Headaches setting in

["Jesse D . Sightler" <jsight pair com>]

On Sat, 13 Mar 1999 00:28:36 Jon Earle wrote:
> <zathras>  Zathras not understanding.  Zathras good at usings, not
> programmings.  </zathras>

Well, at the very least you seem to be a pretty good end-user.  This problem
report at least gave enough details for us to help.  :)
 
> 1.  Gnome has a background setting.  So does enlightenment.  I set the
> enlightenment background to use one of the enclosed pics 9they're really
> nice!), and all was great.  Today, I was trying to resize a panel applet
> (the battery power meter), and the panel crapped out on me, and I had to
> kill X with ctl-alt-backspc.  When it came back up, no panel, and no
> background.  After an hour or so of fiddling around, I got the panel back.
> The background never made it back though, but the odd thing is, an
> application window I had displayed from another machine was showing again!
> It even worked for a few seconds until gnome or enlightenment crashed
> again.   So, okay, I kill off the gnome and enlightenment dirs and files in
> my home dir, and start over.  It comes up now.  I reset the background, and
> a few things, and logout.  When I restart, the background shows breifly,
> then disappears.  As well, the filemanager icon is no longer on my desktop.
>  Okay, fire up fileman, icon is back.  Reset the background (via
> enlightenment) and logout.  restart  and the same thing happens!  I killed
> off the gnome and enlightenment dirs again,. and now, enlightenment has no
> background pics to show!

The Background setting problem is because both E and Gnome can do background images.
If you set up E to do backgrounds, without setting up Gnome not to do backgrounds, they
both get into a fight.  Because Gnome is slower in getting everything started than E,
it generally wins and you get the Gnome background.  The Gnome background setting should
have an option to disable backgrounds.  Use that, and your E background should show up.

The icons problem is a bug in the version of gmc that you have.  I'm not sure if
new RPMS have been released for the latest GMC or not, but just clicking the filemanager
icon should work fine in the mean time.

As to the rest of your error messages, I really can't give any other advice than perhaps
trying a "rm -Rf ~/.gnome".  Sorry, I just couldn't tell enough of your description of what
happened to give any better advice, but that's still better than reinstalling all of Gnome, IMO.

> 2. I get lots of weird errors when I shut down gnome:  "sh: `-c' requires
> an argument", "Gdk-ERROR **: an x io error occurred"  \n  "aborting...", etc

I see some similar errors when exiting X and generally don't consider them to
be something to worry about.  Maybe they are, but I haven't figured out how errors
on X shutdown could be causing a problem, and all of my gnome apps continue to work fine.
If you can't prove it's broke, don't fix it.  :)


> 3.  If I kill the help-browser, I get a core file.

I haven't seen this one.  Perhaps you should send a backtrace from GDB?

> 4. If I change _anything_ it is permanently hosed.  For example, I just
> issued startx > output.txt 2>&1" to try and capture some of the errors I
> get.  I killed that as it failed to load gnome (x sat there at the
> crosshatch startup screen), and tried to restart gnome.  I get the message
> fro menlightenment saying that it's starting, but that's all.  I now have
> that lovely crosshatch screen, and a  dead gnome.  Time to kill the various
> dirs again, and start over.  

If Enlightenment is failing to load, try an "rm -Rf ~/.enlightenment" just in case
your E configuration files have been mangled.

---------------
Jesse D. Sightler
http://www3.pair.com/jsight/

"An honest answer can get you into a lot of trouble." 
         - Anonymous