I killed my root GUI, HELP!
 

I did a NO NO! When I was rebooting my linux box, I was getting multiply Firestarter screens popping up when I logged into my root account. I went into the gnome GUI and deleted the multiply entries and some how I selected everything in the list and deleted it. As I did this all my icons, interfaces and bar disapeared from the desktop. I can log on to my other accounts without any problems, hence I am typing on line now. Anyone know of a way to fix this without fdisk? I can run most things from my local account if need be, but I would rather restore my root back to default gnome set-up. I have one other problem, my mozilla web browser stopped working after I tried to install java. I know it has something to do with the java, but I can't figure it out yet.

this is for the java: you probably have linked a wrong .so java file into your plugins dir, or at least that's what happened to my mozilla when I installed java into it (I didn't remember the correct .so file so I had to try both of the two out, and picked up the wrong one first..heh)

so, go to your $home/.mozilla/plugins and there should be a file called libjavaplugin_oji.so (was it written like that?). if it's a symlink (check out with ls -l libjavaplugin_oji.so and see if there's an arrow -> that tells it's a symlink) just delete it and re-link the correct file from the directory you installed your java into.

EDIT: and oh, the symlinkin goes of course like this:

ln -s /path/to/the/original/libjavaplugin_oji.so $home/.mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so

where the first path points to the file you want to symlink, and the otherone is the path and name of the actual link file

First off, you SERIOUSLY should not be running your GUI as root. It is much better to use another user and so an su to root for any administrative task that needs it. If you insist on still running gnome as root you should either completely delete the .gnome[*] director{y,ies} or copy the contents of a user's gnome directory into root's and change all the permissions.

I may be wrong but I believe gnome will regenerate a default configuration if there is nothing there.

Yes I would recommend not running as root. There is no reason to run as root because you can su - anytime you want to. And you will have to become more familiar with groups in order to get certain applications to run as a regular user.

I can vouch for the mozilla problem. I linked against the wrong java.so and mozilla refused to work at all.

most likely /something/j2sdk/jre/plugin/i386/ and then you have ns610 or ns610-gcc32 (of three) to choose from. Try 610 first. gcc32 is for gcc 3.2 compilation of mozilla.

java link
 

This is how I made my java link:

ln -s /usr/java/j2re1.4.2_04/plugin/i386/ns610/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

I also did this link:

ln -s /usr/java/j2re1.4.2_04/plugin/i386/ns610/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/mozilla-1.6/plugins/


Is this good/bad or indifferent?