weird problem

[tlawren300]

I'm experiencing a problem with a Fedora 12 machine that I've never seen before. I don't know what happened, so I don't know where to look to fix it. All I can really do is describe what I'm seeing.

Yesterday, after rebooting the machine, loading xdm and gnome took a lot longer than normal. This wasn't to big of an alarm, because I just installed a boat load of updates. However, once I was in gnome, I couldn't run programs like Firefox or Open Office. Things like Konqurer and Terminal ran fine. If I tried to run Firefox or Open Office, then they started up as if they were going to load, but they never did. System monitor showed them to be "Uninterruptible." Killing the processes and re-starting them didn't help. However, if I su'ed to root, then I could run everything as normal.

It looks like a permissions issue, but I don't know where to begin looking to figure it out.

[MikeTbob]

Try launching these programs in a terminal window, usually if there is a problem it will spit an error into the terminal window. Post your results.

[tlawren300]

Running firefox from the terminal results in a hang that I have to Control+C to get out of. The same thing happens with Open Office, although the OO load screen pops up. It just sits there until I drop out of it too.

I should also say that I tried to post this reply in Konqurer on my Linux partition, but the whole thing locked up. I had to reboot and log into Windows to make this post.

[chadfluegge]

What do your log files say?

[sigfrido]

Try to isolate the problem by creating a new user and loggin into that account. Run the stuff that seems to be troublesome. If you don't get any trouble, at least you know the problem has to do with your regular user, or even maybe with your user's settings in the home folder.

[previso]

Sometimes library updates "break" applications because the app is hardwired to the old lib. Try updating the app. Or the update was partial, leaving an incomplete environment. Go for full kernel, rather than piecemeal.

[tlawren300]

@chadfluegge - What log files should I look at? Where can I find them?

@sigfrido - The same issues arise on another user account too. Only root can run things normally.

@previso - I will give updating a few apps a shot first to see what happens.

I apologize for posting a thread and then leaving it for a few days untouched. The problems I am having are on the Fedora partition on my machine at work, and I really haven't had time to try and fix it. I'm sure everyone will agree that a magic "stop time" button would be a great thing to have sometimes!

[chadfluegge]

To look at logs, look in /var/log.

This is one of the hardest things that I have to get used to in linux...to this day, I usually have to be prompted to check the logs for errors.

[tlawren300]

I just re-installed the system. It was more or less a new install.

Thanks for the help anyways.

[Issac]

Fedora 12 has that problem, that's why I always have an extra user to log in if a problem occurs. If you waited for about a week without logging in to that account everything would have gone back to normal.

You can also run into trouble if you try to hide your status bar. The solution is to log in with a different user and undo the setting by editing the xml file of the bottom panel.
The Automatic Bug Reporting Tool does not detect this and I found no way to report this bug.