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