Re: tlug: Gnome Problems

[John Seebach <jseebach@example.com>]

On Thu, Nov 04, 1999 at 08:15:52PM +0900, Dennis McMurchy wrote:
>   I boot RH6.0 to a character login, login and then do 'startx' to
> start up the GUI.  This last step normally takes 15 or 20 seconds to
> complete.  But when this "problem" occurs, the GUI startup hangs for
> 30 seconds or so at several different stages, so that the whole 
> process takes 3 or 4 minutes, which, of course, seems like an eternity.

> Another 'feature' of this glitch is that, although other items on the
> menu seem to work fine, clicking on 'Log Off' has no effect at all, and
> it's necessary to use the old Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.

Hmmm. I'm wondering what your .xinitrc looks like. Could you post a copy? I
never had a problem exactly like the one that you seem to be experiencing
at startup, but I certainly got a lot of weirdness whenever I tried to use
Gnome. I remember having a similar problem once with logging out, and it
seemed to be related to the order in which things were getting run in my
.xsession / .xinitrc .  My recollection is that Gnome was very picky about
the order in which things got started.

>  Gnome-UI-WARNING: While connecting to session manager
>  Authentication Rejected, reason: MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 authentication rejected.

Most of the problems that I had seemed to be related to the session
manager, so I'd suspect that. When I started gnome without it, things
started to work better again. Except I never could get the panel to stay
stable for more than a few login sessions. I don't know why.  

>  I'm not overly enamoured of the Gnome/Windoze BS interface anyway, and
>  this glitch is just enough to send me running back to fvwm, which I
>  liked very much and was never once a problem in the years I used it.   

I pretty much came to the same conclusion. 

[slightly off topic] 
I think the gnome folks are going a great thing, a lot of the stuff is
really cool, and I feel a little guilty about criticising any free software
project, but gnome wasn't ready enough for me. (Or maybe I wasn't ready for
it?) I was never quite happy with KDE, either -- it just seemed clunky. In
the end, I solved all of my "desktop environment" problems by changing the
relevant portion of my .xsession to:

kfm &
exec WindowMaker

And I'm quite happy with the results. I'll give gnome another try, but
probably not for a while.

john
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