A further update to my SuSE 10 Gnome breaking after doing an apt-update and letting it update openoffice today. I have tried the following to no avail: 1) rpm -ev all the openoffice rpms. No joy. 2) Deleted all $HOME/gconf, $HOME/gconfd, $HOME/gnome, $HOME/gnome2, $HOME/gnome2-private, and $HOME/gtk* directories. No joy. 3) Set ftp://ftp4.gwdg.de/... as my install source in Yast, went to manage software, searched for "gnome", selected everything that already showed as being installed and chose to install it again. No joy. 4) Created a new test account and tested with that. No joy. At this point I am completely clueless. The two things that I can think of are (1) The apt openoffice update changed files belonging to some RPM that I have not installed. I have no idea which nor how to find out what it could be. (2) Even reinstalling RPMs is not updated some configuration file which continues to contain some type of bad data. Every time I go into the GUI, I see a blank screen. I can launch an xterm and manually try launching gnome-session. After spitting out some material which makes no sense to me, it then slowly continues to repeat "Initializing nautilus-open-terminal". I am not completely naive when it comes to PCs, as I hope my steps above show. At this point I have no clue how to set about fixing this problem other than (1) Try booting from source DVD and choose upgrade system again or (2) wipe the thing clean and reinstall. Both options incur a huge cost of time and energy and option (2) is the least palatable. I am also bothered by the fact that if somewhat PC literate people like me can run into issues like this with Gnome which are so difficult to troubleshoot, how will your average home user ever survive with a SuSE desktop home machine running SuSE? I had moved all my daily operations to this SuSE desktop as of version 9.1. Gaim, OpenOffice, FireFox, and Thunderbird on SuSE ruled the day. Now I am completely down and wondering how bad an idea it would be to throw it out the window and put WinBlows on it. My experience with Gnome internals is limited. I use RedHat and SuSE fine in a server only capacity, with cyrus, sendmail. bind, apache with no issues. However, Gnome issues still seem to eat my lunches and dinners! Thank you for bearing with me and any help or ideas anyone has. -- --Moby They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Benjamin Franklin First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me. -- Pastor Martin Niemöller
Every time I go into the GUI, I see a blank screen. I can launch an xterm and manually try launching gnome-session. After spitting out some material which makes no sense to me, it then slowly continues to repeat "Initializing nautilus-open-terminal".
This happened to me, but with KDE instead of Gnome, and across 3 separate machines. I started rolling packages back to the DVD versions, 2 or 3 packages at a time. Things cleared up and the GUI started working again when I restored fontconfig to it's original version. I left OOo at the latest apt version through all this. I don't know the connection to fontconfig, or even if it was the offending app since it was at the end of my list and it may have been a cumulative effect of rolling KDE and QT back to the DVD versions as well... but it may be worth investigating. What other updates did you do when you did an apt update... try rolling back fontconfig to 2.3.2... I dont' know if it'll work, but it might... apt update isn't always the best thing to run... I've found it pays to be a bit selective when doing apt updates - especially so now with SUSE10 just out... you can't always rely on everything in the apt repositories to work 100% in all situations.. it pays to do only a few packages at a time and test them out before moving on to the next group. C.
What other updates did you do when you did an apt update... try rolling back fontconfig to 2.3.2... I dont' know if it'll work, but it might...
Just an update from another thread... ------------- Well, if you want to stay with fontconfig-2.3.91 you have to run fc-cache -f after installing fonts, as there is some bug in fontconfig. Its symptom is crashing every X application. As far as I know, OpenOffice 2.0 installs some fonts, therefore you should run fc-cache afterwords. ------------- Sounds like Kaus has hit on the solution. :-) Thanks Klaus. C.
That is exactly what it was!!! Thank you very much. Clayton wrote:
What other updates did you do when you did an apt update... try rolling back fontconfig to 2.3.2... I dont' know if it'll work, but it might...
Just an update from another thread...
-------------
Well, if you want to stay with fontconfig-2.3.91 you have to run fc-cache -f after installing fonts, as there is some bug in fontconfig. Its symptom is crashing every X application. As far as I know, OpenOffice 2.0 installs some fonts, therefore you should run fc-cache afterwords.
-------------
Sounds like Kaus has hit on the solution. :-) Thanks Klaus.
C.
-- --Moby They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Benjamin Franklin First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me. -- Pastor Martin Niemöller
Moby wrote:
That is exactly what it was!!! Thank you very much.
Thank Klaus :-) There is a thread on this in the opensuse mailing list right now... that's where I got the solution. Hope this helps other people who also have the new fontconfig... C.
On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 02:21 -0500, Moby wrote:
A further update to my SuSE 10 Gnome breaking after doing an apt-update and letting it update openoffice today.
I have tried the following to no avail:
1) rpm -ev all the openoffice rpms. No joy.
2) Deleted all $HOME/gconf, $HOME/gconfd, $HOME/gnome, $HOME/gnome2, $HOME/gnome2-private, and $HOME/gtk* directories. No joy.
3) Set ftp://ftp4.gwdg.de/... as my install source in Yast, went to manage software, searched for "gnome", selected everything that already showed as being installed and chose to install it again. No joy.
4) Created a new test account and tested with that. No joy.
At this point I am completely clueless. The two things that I can think of are (1) The apt openoffice update changed files belonging to some RPM that I have not installed. I have no idea which nor how to find out what it could be. (2) Even reinstalling RPMs is not updated some configuration file which continues to contain some type of bad data.
Every time I go into the GUI, I see a blank screen. I can launch an xterm and manually try launching gnome-session. After spitting out some material which makes no sense to me, it then slowly continues to repeat "Initializing nautilus-open-terminal".
I am not completely naive when it comes to PCs, as I hope my steps above show. At this point I have no clue how to set about fixing this problem other than (1) Try booting from source DVD and choose upgrade system again or (2) wipe the thing clean and reinstall. Both options incur a huge cost of time and energy and option (2) is the least palatable.
I am also bothered by the fact that if somewhat PC literate people like me can run into issues like this with Gnome which are so difficult to troubleshoot, how will your average home user ever survive with a SuSE desktop home machine running SuSE? I had moved all my daily operations to this SuSE desktop as of version 9.1. Gaim, OpenOffice, FireFox, and Thunderbird on SuSE ruled the day. Now I am completely down and wondering how bad an idea it would be to throw it out the window and put WinBlows on it.
My experience with Gnome internals is limited. I use RedHat and SuSE fine in a server only capacity, with cyrus, sendmail. bind, apache with no issues. However, Gnome issues still seem to eat my lunches and dinners!
Thank you for bearing with me and any help or ideas anyone has.
You could use something like the following to see what has been changed most recently: rpm -qa --queryformat '%{INSTALLTIME}\t%{INSTALLTIME:date}\t%{NAME}\n' | sort -g | cut -f 2- That way you can undo the most recent changes. -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998
participants (3)
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Clayton -
Ken Schneider -
Moby