything like "Gconf demon shutting down." I did see this: "gnome-settings-daemon: you can only run one xsettings manager at a time; exiting." Also: "gnome-settings-daemon: unable to start xsettings manager."

Of course, once I open a terminal window, I can do NOTHING else without rebooting by doing a reset on the case. It's infuriating.

It don't know how to change from GDM to KDM. Could you explain the procedure?

I appreciate all your help; please continue to give suggestions. However, though I've been using Fedora since Core 1, I'm for the first time thinking of changing. We always knew that Fedora was the "bloody edge" for Red Hat. However, it's now more like avant garde idiocy, putting out garbage that doesn't work--especially Gnome. What would be a good STABLE alternative to Fedora? Debian? CentOS, SUSE? Or does Gnome infect them all?

[DBelton]

All you have to do to change from GDM to KDM (assuming you have KDM installed) is to create /etc/sysconfig/desktop with one line in it.

/etc/sysconfig/desktop

DISPLAYMANAGER=KDE

(to switch it back to GDM you can just delete the /etc/sysconfig/desktop file, it defaults to GDM/Gnome)

There are other display managers as well, you can try xdm and see if it does what you want.

If you want to install kdm:

yum install kdm

if you want to install xdm:

yum install xorg-x11-xdm

[StephenH]

I had gotten hit by this. I opened a terminal and entered a root shell (su - and password). I then went to /usr/bin and tried to start xfce4-settings-manager, and it started up xfce4, giving me my controls back. After getting back to the desktop, I went to the graphical settings in the Applications Menu/Settings/Session and Startup. From there, I went to the Sessions tab and verified that xfwm4 was running. I then took the option to save the session.

After that, I was still having problems. after some searching, I found a page (I didn't save it, so I can't provide a link) which suggested that another user having the same problem go and delete everything in the .cache/sessions folder (booting to a command prompt suggested) and then rebooting. At the next logon, it rebuilt the information in the .cache/sessions folder.

The rationale is that something in there was corrupted. By deleting it, the system can then store a clean version.

This caused me significant frustration as well, and caused me to try both KDE and Gnome again. I have decided that even with these hiccoughs, XFCE is still the way to go for me. KDE was a pretty face, and it seemed to work okay, but it just felt wrong. Gnome--I'll refrain from going off on a rant about it.

Anyway, I did not hear LXDE suggested as another alternative. It is not too bad. E16 is also in the repositories as are a couple of others. I have been hoping that E17 would have been done long before now, but it seems to have gone into hiding.

[leigh123linux]

Originally Posted by DBelton

All you have to do to change from GDM to KDM (assuming you have KDM installed) is to create /etc/sysconfig/desktop with one line in it.

/etc/sysconfig/desktop

DISPLAYMANAGER=KDE

(to switch it back to GDM you can just delete the /etc/sysconfig/desktop file, it defaults to GDM/Gnome)

There are other display managers as well, you can try xdm and see if it does what you want.

If you want to install kdm:

yum install kdm

if you want to install xdm:

yum install xorg-x11-xdm

Or

su
yum install lxdm

It looks a lot better than xdm

[billquinn]

I'd like to thank everyone for all the help. As a result, I was able to get XCFE back to normal.

One question, however, slipped through the cracks:

I appreciate all your help; please continue to give suggestions. However, though I've been using Fedora since Core 1, I'm for the first time thinking of changing. We always knew that Fedora was the "bloody edge" for Red Hat. However, it's now more like avant garde idiocy, putting out garbage that doesn't work--especially Gnome. What would be a good STABLE alternative to Fedora? Debian? CentOS, SUSE? Or does Gnome infect them all?

I hate to think of leaving Fedora, but I've just run into so many problems with updates and new releases, that it's taking too much time away from production work. So my question above still remains. Can anyone give me some advice?

Thanks so much.

Bill

[StephenH]

Originally Posted by billquinn

I'd like to thank everyone for all the help. As a result, I was able to get XCFE back to normal.

