Desktop not starting properly

Hi,

My daughter's new AcerOne (with Linpus) fails to startup properly after a normal shutdown yesterday. It boots up properly then when the desktop should appear we see black & white horizontal stripes across the screen. Only the search facility appears in the top right and (what I think is) the xfce star shaped button top left - it's tool tip says "New Item This item has not yet been configured". I can get up a terminal and the task manager equivilent with Ctrl+Alt+Del but my Linux knowledge is patchy. I'm guessing the desktop configuration somehow got changed before shutdown, obviously a full reboot didn't help. Any ideas how this happened - and how I can start the desktop from the command line? I'm hoping that if I start it up, shutdown properly (saving config automatically) that all will be well...?

 

The command to start the desktop from the command line is

Code:

xfdesktop2

It's worth a try, although if something nasty has happened to the configuration files you may still have difficulty. One thing which might help, if the desktop still won't start, is to "hide" your user configuration files for xfce (the underlying desktop manager) by renaming them: in the terminal this would be:

Code:

cd /home/user/.config
mv xfce4 xfce4-old
mv xfce4-session xfce4-session-old

No guarantees on this, but usually if a Linux desktop manager can't find user settings it re-creates a standard set; whether Acer's modification will have broken this behaviour I don't know.

 

Hi David,

Thanks for the reply, I renamed the config files and restarted the desktop via a terminal window - this worked and I now have most of the desktop back. I don't have the task bar along the bottom (with the shutdown,clock etc.) any ideas how I restart that? Also the big star icon (which I've seen before on xfce - top left) is top most and sitting on top of the 'Connect' panel partially obscuring the browser icon.

 

Have a look at this thread; it sounds like the same problem.

 

Thanks, I've been looking through the thread and where it links off to... it's definitely related, but the instructions about re-building your own task bar seem fair enough enough except for some reason now Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't bring up the Task Monitor it locks the desktop! Sorry... I feel a bit helpless!

 

Does alt-F2 bring up a 'run program' dialog? If so, you can do the xfce4-panel -a command in there; if not, can you get to "My Files" and get a terminal by going to File -> Terminal on the menus?

The Ctrl-alt-del behaviour is managed within the xfce comtrol (xfce-setting-show from the run program dialog or terminal) panel under Keyboard -> Shortcuts. To restore the shortcuts you're used to, set the command 'gnome-system-monitor' to be called by Ctrl-Alt-Del.

 

Ok - to answer your questions I can access Alt+F2 to run commands, and had already found how to right click enable the system settings menu and run terminals etc. I followed your instructions about editing the keyboard shortcuts and created a new Keyboard theme - that worked fine. I was then able to follow the 'Modify your Taskbar' thread. But at that point still no network, I had noted someone had found the same. I rebooted, thankfully my taskbar was still there and then after running the browser it prompted me to connect to a Wifi router, and I was off and running.

This prompts the questions - obviously some config files got corrupted, I had run a update after setting it up on Xmas day, maybe it hadn't been rebooted until last night when all this started (?) - but any ideas as to how this happened? Also I'm worried that something as yet undiscovered is also corrupted...? My instinct tells me that an update/download that is interrupted by a power save causes corrupt files.

Any more problems and I'll be looking to move over to Ubuntu I think.

Thanks enormously for your help though... if it gives problems again... I'll be back!!!

 

Actually one further quick question... The network doesn't auto sense the wifi - I can only enable it by effectively failing to connect, then the network icon appears in the system tray with a red x,so I click and tell it to connect to my router - all fine - except not the previous behaviour and too hard for my 8 year old!!

 

Two things come to mind:

1. The boot process starts the network and powersave after the desktop (this is seriously non-standard Linux behaviour!), so if the desktop had not loaded fully normally it may have stopped loading stuff at that point.

2. There is a script called nowait.sh which is what actually loads the network etc. This may have been damaged at some point (it has been amended by Live Updates in the past). If you copy the contents of your nowait script (use

Code:

mousepad /etc/rc.d/slim/nowait.sh

in the run dialog) and paste it here, I can compare it with mine.