Glynn: >> At least once every 6 months, usually more frequently, after I >> live-upgrade, something wonky happens to my desktop. Sometimes I >> lose desktop icons entirely. This time (70->74 upgrade) the icons >> and their text are much bigger than previously, and my window title >> bars are messed up. (Controls aren't left and right justified.) > > Screenshots of bizarre behavior would help a lot I think. > > FWIW, I'm not sure Brian's approach is the way I'd tackle things. > > For theme related stuff, it's generally the 'gnome-settings-daemon' that has > gone wrong, and it's relatively simple to restart this in your session. Use > 'gconftool-2 --shutdown' to stop gconfd (It will restart when any application > wants to access the gconf configuration database, which generally doesn't > happen > on an idle). > > Configuration for most of this stuff is usually in /desktop/gnome/interface. > I'd > start by backing those up, stopping the gconfd daemon, removing them from > ~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/... and pkilling gnome-settings-daemon (it will > automatically restart).
Thanks for the suggestions. You are right that gnome-settings-daemon is often the culprit for system-wide configuration issues. And your suggestions about how to kill gconfd are also easier than my suggestions. You have to be careful, though, since GConfd does start by itself if any program requests any configuration setting. It's really easy to confuse yourself about making a change to the $HOME/.gconf files and having the change not take effect because the GConfd daemon isn't killed properly. > gnome-cleanup is the suck. It stops us from figuring out where the upgrade > bugs are. I am not sure you can put all the blame on gnome-cleanup. Debugging configuration incompatibilities is tedious work regardless. That said, I wrote gnome-cleanup so maybe I'm just being sensitive. Brian
