Preamble:
I have tinkered with Linux for about two years, starting with RH 6.2, which didn't support my video card (but I got it to work after a fashion), Stormix, Mandrake, and now RH 7.1 (kernel 2.4.2-2). My system: celeron333a, 196mbRAM, Intel vid card 8mb, 3gbHD with 900mb free, SB16 soundcard, Intel 100+Pro NIC.
Let me just say, I want to love Linux, I want to use it solely and not be a slave to Gates and his cronies of doom. To that end I moved my Linux box to the place of eminence on my desktop, gave it the ergo-keyboard and larger monitor.
I want to. But, alas, I can not. It seems that every other boot up gives me terrible troubles, mostly in X. I have the Gnome/Enlightenment combo running currently. Sometimes when I boot up and startx I lose all my shortcuts, or my panel won't load. Sometimes X just plain fails to load.
Now. Today's problem. The last week I installed ximian-gnome, which seemed to go really well. I like the Red Carpet install options, and Evolution looks like a really spanky email app. I suggested to my wife that we could just make the switch and turn off the windows machine. I set up Evolution for her (I use pine) and showed her how to use it. I closed it down for her then opened it again and it said "Cannot initialize shell, config. database not found."
Weird. after farting around with it for a while I uninstalled it and got Sylpheed working for her. Fine.
Last night, I got an email saying, in effect, "Evolution is almost ready for base release!" Wahoo, I thought, I'll go get it and try again. Maybe they've fixed it. I grabbed it from RedCarpet, and let it install while I went to bed.
This morning, my desktop is ALL screwed up, with the background image looking like a negative, with all the colours reversed etc. So I logout of X, exit from my user, then log back in. Now, when I startx it goes straight to my desktop, with no Gnome splash screen (where it shows it loading the components), nor Enlightenment opening screen. My mouse arrow remains an 'X' and my panels are gone.
I log out. login as Root, and startx. works just fine, everything is looking good, I get the splash screen etc. and ximian-gnome looks great. All my shortcuts etc. there. Log out. Reboot.
Log back in as my user, and the same thing happens again. My mouse is an X and although now Ihave my panels, all my settings are screwed (custom launchers etc. gone).
Evolution, however, opens just fine now. Go figure.
Anyone have any ideas? Anyone actually read this whole thing?
