On 25/04/2010 07:48, Dr Andrew C Aitchison wrote:
On Sat, 24 Apr 2010, Mark Mahabir wrote:
I completely removed an account for one particular user, then
recreated it from scratch. All looked fine until she copied back in
the .gconf and .gconfd subdirectories into her home area from the
backup I had made; When logging in, the blue GNOME box is missing the
logo and no desktop backgrounds can be set unless they are PNG. Also
the title in a minimised firefox window on the taskbar stretches
across other open programs in the taskbar so they become unreadable.
However, simply deleting .g* subdirectories does not remove the issue.
In two other cases after recreating accounts from scratch, one showed
no improvement whatsoever, whereas in the second case the issue
disappeared and then came back later when the user attempted to
modify the workspace switcher.
I even had the users completely rewrite .login and .cshrc files in
case these were screwing something up.
The new server I installed is an 'everything' install SL4.8, and all
worked fine on the old server.
Any suggestions greatly appreciated, no matter how off the wall!
Recap:
The desktop machines have been running SL4.8 for a while and didn't
change, but the fileserver was updated from SL4.small to SL4.8 at
the time that the problems appeared ?
The users log into the desktop machine with a network mounted
home directory ?
Thus the gui on the file-server should be irrelevant,
but any (minor?) changes to the gui on the desktop machines
at the same time, or any changes to the network mount options
could be significant.
Things I'd check with the network mount include atime, quota,
root (and other user) squash, group memberships and permissions,
SE-Linux attributes, ...
You are looking for changes in values and whether features are
enabled or disabled.
Problem solved: The issue was with user's .login files. Some of them
were setting their own LD_LIBRARY_PATHS necessary for software installed
in their own data directories (which I try to discourage!), as opposed
to centrally. If I comment this line out and get them to re-login
everything works just fine.
Thanks for your suggestions.
Mark
