I think I know what is clobbering my Gnome

[John Jason Jordan <johnxj comcast net>]

I have Gnome 2.26.3 on Fedora 11, fresh install three days ago, and up to date
via Update Manager.

Yesterday evening I rebooted and logged in. When Gnome came up I had no window
manager; that is metacity failed to start. However, gnome panel was working, so
I opened a terminal and launched metacity. Since then I have rebooted a couple
times, but invariably metacity does not start. Everything else is fine, but I
always have to start metacity manually after logging in.

This is the fifth time this has happened. (1) and (2) were Debian Testing, (3)
was Fedora 12, (4) was OpenSuse 11.2. Typically it happens during the second
day when I am still installing the apps I need and setting things up the way I
want them. Debian Testing, Fedora 12 and OpenSuse 11.2 all use the recently
released version of Gnome. Therefore, I assumed that my problem was a bug in
the new version, which is why I installed Fedora 11 instead of 12. However,
the events of last night lead me to a different suspect.

It is extremely difficult to pin this down. After installing a distro you spend
several days

get Rhythmbox to see the playlist
file from Rhythmbox on my desktop computer (unsuccessfully), installed Banshee,
uninstalled Virtualbox from Sun, installed Virtualbox OSE. Virtualbox OSE would
not start any guests until I rebooted. So I rebooted, and then I landed without
a window manager.



But Virtualbox OSE does start my guests. One problem solved, bigger problem
created.

As soon as I send this I'm going to uninstall Virtualbox OSE and reboot.