Re: repair of gnome corruption

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 11:08:05AM -0400, Haines Brown wrote: 
> I intentionally did not specify the problems because I was looking for
> pointers on where to find information on gnome(2) that would allow me
> to undertake a fix. 
> 
> I find that gconftool-2 is on my system, but there's no man for
> it. The -R option seems to display the configurations held in the XML
> files. Again, what should I be reading that would have told me about
> gconftool-2? 

There's a sysadmin guide on www.gnome.org/learn (something like that)
that may be helpful and discusses some of this. It's a bit misguided
on the topic of gnome-panel configuration though, in part my fault.

gconftool-2 --help and http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ and 
the gconf API manual have other information.

> This information appreciated. I replaced .gconf, .gnome and .gnome2
> in user's home directory from a backup, but I suppose that I wont see
> the effect until I restart X or reboot. Which do I have to do?

For .gnome and .gnome2 you have to log out and back in, for .gconf you
have to get gconfd to restart (which will happen as soon as no apps
are running that use it, after a short timeout; if you're only logged
in once, in other words, it should happen on logout).

Or you can manually kick gconfd ("gconftool-2 --shutdown" or just
"killall gconfd-2")

> The problems involve loss of control of the mouse (when moved, it
> often acts as if I were sweeping it everywhere with the LMB depressed:
> the mouse jumps to a panel, pops up multiple menus, opens and closes
> files displayed in a file manager arbitrarily, the mouse locks itself
> onto a scroll bar so that moving the mouse anywhere on the desktop
> causes a reverse scroll, etc.

That sounds like a symptom of bad XFree86 configuration, rather than
anything GNOME would cause. e.g. I've seen this when choosing the
wrong type of mouse (PS/2 vs. serial vs. Intellimouse or whatever).

Conceivably there's also some setting in the Mouse control panel that
affects it, conceivably also it's simply an X or kernel bug in the
mouse driver or USB driver.

I have a hard time coming up with a scenario where it would be caused
by Solaris/Linux GNOME config interaction, but that doesn't mean it
isn't caused by that.

> A valued applet, character picker, is dead in that I can't change
> the selected letters. xkbset refuses to remember changes in its
> configuration.

No clue there, most likely a bug in that applet.  Specific applet
config is under /apps/panel/profiles/default/objects/ in gconf
I believe.

Havoc