Arch Linux

Jungian

Member

Registered: 2007-04-01

Posts: 10

Some part of Gnome dies, rendering it useless

Good afternoon fellow Arch-users.

Each time I've tried to use Arch + Gnome on either my laptop or my pc Gnome decides to randomly crap out (2.16 did, 2.18 still does), making gnome-panel useless and eventually Gnome as a whole. I'm quite fed up by either having to use Gentoo, Ubuntu or *insert crap distro* for a reasonably usable Gnome environment that doesn't kill itself.

Symptoms :
gnome-panel decides at random to "freeze", the rest of the apps are still usable (Nautilus is anyway). Killing gnome-panel doesn't make it restart (it becomes an zombie process)
A restart of X / gdm only makes the problem worse : Gnome will appear to start correctly, the panel semi-loads (it's only colored, no applets), but the sound suddenly cuts off and it just stops at that.
Every restart of X / gdm after that just gives a light-blue screen with no visible progress at all.

So after reading this :

How's gnome-session doing now btw, does it still fail to startup the dbus daemon correctly, or does it work fine as it was with 2.16.2?

I killed hal, dbus, gdm and every dbus and gnome-related app ps could find (should Gnome-apps still be active after killing X/gdm ?) and restarted dbus, hal and gdm. It didn't make any difference : still the light-blue screen without any visible progress.

The RAM of both my machines checks out fine.
My systems specs, xorg.conf and video-driver are all irrelevant to this problem (Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora all work just fine using the exact same drivers / xorg.conf).

Just to make sure nobodies reads over this : Archlinux is the only distro showing this bizarre behaviour.

test1000

Member

Registered: 2005-04-03

Posts: 834

Re: Some part of Gnome dies, rendering it useless

about gnome-panel freezing: i have that exact same problem and have had it ever since 2.16. If someone could give me a strace command to run gnome-panel from then maybe we could get to the bottom of this(i haven't bothered reading up on strace as i don't know c or any other language than bash and i need an decipherable output...). Atleast for me a quick killall gnome-panel always fixes it and gnome-panel reloads but maybe this is because i'm not using GDM(just my .bashrc...)

when gnome crapped up in the past i usually deleted .gnome2/session and it worked again. you can also edit that file if you must.

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Jungian

Member

Registered: 2007-04-01

Posts: 10

Re: Some part of Gnome dies, rendering it useless

about gnome-panel freezing: i have that exact same problem and have had it ever since 2.16. If someone could give me a strace command to run gnome-panel from then maybe we could get to the bottom of this(i haven't bothered reading up on strace as i don't know c or any other language than bash and i need an decipherable output...). Atleast for me a quick killall gnome-panel always fixes it and gnome-panel reloads but maybe this is because i'm not using GDM(just my .bashrc...)

It didn't always just kill gnome-panel, it sometimes (1/3 of the time) made gnome-terminal and all other Gnome-apps go blank and unresponsive (it just screams Dbus for some reason). I've always wanted to try Frugalware and this (still unresolved) random Gnome-killing made me try it and it "fixed" my problem. I keep using my Arch-server though, and I'll probably check out ArchLinux again on the desktop in the very near future

when gnome crapped up in the past i usually deleted .gnome2/session and it worked again. you can also edit that file if you must.

Nice. Now I just need to remember this untill I install Arch on my desktop again.