Hi everybody

A couple of days ago I was using Google Chrome and hit ctrl+shift+n to open a new incognito tab. Then suddenly the upper and lower panels of my GNOME Classic Desktop stop working and disappear. I tried to restart the desktop from tty1 console (I pressed ctrl+alt+f1), and also tried to reinstall gnome desktop and gnome panel from synaptic. None of these workarounds didn't work. I even tried "rm -rf .gnome*" in order to the GNOME enviroment to ask for a fresh setting up, but nothing.

Am I missing something here???

Debian GNU/Linux 7.7 (Wheezy)
GNOME 3 Desktop
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.8 GHz, 2GB RAM

How did you install Chrome?

Can you select the non-Classic GNOME desktop from the GDM login screen?

Does that work?

Hi Head_on_a_Stick!

I installed chrome-stable mamanually a couple of weeks ago, because i couldn't get flash working right on Chromium; then I uninstalled Chromium and any other web browser. I downloaded Chrome frome Google's official site.

And yes, I can Log in into GNOME non-classic, KDE and TWM without any additional issues. Everything else works just fine!

I have no idea why your bars are gone, but my first question still stands:

When you say "downloaded Chrome from Google's official site" -- what exactly did you download from that site?

When you say "I installed chrome-stable mamanually [sic]" -- how exactly did you do this?

Just to note, Google Chrome has an unofficial repository for Debian:
http://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/

Oh I see! Well, all the process went as follows:

I got the google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb file from Google Chrome's site. At home, you find a download button with the label "Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE". Once you clicked the button, a selection windows emerged and then you choose Google Chrome for Debian/Ubuntu 64 bits, and accept the terms and conditions and so on.

Once the file was in my HDD, I right-clicked on it and chose open with Sofware Center. I could also chose Synaptic to accomplish this task. This is what I call "manual", because Synaptic has two categories: Installed and Manually Installed to differenciate those packages in the official Debian's repositories from those you downloaded for yourself anywhere else. There's always the actual manual method, i.e., from command line but this time I used one of Debian's installing utilities.

As I stated before, I tried the most usual solutions: restarting X server, deleting .gnome* directories, etc., unsuccesfully. I am now using Non-classic GNOME desktop manager because the problem is still there... any hint???

I had a quick search but I could only find stuff relating to Ubuntu.

The solutions were to change the ATI/AMD graphics drivers to the proprietary versions -- are you using an ATI/AMD graphics card?

There were also (old) suggestions to load up gnome-tweak-tool and deselect the option to have the file manager control the desktop -- this isn't even an option in my version of GNOME (I have jessie & sid); do you have this option in wheezy?

Well, I have an Intel PC not an AMD. My motherboard is a FOXCONN with integrated Intel graphics chipset i945G. You can see more details in my signature below. Am I gonna need Intel drivers instead?

I could launch the GNOME Panel double clicking the gnome-panel file via Nautilus. But the window manager doesn't work at all. I Think after loging in, the gnome session manager fail to start the gnome shell and/or the gnome shell extensions. I've been looking up at the log files but found nothing yet.

OK, I think we may be onto something here -- I find Nautilus "takes over" the desktop sometimes in my GNOME (non-classic) desktop, so much so that I've removed it and can't use GNOME-classic anymore...

Have a look in dconf-editor for the Nautilus options (org.gnome.nautilus) and see if playing around with those helps.

I tried the dconf-editor option and played around with some of the parameters and nothing. Then I tried to go deeper and made some research.

When I login, gdm3 (GNOME Display Manager 3) calls upon gnome-session (GNOME 3) or gnome-session-fallback (GNOME Classic) depending on what session I chose before logging in. Then finally the selected gnome-session* calls upon various program in order to prepare the desktop enviroment: gnome-shell, gnome-panel, metacity, etc. Thus, I think gnome-session-fallback's conf file has been corrupted and that's why the session program is failing to launch the panel, the desktop manager and the windows/compositing manager. The panel is still missing; when I get to open a nautilus file manager, ther are no borders, status bar or title bar. Then, with the file manager, I open gnome-panel from /usr/bin which starts the top and bottom panels up so I can open other programs via Applications Menu. The windows manager is still missing at this point, so I can't move or resize any opened window. I can't even close any window because there aren't any action buttons. To this point, I'm stuck!

In the meantime I installed KDE and XFCE. Both of them have been working well so far.

Hi again!

After a few hours reading manuals, modifiying rc riles, I could'n get nothing usuful: my GNOME Classic Session still didn't work properly so I decided to make a backup of al my documents, created a new linux user and deleted the old one. Once I logged in my GNOME Classic session with my new user, everything worked just fine.

This isn't the solution I wanted at all. But in the meantime I'll keep looking at a true solution. I know where to look at now: my home's hidden conf files.

That's all for now!

And thank you very much for help Head_on_a_Stick!