On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 08:13:14PM -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote: [... huge snip of history of metacity & gnome panel faiilng to start ... ] > Tony suggested polluting my new user alter ego with the gnome > configuration files from my regular self. I started by just > renaming .gconf, .gnome2 and .gnome2_private, then logging out and back > in again as myself. There was no change - metacity and gnome-panel > still did not start. > > Yet they do start for my new user alter ego. So I used Tony's > suggestion and copied my original .gconf, .gnome2 and .gnome2_private > files to the new user, then logged in as the new user. The new user > still had metacity and gnome-panel. > > Conclusion: The problem is somewhere in my configuration files, but not > in .gconf, .gnome2 or .gnome2_private. okay, there should be, at this point, very few dot-files in your alter-ego. If not, make another one and don't do *anything* extra in that account. Just login to it, confirm that it looks reasonably right, and logout. Then as root or some other user, take a full listing of that user's /home directory. Since you've already tested .gconf, .gnome2 and .gnome2_private, then the problem is in one of the other dot-files. It should be a fairly small set and fairly easy to test each one. Just copy them over one-by-one from the broken user (make sure to fixup permissions on the files, this is probably important), logging in and out each time, until it breaks. Oh!, you should check out ~/.dmrc. It should say: [Desktop] Session=default anything else, at this point, is probably doing more harm than good. This is the file that tells gdm which session to start for the user (there are multiple sessions specified in /usr/share/xsessions, at least in the past that was the way it worked). A
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