Gnome 2 and notebook troubles

[xkalibur8]

I've been having problems with my Gnome2 session on my Compaq Armada ever since I cleanly installed 1.4rc1. The strange thing is that I'm running the same setup on 2 other machines (desktops), with no problem at all. Forgive me for paraphrasing as I'm at work, without my notebook:

On almost every login, even with a newly created user (on her very first login), I get an error prompt stating that the Gnome Settings Daemon failed to start, that it restarted to quickly (IIRC), and that certain settings, yada yada, might not work. When this first started I tried starting gnome-settings-daemon, even manually adding it to my session, with mixed but ultimately unsuccessul results. On logins where I don't get this message, and sometimes when I do, I get an error prompt to the tune of "Can't start 'OAFID:some_applet: INV_OBJREF etc." (like I said, slight paraphrasing, i'm doing this from memory). So gnome settings daemon loses my applets, then I can't restart them. And on random occasions there's no problem at all and i can add everything back. I do remember an error when emerge'ing gnome, I think I restarted the emerge or maybe 'emerge rsync'ed first, it's been a while. But I just recently removed every gnome package I could think of as a culprit, like gnome-session, gnome-desktop, but not gnome-media or something like that. Nearly all the gnome libs. Then I emerge rsync'ed, and emerged gnome again (which got me an updated X as well). Same problem, no luck. I also updated gnome2 on one of those other boxes and no problem at all.

So I'm thinking something must have gotten built wrong, linked against the wrong lib, somewhere in the mix. Oh yeah, just remembered: and sometimes in Evolution, I can't create a new composer window. But, if I just keep clicking "Reply" (or New Message), about the 3rd or 4th time it creates the composer window no problem. What gives? Could this actually be a hardware problem? I'm >this< close to format and reinstalling, but I usually reserve that for win32 os's. Furthermore Gnome, Evolution, Mozilla, X... all takes quite some time to build on a 650Mhz notebook

[ssbilly5]

just wanted to chime in that i am having the same issue,

Unfortunately, I am having no luck at all getting gnome-settings-daemon working. grah. anyhow right now most of my gnome2 programs aren't working, and definately gnome-settings-daemon isn't, it just sits there and doesn't do anything. i don't know if the is just the latest ebuild or what, but it is really frustrating, and since i don't have an old ebuild laying around for some reason i can't just emerge an old version.

maybe this is a bug or something is anyone else having this issue?

anyway someone could email me an old ebuild for control-center that is pre control-center-2.0.1.1.ebuild?

thanks

John

[ssbilly5]

well i figured out my problem, and i don't know if this will help you or not, but gnome-settings-daemon, needs some ports opened for localhost, which i had blocked by my iptables, so try turning off your iptables and then seeing what happens, and go from there. hope that helps some.

john

[xkalibur8]

Well i didn't have iptables running on my notebook, however the problem does seem to stem from network misconfigurations. I was using ifplugd daemon (quite nice actually) to bring up net.eth0, samba, etc. when my network cable was plugged in, and bring it down otherwise. Seems manually doing this in the ifplugd.action file was shoddy and created gnome-session madness. However, I just found in the Gentoo docs on the rc system, it's much cleaner to just make separate "online" and "offline" runlevels. Now I just switch runlevels on the fly, and Gentoo's rc system takes care of PROPERLY starting and stopping services. I'm really impressed! And to top it all off, my gnome session works great now! Anyone with a laptop that wants a good solution for network connectivity should check out ifplugd and Gentoo's runlevel system.