Redhat 9 graphical interface corruption
 

I have an Intel machine running Red Hat Linux 9 that has been stable for the last few months of use. Today when I logged in I found that the graphical interface was
severely corrupted, with minuscule illegible fonts, icons arranged in a peculiar way, and a number of rectangular windows with red and green push-buttons. When I log in as root everything looks fine. How do I fix this problem?

Here is some more data on the problem.

The top of the very long .xsession-errors file (edited) reads

** (gnome-session:2035): WARNING **: Error getting value of /desktop/gnome/sound/enable_esd: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details - 1: IOR file '/home/asimen/.gconfd/lock/ior' not opened successfully, no gconfd located: No such file or directory 2: IOR file '/home/asimen/.gconfd/lock/ior' not opened successfully, no gconfd located: No such file or directory)

...

Window manager warning: 0 stored in GConf key /apps/metacity/general/num_workspaces is not a reasonable number of workspaces, current maximum is 32

...

** (gnome-panel:2580): CRITICAL **: file panel-gconf.c: line 322 (panel_gconf_associate_schemas_in_dir): assertion `*error == NULL' failed

...

(nautilus:2582): Eel-WARNING **: GConf error:** (gnome-panel:2580): CRITICAL **: file panel-gconf.c: line 322 (panel_gconf_associate_schemas_in_dir): assertion `*error == NULL' failed

** (gnome-panel:2580): WARNING **: gconf error: ...

(nautilus:2582): Eel-WARNING **: GConf error: ...

(nautilus:2582): Eel-WARNING **: GConf error: ...


** (gnome-panel:2580): WARNING **: Unable to load panel stock icon 'go'

...

(nautilus:2582): Bonobo-WARNING **: Failed to get '/desktop/gnome/interface/menubar_detachable'


Thanks.

Check the directory permission of ~/.gconf and ~/.gconfd
 

Check the dirctory permission of ~/.gconf and ~/.gconfd, is it 700?
if not ,chmod -R 700 ~/.gconf ~/.gconfd ,try again.

The permissions are all OK. Any other suggestions?

I am having the same problem which I am working trying to fix in the followng thread.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...814#post670814

Hopefully we can keep each other informed as to a solution

Good luck

I had a similar problem after upgrading XFree86 packages yesterday (Feb 16).
Initially, I suspected of the directory permission, but there was no obvious
problem. Silly me, then, I tried to see if chmod -R o+rw ~/.gconfd solves
the problem. The symptom was worse. Some new programs must took the
old no longer compatible data and tried to use that: the result is totally
garbled screen. Unproportionally large warning box that, before the silly change,
showed the warning message except that now the font is no longer rendered thus
no messages inside. And as a matter of fact the box is so large it doesn't fit
horizontally in the LCD screen, etc..

Anyway, after looking at the previous posts, I removed the old gconf, gconfd directories.
mv .gconf .gconf.old
mv .gconfd .gconfd.old

I reran startx and all is well now.

Looks to me that there is a slight incompatibility that sneaked in during
the upgrade or something.

Hope this helps.