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[Solved] Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

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FreewheelinFrank
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[Solved] Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#1 Post by FreewheelinFrank »

After a recent update, Gnome 3.4 became corrupted:
  • GDM background persists as Gnome desktop background and is not changeable.
    Terminal opens black and blank- unusable.
    GUIs fallback to Windows 95 like blockyness
    Sceen does not shut down when computer is idle.
I noticed this affected only my user account. Deleting and creating a new account fixed the problems, but booting today they'd come back.

Is there any way to see error messages for Gnome? Any ideas what might be becoming corrupted in user settings?
Last edited by FreewheelinFrank on 2012-08-29 20:30, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#2 Post by schmidtbag »

I haven't extensivly used GNOME in about 3 years, but try renaming the hidden folders in your account that relate to gnome and let them get re-created. This might help. You could have recursive permission problems too.

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#3 Post by FreewheelinFrank »

Hmm.... that just gave me a "Oh no! Something has gone wrong. A problem has occurred and the system can't recover" message.

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#4 Post by schmidtbag »

You either renamed the wrong folders or you didn't do enough and something is trying to make a reference that doesn't exist. Keep going. When you get back to your desktop, you should be able to copy over some settings of individual programs.

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#5 Post by FreewheelinFrank »

Found some more Gnome folders, but still got the same message.

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#6 Post by schmidtbag »

At this point there's probably some permission problems somewhere. I think it'd probably be easiest to copy only the bare minimum of what you need to a new user account and just delete your old one. Stuff like this tends to happen to everyone on just about any DE. I've had the same problem on KDE before where I had to re-do everything in my user account from scratch. It wasn't worth it to me so I personally switched to LXDE which is a lot easier to maintain in situations like this.

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#7 Post by FreewheelinFrank »

I did that but the same problem came back.

I've created a "Test" account and I'm waiting to see if the same problem occurs.

I was interested to see that after deleting my account and folder in /home, when I created an account with the same name, the login screen still had my picture. I'm wondering if GDM still retains some settings which reintroduce the same corruption later on?

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#8 Post by FreewheelinFrank »

The same issue has occurred on a fresh install of Wheezy after rebooting the next day.

On my previous install, the new test account I created wasn't affected, even though I did the same things. It's a mystery what's borking my user settings.

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#9 Post by FreewheelinFrank »

The Terminal is black because the background is black and text is black.

Seems to be this bug here.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/980710

My problems seem to result from some recent updates to GTK.

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#10 Post by FreewheelinFrank »

This bug bug report also seems to describe my problem.
There is some kind of problem with the
newer gnome-shell or its dependencies with the radeon X driver.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=679918

Looks like I'll just have to wait for these issues to be sorted out.

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#11 Post by schmidtbag »

I didn't expect reinstalling would help - usually with such problems it doesn't. You could try sid and see if that helps. Personally I hate Debian's stable and "unstable" branches - to me, they act like old==stable when in fact that isn't true at all. By using sid you do take a chance of something failing on you but considering your quick decision to reinstall, I don't think that would be such a problem to you as long as you recover your stuff. Besides, chrooting can often help in emergency situations.

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#12 Post by FreewheelinFrank »

schmidtbag wrote:I didn't expect reinstalling would help - usually with such problems it doesn't. You could try sid and see if that helps. Personally I hate Debian's stable and "unstable" branches - to me, they act like old==stable when in fact that isn't true at all. By using sid you do take a chance of something failing on you but considering your quick decision to reinstall, I don't think that would be such a problem to you as long as you recover your stuff. Besides, chrooting can often help in emergency situations.
Oh, I was planning to reinstall anyway. I was running Stable and Testing on the same laptop and was always getting confused what I was doing and where.

I'm interested in following Gnome 3 developments, so I chose Testing.

Thanks for the comments, by the way, much appreciated.

I found a workaround for the Terminal problem, which is to go to to Edit>Profile Preferences>Colours and untick Use colours from system theme.

I would like to know why my user account worked for some time and then didn't, and why other user accounts work as expected. As, if I recreate the account, it works as normal, there must be some file somewhere that I could delete as you suggest to reset Gnome Shell.

