Re: repair of gnome corruption

[Haines Brown <brownh hartford-hwp com>]

Havoc,

Thanks for your patient reply.

> > Again, what should I be reading that would have told me about
> > gconftool-2? 
> 
> There's a sysadmin guide on www.gnome.org/learn (something like that)
> that may be helpful and discusses some of this. It's a bit misguided
> on the topic of gnome-panel configuration though, in part my fault.
> 
> gconftool-2 --help and http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ and 
> the gconf API manual have other information.

I'll pursue all this. Thanks.

> For .gnome and .gnome2 you have to log out and back in, for .gconf you
> have to get gconfd to restart (which will happen as soon as no apps
> are running that use it, after a short timeout; if you're only logged
> in once, in other words, it should happen on logout).

> > problems involve loss of control of the mouse (when moved, it
> > often acts as if I were sweeping it everywhere with the LMB depressed:
> > the mouse jumps to a panel, pops up multiple menus, opens and closes
> > files displayed in a file manager arbitrarily, the mouse locks itself
> > onto a scroll bar so that moving the mouse anywhere on the desktop
> > causes a reverse scroll, etc.
> 
> That sounds like a symptom of bad XFree86 configuration, rather than
> anything GNOME would cause. e.g. I've seen this when choosing the
> wrong type of mouse (PS/2 vs. serial vs. Intellimouse or whatever).
> 

Yes, but I've been running quite a while without problems, which only
came up when X crashed. It turns out that when I overwrote the gnome
directores from a backup and logged out, the mouse so far is behaving
itself and gnome-kayboard-properties saves configuration changes. The
character picker applet is still broken. 
> 
> > A valued applet, character picker, is dead in that I can't change
> > the selected letters. xkbset refuses to remember changes in its
> > configuration.
> 
> No clue there, most likely a bug in that applet.  Specific applet
> config is under /apps/panel/profiles/default/objects/ in gconf
> I believe.

I'll pursue after I've done some reading, starting with the gnome2
admin pdf file I just downloaded. Thanks.

Haines