Missing information in gnome bottom panel

sirius56 · #1 12th June 2007, 02:52 PM

I installed FC7 and it was great for a while. Suddenly, in gnome, my bottom panel is present, but is blank. The panel normally showed tasks, desktop switcher, etc.

All of my Fedora updates are current. My Gnome Panel is 2.18.2.

I searched but cannot find any way to restore the information.

With KDE, the task list, desktop switcher, etc. are present.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you.

madopal · #2 12th June 2007, 03:45 PM

I've got the same problem, except it's the top panel. It's completely blank, and I have no menus. Also, nautilus won't start anymore, either.

I upgraded from FC6, so I'm going to look through the gnome packages and see if I can find any that are causing problems.

Can anyone tell me where gnome might be logging errors?

steven.ercolani · #3 12th June 2007, 04:00 PM

I'm almost relieved that I'm not the only one having this problem. I also performed an upgrade from version 6 to 7. At first, I thought there was something wrong with my profile because I never experienced this when logging in as root. I removed my profile and started a new one. For a while, everything was good, but then this issue started appearing again.

For me, the top and bottom bars appear to fail differently each time. Sometimes, part of the bar displays and sometimes nothing displays in the bars. And sometimes, the both bars and the desktop don't even appear on the screen. The only way to get everything working again is to restart the computer and eventually everything works again.

Some information about my computer:
Laptop: AMDTurion64 running x86_64
Graphics: ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955

If there is any more information that someone can think of that would help correct this, I'll be more than happy to provide it.

A.Serbinski · #4 12th June 2007, 04:03 PM

Did you try adding them back? Right-click --> Add to panel.
Failing that, backup your home directory, wipe it, copy in default files from /etc/skel and see if it starts working. If it does, copy in one file at a time from your backup until you discover where the problem is.

madopal · #5 12th June 2007, 04:11 PM

Right clicking doesn't work anymore for me because nautilus is dead. Also, right clicking on the panel doesn't seem to do anything, as the panel is dead. When I first installed, my setup was behaving much the same as steven.ercolani. I had some things working (the workspace switcher and the system monitor), but the menus and my launchers wouldn't do anything. Right clicking on blank areas of the panel also did nothing.

After a yum update, it's COMPLETELY dead. I have a blank panel. If I flail on the mouse, I can get a properties panel to load, but it's blank.

Looking at the bug list, I found out that some people were having trouble with esd and sounds. They said if they disabled sound (gnome-sound-properties from a console) it cleared things up. That hasn't worked for me, though. I'm trying to get gnome to give me SOME error. Right now, if I kill -s HUP the panel, it restarts dead, and if I run nautilus, it hangs up saying "Intializing nautilus-search-tool extension" and then does nothing.

I'll try using the /etc/skel files. I already deleted .gnome2, .gnome .gnome2-private, and .gconf* to see if it would recreate the files, but no luck. Also, I created a dummy user, logged in with him, and it made no difference. So, I bailed on the conf files (at least in the home directory) being a problem, but I'll try the /etc/skel.

steven.ercolani · #6 12th June 2007, 04:14 PM

Adding them back in isn't an option because right clicking doesn't usually work and when it does, none of the apps are responsive (i.e. buttons and other components don't work).

I'm going to investigate copying the default files from /etc/skel to see if this will help. One of the biggest problems with this issues is that it doesn't happen consistently. Sometimes everything works when I log in, and sometimes it doesn't. Will it be heads or tails today???

steven.ercolani · #7 12th June 2007, 04:34 PM

I just took a look in the directory /etc/skel and it's empty. What is this directory suppose to contain?

madopal · #8 12th June 2007, 04:35 PM

/etc/skel only has shell files (like .bash_profile, .bashrc, etc...you have to use ls -la to see them). Yes, it blows away everything, but it's easier just to remove any gnome-related files (.gnome*, .gconf*, and .nautilus). That had no effect, and I confirmed that by starting a new user (easier to test and doesn't involve blowing away my home directory).

This has to be related to either a) libs that are mismatched, or b) configuration files outside of the user's home directory. I already found out that nautilus-actions from FC6 was version 1.4-4, but the new F7 nautilus-actions is version 1.4.1-1. For some reason, yum didn't update that one, so I removed it, and when I reinstalled it, it added the F7 version. Nothing changed, though.

The release notes did say that many packages would remain fc6 instead of fc7 if it was just a version number change, but since there was an actual versioning difference, I figured it might be significant.

I went through xorg, gtk, and gdk looking for suspicious fc6 packages still hanging around, but I haven't found anything. I'm trying to hit up the gnome forums to see if I can find out where things might be reporting errors.