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#13 Post by schmidtbag »

Like I said before, this isn't uncommon no matter which of the more complex DEs you choose. Things update so often that an old config file is bound to break. When updating packages, they often ask you if you want to replace a config file but they're usually system-wide files located in /etc, rarely are you asked to replace user-based config files. This is really annoying since there are so many of them.

I personally don't feel like using a heavy DE like GNOME, KDE, or Unity until they're more polished. Unfortunately all 3 of them have serious "political" issues of their own.

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#14 Post by PhilGil »

I'm having the same problem on one of my three Wheezy installs. The computer that has issues is a recent bare-metal Wheezy/XFCE install, with Gnome added later. I can create a new user and the first login is fine. On subsequent logins I usually get the "Oh no. Something has gone wrong." error. If Gnome does load, the GTK theme does not work. I have purged and reinstalled gnome-settings-daemon. This is not just a problem with Gnome Shell as the same problem occurs when I try to log in to a Gnome Classic session.

Beyond the usual "delete configuration files and see if the issue persists," I'm just not adept enough at troubleshooting to go further. At present, I'm using XFCE and waiting for the problem to resolve itself.

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#15 Post by schmidtbag »

PhilGil wrote:I'm having the same problem on one of my three Wheezy installs. The computer that has issues is a recent bare-metal Wheezy/XFCE install, with Gnome added later. I can create a new user and the first login is fine. On subsequent logins I usually get the "Oh no. Something has gone wrong." error. If Gnome does load, the GTK theme does not work. I have purged and reinstalled gnome-settings-daemon. This is not just a problem with Gnome Shell as the same problem occurs when I try to log in to a Gnome Classic session.

Beyond the usual "delete configuration files and see if the issue persists," I'm just not adept enough at troubleshooting to go further. At present, I'm using XFCE and waiting for the problem to resolve itself.
Generally speaking, if an update caused this, further updates won't fix it. User files that are obsoleted tend to stay obsoleted. Since XFCE isn't as heavy as GNOME, you might have better luck than FreewheelinFrank when it comes to renaming certain config folders to find exactly where the problem is coming from.

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#16 Post by PhilGil »

@schmidtbag
I agree. I think what's going on is that a Gnome component is writing faulty information to a configuration file somewhere. That would explain why the first time I login to a new profile things are fine, but a failure occurs on the next login attempt. That would also explain why my two older Wheezy/Gnome 3 installs aren't exhibiting the bug.

Once this is resolved, I assume I'll have to delete the faulty config file(s) before the system will replace it/them with good ones.

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#17 Post by FreewheelinFrank »

If I use Gnome-Tweak to try to change the GTK+ theme, I can't do it in my broken user account, but if I log into another account that still displays correctly, I can change the GTK+ theme.

This may help to identify the configuration file, if indeed it is a corrupt config file.

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#18 Post by FreewheelinFrank »

Yay! I found the answer.
A new user works fine. As it turns out, when I said g-s-d was running, ps shows it is, but looking in the logs, it has crashed (every time on login).

I was victim of this bug:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=675763

I’ve worked around it now, by unchecking the “disable touchpad while typing” touchpad preference, which was causing g-s-d to crash on login.

Thanks!
– Kevin
http://debian.distrosfaqs.org/debian-us ... gtk-theme/

Thanks Kevin!

PhilGil, I hope this fixes your problem too!

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Re: Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#19 Post by PhilGil »

FreewheelinFrank wrote:PhilGil, I hope this fixes your problem too!
I don't have the computer with me, but I'll try the fix when I get home. I'm feeling pretty optimistic since the bug report references an EEE PC 1000HE and the computer I'm having problems with is a similar model.

I'll post back and let you know.

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Re: [Solved] Gnome 3.4 in Wheezy corrupted user setttings?

#20 Post by PhilGil »

Thank you FreewheelinFrank! I unchecked "disable touchpad while typing" and all is now well on my EEE PC 1000H.

Gnome shell seems to be well suited to a small screen netbook.

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