Entries tagged gnome

My GNOME desktop is broken upon my primary machine, and it has taken me too long to get it sorted out.

Short version: metacity will not run:

skx@vain:~$ metacity
metacity: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_thread_gettime

The .so file referenced is a symlink to libgthread-2.0.so.0.1200.13, and using nm I can see there are no symbols listed:

skx@vain:~$ nm /usr/lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0.1200.13
nm: /usr/lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0.1200.13: no symbols

That seems weird to me, but libraries are mysterious beasts, so I might be expecting this behaviour?

Anyway dpkg claims this file is installed by libglib2.0-0, and the package hasn't had an upload since July 17th, so I can't believe this is the reason for the recent breakage (Even given that I don't logout often..)

Reinstalling both packages (metacity + libglib2.0-0) has failed to fix the problem so I'm lost.

Right now I'm running GNOME with a different window manager, icewm, via a ~/.gnome2/session file:

gnome-wm --default-wm /usr/bin/icewm-gnome --sm-client-id default0

This works almost perfectly - it is better than metacity in the sense that new windows don't overlap existing ones if there is spare screen space, but worse in that alt-TAB shows two windows "Top extended Edge Panel" and "Bottom Extended Edge Panel" - which I don't need/want to see.

I'd be happy to stay with IceWM if I could fix those two problems, but I'd love to know why metacity is broken, and how I can fix it. I can't see any obvious bug reports - and I'm not 100% certain that the gthread package is the source of the error...

Any suggestions welcome.

ii  metacity       1:2.18.5-1     A lightweight GTK2 based Window Manager
ii  libglib2.0-0   2.12.13-1      The GLib library of C routines

Tags: gnome, lazyweb, metacity, vain.my.flat | No comments

I was interested to see Adnan Hodzic discuss life without evolution in the GNOME environment recently.

I too use GNOME as my desktop environment (I sometimes toy with various tiling window managers before getting annoyed at something or other).

My solution to the GNOME problem is to purge the gnome-desktop-environment package and instead my own local package gnome-desktop-minimal. This package is a meta-package which includes a smaller selection of GNOME packages, notably ignoring several that the gnome-core package would pull in such as eog - why install that when I prefer qiv or feh?

If I believed we could agree on precisely which packages to include I would submit a bug to the gnome team "Please provide gnome-desktop-minimal" or similar. Still I suspect individual biases/preferences will make such a suggestion contentious at best and impossible to satisfy at worst.

ObTitle: Léon

Tags: gnome, meta-packages | 12 comments

I look after a bunch of servers, working for Bytemark that is not a surprise, but I only touch a very small number of desktop systems.

precious - My desktop

This is the machine upon which I develop, check my personal mail, play my music & etc.

steve - My work machine

To keep the working from home separation going I have a machine I only use for work purposes.

travel/travel2 - EEPC box

I have two EEPC machines, a personal 701 and a work-provided 901.

Honestly these rarely get used. One is for when I'm on holiday or traveling, the second for when I'm on-call.

Yesterday I got round to upgrading both the toy EEPC machines to wheezy. The good news? Both of them upgraded/reinstalled easily. Hardware was all detected, sleeping, hibernation, wifi, etc all "just worked".

Unfortunately I am now running GNOME 3.x and the experience is unpleasant. This is a shame, because I've enjoyed GNOME 2.x & bluetile for the past few years.

The only other concern is that pwsafe appears to be scheduled for removal from Debian GNU/Linux - the list of open bugs shows some cause, but there are bugs there that are trivial to fix.

For the moment I've rebuilt the package and if I cannot find a suitable alternative - available for squeeze and wheezy - then I will host the package on my package repository.

In conclusion: Debian, you did good. GNOME, I've loved and appreciated you for years, but you might not be the desktop I want these days. It's not you, it's me.

Tags: gnome, pwsafe, wheezy | 24 comments