blank desktop after fresh install

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 14 Feb 2008, Andrew Farris wrote:

> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > On Thu, 14 Feb 2008, Jim Cornette wrote:
> >
> > > Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > > >   (i apologize for coming late to the party, but i'm just getting
> > > > around to test installing f9-alpha so i might need a few dumb
> > > > questions to catch up.)
> > > >
> > > >   from a fresh install yesterday (and selecting pretty much all the
> > > > defaults as a start), when the system came back up, i logged in as
> > > > "guest" but got only a blank desktop.  totally blank.
> > > >
> > > >   i checked bugzilla (i'm assuming fedora "rawhide" version) and
> > > > searched on "blank desktop" but nothing came up.  has this been BZed?
> > > > what would have been a better search criteria?  thanks.
> > > >
> > > > rday
> > > > --
> > > Blank as in no Icons, panels, menus or blank as in no illumination?
> > > Gnome came up once with just the background but came up correctly
> > > ever since.
> >
> > sorry, that was a particularly uninformative description, wasn't it?
> > just the background, but no icons, panels, menus, etc.  just for fun,
> > i re-installed from scratch, logged in again as "guest", same thing.
> > but you're saying that's what you got only once and it worked fine
> > from then on?
> >
> > i obviously can't log out the normal way since there are no icons, so
> > i popped over to a VC, init 3, init 5 ... nope, so let's go back to
> > the VC and reboot ... nope, no change.
> >
> > rday
> >
> > p.s.  this is installing f9a x86_64 on an AMD-equipped gateway laptop,
> > if that's relevant.
>
> Did you try this with a normal user yet or just guest?  Several
> people have mentioned they had to just 'useradd' from a terminal.
> I don't have guest even shown on my machines now and not sure what
> changed; the guest login never succeeded anyway.

i just tried guest, so i popped back to a VC, created another account,
and tried to start another graphical login but i can't get rid of the
current blank desktop.  heck, i even tried init 3 and init 1 but, when
i came back to runlevel 5, still that "blank" desktop sitting at VC 7.
so i'm rebooting and ...

... ok, there we go, log in as new user, get a couple whiny dialogs
about pulseaudio and i'm in.

that logging in as "guest" is definitely problematic.  once i tried
that, it seems i was stuck with it until a full reboot and logging in
under the new account.  not good.

rday
--

========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry:
    Have classroom, will lecture.

http://crashcourse.ca                          Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
========================================================================