When I log into GNOME 3, I’m missing the top bar, and the “hot corner” doesn’t work. I can still access the programs I have on Cairo dock, including the terminal, which I can use to launch other programs from command line. Such programs lack a titlebar with its corresponding right-click menu to minimize or close. Everything looks normal in control center and tweak tool, except for items in the latter marked “unable to access shell extensions”. I uninstalled shell extensions but I still see that listed in the theme box where “Adwaita” should show. Cairo dock is surrounded by a black rectangle suggesting that compositing does not work, yet I’m not forced into fallback mode. I can force fallback mode in control center and re-login, where I’m still missing titlebars and still have the black field around Cairo, but I can access the applications menu, or logout. In either mode, I can’t do much before the system freezes, although it still responds to ctrl-alt-bkspc-bkspc. With a test account, I can log into GNOME and everything works, so I presume I have a corrupt configuration file in my primary account. Any ideas how to find it?
Thanks,
GEF
PS: I also have KDE and Enlightenment desktops on this device. GNOME Shell began misbehaving not long after install of Enlightenment, and incidentally cube and some window animations don’t work in that desktop environment. Does anyone know if they’re incompatble, or will I have to uninstall one or the other to find out?
Does anyone know what config files to delete (or rename, just in case) to force GNOME to regenerate and give me what a new user would see on first login?
Thank you, please_try_again. I’ll try that in a moment. In the meantime I’ve found a work around. I can open a terminal, because it’s on the Cairo dock, and type “gnome-shell”. That makes everything work until my next login, but I wonder if this warning might be a clue:
gef@linux-8z27:~> gnome-shell
JS LOG: GNOME Shell started at Thu Sep 15 2011 20:06:07 GMT-0700 (PDT)
(gnome-shell:2798): GdmUser-WARNING **: Unable to parse history: (null) 6
(gnome-shell:2798): GdmUser-WARNING **: Unable to parse history: (null) 5
Renaming dconf/user reset my wallpaper but didn’t solve the problem, so I add gnome-shell to autostart and set it for gnome only as you taught me for Cairo dock*. It works, though I don’t know why it’s necessary. -GEF
*For anyone who didn’t see that post: After creating gnome-shell autostart (through KDE GUI), edit its *.desktop file in ~/.config/autostart to add these two lines:
NotShowIn=KDE;
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
It looks like gnome-shell crashes for some reason when you start Gnome, right? Then you execute gnome-shell and it starts fine. At next login, it would crash again but you put it in autostart as a work around. It is absolutely not necessary (normally). And I think you should find out what makes gnome-shell crash at the first place. Gnome3 still uses a couple configurations inherited from Gnome2 in ~/.ġconf. The gtk theme (AFAIK there is only Adwaita available) is defined in ~/gtk-3.0. You can edit the files settings.ini, gtk.css and gtk-widgets.css to customize the colors, etc - but I wouldn’t do it now before knowing why gnome-shell crashes.
All right, to be honest, I should add that I haven’t use Gnome3 in openSUSE yet (waiting for 12.1) - I just set it up on ArchLinux and Fedora, but it would surprise me if it were different.
I don’t see anything out of order in gconf; I looked at everything in ~/.config that started with a “g” and compared it to my test account. There’s no gtk-3.0 but I found ~/.config/gconf/shell/windows/%gconf.xml that specifies theme adwaita; the other xml files I found in gconf’s tree were empty. I admit my solution is inelegant but I’m willing to wait and see if the upcoming upgrade to 3.2 magically fixes it.