One question, however, slipped through the cracks:



I hate to think of leaving Fedora, but I've just run into so many problems with updates and new releases, that it's taking too much time away from production work. So my question above still remains. Can anyone give me some advice?

Thanks so much.

Bill

Well, it depends. Do you want the most current things or are you willing to settle for older ones?

If you are willing to settle for not having the newest toys to play with (because they do break things periodically), then choose one with an LTE version (LTE=Long Term Edition) like Mint 9, Scientific Linux 6.1, CentOS, or whatever the current LTE version of Ubuntu is. You'll have stability then, but at the cost of being stuck at older versions of things like Firefox.

If you want leading/bleeding edge, then stick with Fedora or try Mint's current version on for size and see how it fits.

Me, I am getting to like the overall feel of F16 with XFCE. I currently have no other DE option loaded. I do NOT like Gnome Shell and the "fallback mode" is even worse. KDE is a pretty face, but it is just too different for me. I've got my XFCE desktop fixed up pretty nice, to include a desktop slideshow that changes every 15 minutes. It has just been working well, so I'm going to stick with it.

There is only one minor quirk. The panel keyboard layout indicator will not keep its settings. I have not chased down an answer for that, but it is an annoyance, not a significant issue.

[AdamW]

bill: what turned out to solve the problem for you?

[stoat]

Originally Posted by billquinn

I hate to think of leaving Fedora, but I've just run into so many problems with updates and new releases, that it's taking too much time away from production work. So my question above still remains. Can anyone give me some advice?

If you really like Fedora the best, and now that you've got it fixed, what about not updating it so much? And when you do update it, look at the list of available updates first and just pick security-related stuff, kernels, or things that interest you. I mean, do we really need the white-hot latest version XFCE or LibreOffice or libpng or whatever? That's probably why people often consider the Debians and Centoses and so on as so stable... They stay well back from the edge. So maybe you can stick with Fedora and make it more like those via careful consideration and management of updates. Just a thought.

P.S.: Another thing I never do is update before I backup the entire system. I always backup the entire thing in a tarball and then update. Every now and then I've had to restore from those when an update busted the wheels off of the system and I didn't have the time or patience to deal with it.

[billquinn]

Adam, from post #7, this is what I did:

After that, I was still having problems. after some searching, I found a page (I didn't save it, so I can't provide a link) which suggested that another user having the same problem go and delete everything in the .cache/sessions folder (booting to a command prompt suggested) and then rebooting. At the next logon, it rebuilt the information in the .cache/sessions folder.

After that, I had to "put things back" the way I wanted them.

[DBelton]

I think I finally figured out what was causing my endless hair pulling and that blasted Gconf deamon shutting down mess...

It goes back to an issue that was in the common bugs for F16

Due to a change in the default /etc/nsswitch.conf file, when using a non-file backed user account backend (as is common for remote authentication methods such as sssd), user's secondary group memberships are not correctly registered.

A test build that should resolve this problem is available from Koji: authconfig-6.1.16-2.fc16. If you are affected by this issue, please test this update and report your results to the bug report.

To resolve the issue manually, edit the file /etc/nsswitch.conf and remove the line:

initgroups: files

All of the updates that I did, installed the updated version with the corrections, but, the /etc/nsswitch.conf file was named as a .rpmnew file instead of overwriting the one I had.

I made the changes to the nsswitch.conf file and I haven't seen the issue since, and it's been a day or two and quite a few reboots now. It was happening on just about every reboot, and I would keep having to restart until it didn't occur and not reboot unless absolutely necessary.

I am not certain if that was actually causing the issue on my system here, but it does seem to have corrected the problem, well, at least for now, anyway.

I just stumbled upon this one by accident, I saw it in the common bugs, and looked at my nsswitch.conf file and noticed it was still the old original one with the initgroups: files in it, so I changed it to what the new updated version had, and my problem disappeared.