Re: Windows decorations lost. Have to start gnome-wm manually.

[John Jason Jordan <johnxj comcast net>]

On Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:50:10 +0200
David Harel <hareldvd gmail com> dijo:

>Seems I am onto a huge bug.
>Editing the main menus can cause total malfunction of desktop
>resulting in windows decorations and frame loss and therefore
>inability to move windows around.
>Not getting anyone to direct me to proper documentation, I had to 
>perform some trial on error searches and eventually I found the 
>directory ~/.local/share/applications where *.desktop files reside as
>a result of editing the main menu.
>3 files I removed from that directory saved the day.
>1. 'gnome-wm.desktop' - when removed, windows decorations returned.
>2. 'nautilus.desktop' - when removed, desktop icons returned.
>3. 'firefox.desktop' - a small issue, the firefox icon got removed
>from the top panel. removing this file returned the icon.
>
>My machine is a Fujitsu/Siemens laptop running Ubuntu 9.10
>
>Any idea if this is a bug ?

I don't know for sure if it is a bug, but I had a similar experience.

After several years of nothing but Ubuntu I recently went 64-bit
distro shopping. I bought a new hard disk for my laptop and put the
Ubuntu disk on the shelf.

I started with Debian Testing. Toward the end of the second day I
rebooted. When Gnome came up I had no Gnome panel and no window
manager. I had to launch them manually with "gnome-panel" and
"metacity." I spent hours trying to figure out how to get them back.

Eventually I gave up and installed Fedora 12. This time I rebooted
frequently. On the morning of the second day I found I had lost
metacity, although gnome-panel was still working. 

I couldn't figure out how to get it back, so I wiped out Fedora 12 and
installed OpenSuse 11.2. At the end of the first day I lost metacity
again. 

I noted that all three of these distros used Gnome 2.8.x, so I blamed
it on a bug in 2.8.x. Therefore, I wiped out OpenSuse 11.2 and
installed 11.1 instead. After two days I never lost metacity or
gnome-panel, but I didn't like OpenSuse very much. So I wiped it out
and installed Fedora 11, which also uses an older version of Gnome. At
the end of the second day I lost metacity again. Rats! Apparently the
problem is not in the new versions of Gnome.

I never discovered what I was doing that caused the problem. It could
well be exactly what you described - editing menus, because I did a lot
of that. However, I edited menus in OpenSuse 11.1 the same way, yet
never had a problem. I'm guessing it's just one specific thing that
maybe I never got around to doing in OpenSuse 11.1.

Like you, I finally located the problem in ~/.local/share/applications.
In my case the evil file was metacity.desktop. I renamed it and have
had no problems since.

I documented this all previously in a different thread on this list.

I am glad you posted here about your issue. Our problems are clearly
related and you at least added that it was caused by editing menus. I
have not filed a bug report because I could not reproduce the problem.
If we can get to the point where we can reproduce it reliably we
definitely need to file a bug report.

I also looked in the Gnome bug tracker web site, but could not find
anything at all like this. But the web site is hopelessly confusing, so
it is possibly due to my ineptness at searching.