Re: Gnome 2 on RedHat 9 and Solaris

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2003 at 01:46:54PM -0700, Chris Majewski wrote: 
> I tried it now and get various more or less fatal errors. For example,
> if I log on to a Solaris box via Gnome 2, then logout and log on to a RedHat
> box, I get no menu bar on the RedHat box. So I can't even logout! 

This is not expected behavior, so would need debugging to see what
goes wrong. It may be an issue for GNOME 2.0 (Solaris) vs. 2.2 (RHL
9)?

One thing you could do that may help is to edit /etc/gconf/2/path on
the Solaris and Linux systems and change the $HOME/.gconf directory to
have a different name on each. Then you would get separate
configuration on each system. It's worth a try anyhow.

> If I log on to a RedHat box first, then logout and log on to a Solaris
> box, Gnome on  the Solaris box complains that  the configuration is in
> use and forces me to logout again.

Ugh, most likely some NFS locking issue. See 
www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/

Try setting GCONF_LOCAL_LOCKS=1 in /etc/profile.d on the RHL 9
systems. With the local DOS security caveat on the gconf web site,
which probably doesn't matter.

Another option is to enable ORBit TCP.

> With Gnome 1.4, we managed to make things work via an ugly hack on the Solaris
> servers,  which would  rename the  ~/.gnome directory  on  logout, and
> rename it back  on login. (Of course this  meant user preferences were
> not shared between Linux and Solaris). 

You could still do this, you just need to cover .gconf as well. But
the less hacky way to do it by editing the gconf path file should
work.

> With  2.0 this  no longer  works,  even if  I use  .gnome2 instead  of
> .gnome.  And  when I spoke to  the Gnome developers a  while ago, they
> claimed  that  running 2.0  on  both  platforms  would solve  all  our
> problems. On the contrary, it seems to make them worse. 

Probably unsurprisingly, the Red Hat Linux / Solaris NFS homedir
sharing case hasn't been extensively tested as a release criterion for
those OS's. But in principle nobody should have made changes that
break this, and I actively consider this case and encourage others to
do so when evaluating changes.

So, it is expected to work. I predict the problem is one or two fairly
easy to address bugs, but probably hard to track down.

Havoc