No Desktop Application Menus in Gnome after update

[toddb@toddbailey.net]

So what happened?

I allowed a automatic update to run and after a suggested reboot, none of the desktop applications had menus any more.

Very frustrating

when booting into KDE menus are present so it's just a gnome corruption.

I tried reinstalling gnome.... but no change
It's not limited to my user account any login has same issues.

I even posted a bug for gnome and fedora 11, but they don't seem to care..


Any ideas what to try?

[Lost_scrib]

I tried reinstalling gnome

How exactly did you try to reinstall? If rpm (yum) finds already installed Gnome, by default it's not making any changes...
rpm -q -a *gnome*
will show you what packages are really installed. You can try to force un-install them with rpm and install them again using yum.

[toddb@toddbailey.net]

as I recall the exact cmd I used was 'yum -reinstall gnome-desktop gnome*'

it displayed a long list of "modules" that it was going to reinstall and then proceeded to download and install them with out any errors.

Using evolution email for example, I even tried a complete uninstall/erase of this application and reinstall, but still no menus.

On ocassion, during the first few seconds of an applications's start up I see a blank area where the menus would normally occupy, but it is quickly reduced in vertical size to a fraction required to support the menu space

[devils casper]

Execute this

gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/panel

[toddb@toddbailey.net]

thanks but that just made matters worse

no in addition to not having any menus in desktop applications, I don't have any entries in the top and bottom panels.

hopefully I can fix the panel issue by reinstalling gnome-panel.

[Lost_scrib]

Well, that's a pretty strange story...
Are you sure that the bad behaviour applies to a new added user too?

If so, would you like to try to

1. remove (backup) /etc/gconf
2. add a new user
3. reinstall GConf2-gtk package
4. login as a new user to a Gnome session

If this doesn't help then you have 2 choices:
Download and install a lot of stuff - for a preview look at
yum list --disablerepo=* *gtk*
and maybe also
yum list --disablerepo=* *gnome*
Or do a fresh install on your strange machine

[toddb@toddbailey.net]

deleting the gconf folder broke all sorts of things, I couldn't even login to a desktop, so I tried to reinstall everything to regenerate all the configuration files but even that didn't work.

I eventually restored the backup conf folder and I'm back to where I started.

This isssue is a real problem child and for my own educational pursuits I want to figure out what happened and how to fix it.

interesting that it only happens on a few desktop applications, at least firefox still works, but email and terminal to list a few do not.

[Lost_scrib]

Great... I believe we're getting closer...

What are the applications that don't work? From the original message it looked like all apps are misbehaving. In the gconf folder should be stored vital desktop definitions, as I'm suspecting.
My reference guide is poor GConf documentation at GConf configuration system.
From what I see, there are definitions for each Gnome application in the /etc/gconf/schemas folder. When an application is misbehaving, there should be an appropriate .schema file somehow corrupted.

You said:

I tried to reinstall everything to regenerate

What exactly did you do? According to the GConf2 documentation, you should reinstall the application (terminal, email...) itself, which now makes some sense, since you've reinstalled the back-end.

[toddb@toddbailey.net]

Getting closer, absolutely.

At least we know what folder is causing the breakage
And now I have a work around.

The clue was the gconf folder.

It occurred to me that perhaps I could just copy the folder from a working machine with the same os and same installed apps.

So as far as I can tell, apps like evolution email, open office, boinc and terminal have the drop down menus visible again...

yea,

[Lost_scrib]

Nice! Would be interesting what files have been screwed up and how...


Don't forget to backup the working configuration! Just in case...