Gnome problem!!

[The Linuxator]

Ok a couple of days ago gome started crashing on me in my FC4 system, especially the file browser it causes every single gnome app to just not open anymore and I can do nothing except restart, and I have KDE on my system too in KDE I don't see those crahses, I knew I screwed up something in Gnome but I can't remeber what I did to it.

So after getting frustrated with the problem and after doing an update to all gnomes components, I decided to uninstall all of Gnome and reinstall it. What I did is :

1- sudo -y yum groupremove "GNOME Desktop Enviroment" which deleted much more stuff than I thought it would

2- sudo -y yum groupinstall "GNOME Desktop Enviroment" from KDE

When I got back to GNOME everything was the same as I had it before (configuration wise) except for one big problem, I lost my menus on my GNOME start menu, and pretty much %40 of GNOME's functionality.

I can't even take a snapshot anymore, I can't launch my apps from gnome becasue i can't see them, while i am perfectly able to launch the same apps but from KDE.

 

[The Linuxator]

Anybody know what's the issue , it looks like some missing package, but I don't what I have pretty much installed everything related to gnome from yum.

 

[drag]

If you make a new user and log in as that guy does the issues remain?

If not then its a borked configuration problem with your user configuration/preferences. (which is easily fixed)
if the problems persist with a new user then it's a system wide thing. (which maybe difficult or not)

 

[The Linuxator]

I will go ahead and try that now and report back 😉

 

[The Linuxator]

ok made a new user and I still have the same problem.

 

[The Linuxator]

I am losing hope here !

 

[drag]

(I've been busy)

Not sure.

Check with the fedoraforums.org people?

Is it just the menu stuff that is screwed up now?

There is a gnome-menus package for Fedora Core 4 that is for setting up the XML configuration layout for menus.

Also do searches for any menu stuff in yum.


Otherwise just go thru and make sure that all the higher level packages like gnome applets or the control panel and such things, and their dependancies, are installed.

Otherwise I don't know. Probably reinstall if it's too screwed up.

 

[The Linuxator]

I have just removed gnome completely and reinstalled it from a failsafe terminal and everything is till the way it is, I have another FC4 machine do you know if there is a way to overwrite my configuration files with the default ones ?

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: The Linuxator
I have just removed gnome completely and reinstalled it from a failsafe terminal and everything is till the way it is, I have another FC4 machine do you know if there is a way to overwrite my configuration files with the default ones ?

Well I don't know to much about Yum. Not like I know for apt-get in Debian.


With apt-get when you uninstall stuff it leaves configuration files behind... but it has a purge option so that you can delete all files and new directories that were made when the package was installed.
Like this:
apt-get remove --purge whateverpackagename

Then if it can't remove a directory because there is stuff in it, then you can go in there and manually choose what to keep and what to delete.

I would expect that yum would have a similar option.

Then after you uninstall everything, go thru configuration stuff... like in /etc/, but also there maybe some stuff in /usr or /var that you may need to look at.

Also you'd want to delete any stale files in tmp and make sure that all gnome background proccesses are dead so they don't try to rewrite any files.

Then for your user preferences you can (after backing up email and bookmarks and other stuff you want to keep) go
mkdir ~/backedUpPref
mv ~/.??* ~/backedUpPref

To clean out any user preferences for whatever user your using.. for EVERYTHING. If you want to keep some stuff you'd have to go thru and delete all the gnome configuration items. Stuff like ~/.gconf and such.

Always make backups of any configuration files and take a note of their locations.. so that if something gets messed up you can move them back to the original location and at least get back. Once everything is working and nice go ahead and delete them if you need the disk space.

 

[The Linuxator]

Tried all that can be done, but too much waisted on it so I formatted and started from scratch, since I have backed up my home directory and I don't have much much bookmarks and that kind of stuff (except Anandtech 😀), so I guess I should have done this a while back, but I wanted to learn how to fix such a problem, oh well thanx for the help Drag as always 😉.

 

[pkme2]

I had the similar problem when I installed FC3 last year on my eMachine. I did an immediate install, formatted the HDD to Linux and fiinished the install. Got all the hardware to work, updated everything as needed and thought everything was AOK. Wrong, wrong, wrong!!!! The computer started rebooting, freezing, crashing and everything was horrible.

Well to make the story short, I got recommendations to reformat the HDD and do a clean install. Well, that solved my problems and did FC4 later.
Well, January will be x64 FC4 on my new built and Ubuntu on my e-Machine.