nautilus issues

[Rick Stevens]

On Wed, 2006-05-31 at 20:48 -0400, Jason Pinkney wrote:
> Dear Linux gurus,
> I'm having problems with my gnome desktop/nautilus.
> I'm running Fedora core 2,  gnome-desktop-2.0.
> 
> I had this problems before, but I can't remember the
> solution.  Here are some symptoms:
> 1. When I reboot, my desktop comes up without my
>      chosen background and without my desktop icons.
>      The panels are ok.
> 2. Right-clicking on the background does nothing
> 3. Trying to run nautilus from the command line does nothing.
> 4. Logging out takes so long that I get impatient and kill X.
> 5. I've been able to get the desktop back to normal by logging
>      in with a KDE desktop, fiddling with things, and then going
>      back to gnome.  Also, by killing X, fiddling around with things
>       (like killing stray nautilus commands) and then typing "startx".
>      However, when I log out again, the dialogue does not include
>      the check box for save the current desktop.  (How can that happen??)
>       And completely rebooting makes it messed up again.
> Any ideas?

Sounds like your ~/.gtk* files got hosed.  Replace them with copies from
another user or take note of your home directory, UID and GID, then
delete your account by becoming the root user and using the command:

	# userdel yourloginname

Do NOT use the "-r" option!  Once that's done, recreate the account
using:

	# useradd -g oldGID -u oldUID -d oldhomedirectory yourloginname

That will create the account anew, but use the old UID and GID and home
directory.  Since you didn't use the "-r" option to userdel, all the
files in the directory will still be there.  Once that's done, reset the
password:

	# passwd yourloginname


and the account should be OK.

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-     I.R.S.: We've got what it takes to take what you've got!       -
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