F12 Lost Gnome Panels

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, Dec 03, 2009 at 09:33:21PM +0000, Beartooth wrote:
> On Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:43:47 -0500, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> 	[....]
> >> On Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:52:26 -0800, Rick Stevens wrote:
> 	[....]
> >> > Try restarting gnome-panel (assuming it's Gnome you're using)
> >> 
> >> 	That's what I want all right -- and I am running Gnome. But how
> >> do I do it? I can't even seem to get a CLI. Ssh into it from another
> >> machine?
> > 
> > Can you hit Ctrl+Alt+F2 (or F3, F4...) to get a terminal?  
> 
> 	I'd've sworn that was one of the things I had tried; but, be that 
> as it may, I did get a prompt this time.
> 
> > If so, you
> > can log in there, locally, to issue commands.  
> 
> 	I did that, as user. The only command I could think of at first 
> was "gnome-panel." That got me lots of options for help, but nothing I 
> could understand. I tried several likely-sounding ones anyway, but still 
> got nowhere.

Right, gnome-panel won't run unless you're in a gnome-session (i.e. in
the GUI).

> > Some may not be as
> > effective without the X environment variables set -- but at worst, if
> > you had no work pending, you could kill the gnome-session and see if
> > your panels return.  (That's kind of an atomic bomb approach.)
> 
> 	Hmmmm.... I thought to try "startx" first. That told me X was 
> running, and what seemed to be the lock to remove. (There was a short 
> illegible line in there.)

Right, although you could start a second one with:

  startx -- :1

> 	I tried "rm /tmp/.X0-lock255.255.0" and it seemed to think the 
> command should end with <...>lock ; I tried that; it wouldn't let me; I 
> did "su - "  and tried again.

Not the best idea while X is actually running.

> 	That seemed to succeed, but "startx" got me a whole bunch of 
> stuff I couldn't make head nor tail of.
> 
> 	So I tried the big hammer -- Ctrl-Alt-BS -- though I'm sure I had 
> before. It did nothing, afaict.

You do need to use this key in the GUI itself for it to work, and the
kill behavior has to be enabled.  The default is that this old killer
key combo is turned off.  (The setting is in the System > Preferences
> Keyboard tool).

> 	So I tried "ps ax|grep X" -- and got a couple of numbers, one 
> obviously the command I had just given. I told it to kill the other. That 
> put me back (for the umpteenth time today) to a login screen.
>
> 	Logging in just put me back into my desert desktop. There are no 
> hide buttons nor anything else to show it ever heard of a panel -- and, 
> as I thought, Ctrl-Alt-Fx (for x = 2 - 7) does nothing afaict.

Can you hit Alt-F2 to run a command?  If so, you can try running
'gnome-terminal' to see if you can get a command line in the GUI.

> 	I should perhaps mention that this machine (my #1) got royally, 
> unbootably bollixed a few days ago, and ended up with a fresh install of 
> F12 -- into which I began trying to scp /home/btth from #2 -- and messed 
> that up so that there seem to be several partial copies scattered all 
> over it in spots, to the point that the hard drive thinks it's 
> effectively full .... At any rate, "df -h" shows it far fuller than it 
> ought to be.

Uh, yup -- it's possible that your GConf registry may be messed up
then.  (I thought not in another post but hadn't read this through
yet, thanks for all the detail.)  It's stored under ~/.gconf -- maybe
you *should* move that to a backup, kill the session and try logging
in again.

> 	LATER : after another reboot, leaning hard and long on Ctrl-Alt-
> F2 did get me another prompt; I logged in as root -- and am wondering 
> what to try next ....

You don't need to be root to fix this.  Log in as your normal user
unless something is wrong with the actual system itself.  So far it
looks like the problem is with your normal user.

To test that hypothesis, you could log in as root, add a new user:

# useradd <newname>
# passwd <newname>        # enter new password twice
# logout

Then login the GUI as the new user.  If everything works fine, chances
are it's a user-related problem.  Using root to fix things is not
usually required for that, and you can do other damage or induce weird
permission-related problems if you're not careful.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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