[Testing - Trixie] SOLVED - Mate Applets

[Garak]

This is just a heads up to you guys. Something minor, but annoying cropped up in yesterday's updates, notably with xserver and Mate panel software. I didn't check the bugs list, which may or may not have helped, but here we are. In any case, upon logging in, I was given an error that the clock had quit unexpectedly and I was given the options to delete, reload, or not reload, along with the same error for the workspace switcher, windows list, show desktop, and notification area. They all disappeared except, strangely enough, the show desktop button. The Mate Classic Menu was unaffected. First instinct was to just try to re-add them on the panel. That did not work; same popup errors. Some applets could be added, strangely enough (Window Selector [not Switcher], Shutdown, Mounter, etc). The ones in question could not be added. I thought maybe we just had an incomplete update and left it at that for the day.

Today, I found no updates. I wondered if deleting all the applets that are failing to load, then logging out or rebooting, and coming back in and adding them would work. No success. I checked the xsession-errors and found:

Settings schema 'ca.desrt.dconf-editor.Settings' is not installed

Rather than trying to revert the updates, I decided to first check the install of the dconf-editor package. It wasn't there. I installed it and was able to repopulate all the applets without any issue. I checked /var/log/dpkg.log to see if dconf-editor was previously installed and somehow got uninstalled, but had no record of it whatsoever until I installed it myself.

So, the long and short of it is, in my experience, if you have Mate applets issues today, install dconf-editor and try again.

[kaberett]

Thank you. This fixed the identical problem for me!

[htw]

I registered here and confirmed, just so I could reply to this. (NOTE: I do read here, just hadn't registered yet)

Thanks very much, this morning mate was updated, and all applets kept doing as you describe. Installing dconf-editor and it immediately fixed the issue!

[Garak]

Thanks very much, this morning mate was updated, and all applets kept doing as you describe. Installing dconf-editor and it immediately fixed the issue!

For you and other readers, there was another small incident I'd like to pass on, with much the same symptoms, but apparently a different cause. I had been doing some IceWM logins for a while and there was a small MATE update a couple days back, mate-panel and mate-panel-common from 1.27.1-2+b2 and 1.27.1-2, respectively, to 1.27.1-3. Last night, I finally went back into my MATE, and got the same errors that I had in the original post. I checked the xsessions-errors and there were a whack of them trying to access MATE applets, with none of the dconf issues.

I ended up going into IceWM, since open windows weren't even shown on the bottom, if I was needing to switch between them readily. I was too tired to do a bunch of messing around, and I simply did:

Code: Select all

apt reinstall task-mate-desktop

That took a couple seconds. I shut down, and this morning I rebooted into MATE, and all seems perfectly normal again. MATE seems to like to fight itself during occasional upgrades, but this was a very easy one to fix. Unfortunately, I didn't have the energy or time to do a real diagnosis and see if there was a specific component acting up, but simply reinstalling the task-mate-desktop package turned everything completely normal again.