Re: More Gnome strangeness

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2001 at 05:44:48PM -0600 or thereabouts, Matthew Hoffman wrote:
> My Gnome was installed at the time of my general Red Hat distro 
> installation, so I would think it was installed using RPM.  I hate to say 
> this, but I tried to determine what verison I'm running, and can't.  How 
> do you do it?

It's annoying, isn't it? :) There's no easy "what is this version of
Gnome?" in the menu. There is a gnome-about program you can run at the
command-line in a gnome-terminal, but that's just the credits for GNOME
and doesn't have the version of Gnome in it. "System info" on the menu
doesn't have it either. 

I usually suggest just checking the version of gnome-core and gnome-libs.
This gets complicated because some distros use different names for them.
But "rpm -q gnome-core gnome-libs" will work on RH. "dpkg -l gnome-core"
works on Debian, but I forget the package name for what I call gnome-libs.

RH 7.0 came with Gnome 1.2. I know, because I have it too. 

As to the original problem: 
> > 
> > On 09 Mar 2001 22:02:48 -0600, Matthew Hoffman wrote:
> > > I've got some more strangeness on my hands...
> > > 
> > > After exiting Netscape Navigator, a bunch of KDE icons appeared 
> > > on my Gnome screen spontaneously.  I got out of Gnome and X, and 
> > > went back in, and the KDE icons were gone.  
> > > 
> > > Is this, in combination with my disappearing task bar and unvailable 
> > > alternate sessions of Gnome, sounding like a virus?  If so, how can I 
> > > deal with it? Again, I'm running Red Hat Linux 7 on an x86.  Thanks!

It sounds more like Netscape weirdness to me, but I am biassed. I have
had Netscape do weird things to my machine and I like to blame everything 
on it. 

Disappearing taskbar: is this the bar at the bottom of the screen? That's
the Gnome panel. If you have a terminal you can type into, "panel &" should
either restore it, or whinge that you already have a panel running. If you
have a panel running (allegedly), then Gnome is confused. The panel will
have said "hello, I exist" to Gnome. It's then supposed to say "I'm going
away now" when it stops running. But sometimes it dies without saying 
that and Gnome thinks it's still there. This business of getting the
"But a panel is already running!" message when there is a conspicuous
lack of a panel used to occur, but I really thought it had been fixed by
Gnome 1.2. 

I'm not sure about unavailable alternate sessions. This sounds like you
are logging in through gdm, the Gnome display manager (aka "the graphical
login prompt". I believe that offers choices of sessions? I don't use 
this so I can't really offer much help here. 

Telsa