Matthew Wilcox wrote:
If one upgrades an hppa machine to unstable and tries to start gnome, the first problem one encounters is that gnome-panel tells you that it's already running about 9 times, then nothing happens. Downgrading gnome-panel (and its dependencies -- gnome-panel-data, gnome-utils, libgnomevfs2-common and some misc libs) to 2.8.3-1 makes it work.
I don't think this is an hppa bug; it happens to me on i386 on every log in, and lots of other people too. The panel does show up for me, though, and I only get one "Already running" error. It's this bug: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309506
The problem, I think, has gone away in GNOME 2.14 by removing gnome-smproxy. Try disabling that and see if it fixes your problem.
This could all be due to having had to install older versions of packages to make gnome-panel work, of course. Or maybe there's some common bug in an underlying library causing all these problems.
My first reaction would be to try installing the up-to-date versions of all GNOME packages.