I've been playing around with Beryl and Samba with Fedora Core 6 (using Gnome), and recently I uninstalled both. Now, when I try to log in, it looks like it's starting to login and I get both the bottom and top bar, but no icons appear and I cannot log out/do anything else. I can successfully log into root, though. Any ideas on what may be happening, here? Apologies if this is a newb question; I'm a bit of a linux newb.

Is it possible when you uninstalled Beryl you damaged your Gnome installation? One hint would be to note if your root login is via X (Gnome) or uses a plain text screen.

Hi cmnorton,

I still have the graphical user login screen (when attempting to log in to my user account or the root account) and I can still log in as root with gnome, with no problem.

EDIT: I guess this problem is half-solved. I deleted my user account and created another one. I wanted to find a way around that, but I guess for now this is all I can do. Thanks for your help anyway.

The best guess that I can make is that your gnome desktop needed to be reset. The need to do this happened to me quite a few times with earlier versions of Evolution on RHEL 3. I have not run into this problem in nearly a year.

Here is one way to reset the GNOME desktop:

Boot the machine into runlevel 3, "init 3".

Create a backup directory, and move all the files starting with ".g" in it.

mkdir backup
mv .g* backup

This will effectively preserve your original GNOME settings but delete the desktop files as far as GNOME is concerned. Then, when you restart X, init 5, your desktop will be created to its default configuration.

I tried checking differences between the default configuration and what I had saved. Nothing popped up as an obvious problem. If I had known more about GNOME, there probably would have been a more elegant way to handle this, instead of resetting the GNOME files.

Interesting update on this: it seems that it will work with the older kernel, I don't have any problems logging in, but not the latest one (it freezes)... (but the latest kernel fixes sata boot issues).

EDIT: After installing the latest drivers for my graphics card (ATI radeon x300), these issues were fixed.