Xfce Forum

grey

Member

Registered: 2008-06-23

Posts: 1

xfce desktop broke - no panels, no icons, no joy

Hello, I am running Xubuntu Hardy on an older box.  Yesterday when logging in, I unexpectedly got a empty desktop with nothing to click on.  Upon right clicking on the desktop, the wallpaper changed to a plain grey screen, and after some more clicking, I got some desktop locked pop-up.  From there I could change accounts and log on to my ¨guestuser¨ profile, which is working fine, but could not get back into my regular profile without getting the unusable desktop again.
The only way to use my profile at this point is to reboot, and use fluxbox as my window manager.  If I log into my xfce desktop with my username after rebooting, the problem persists.  Fluxbox is not bad, and I am using it now, but what´s up with my xfce desktop?
Mousepad has similarly broken for me twice, which I recovered from by reinstalling or upgrading the distro.  There has to be some less drastic way to recover, perhaps by copying some config files from my functioning guestuser account to my broken account?  I raise this possibility because it does not seem to be a system-wide problem, but where to start?

herd

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2006-05-18

Posts: 143

Website

Re: xfce desktop broke - no panels, no icons, no joy

I got this on hardy too.
Somehow, the combination of gdm and seahorse seem to be getting in the way of starting xfce.
doing a ctrl+alt+backspace seemed to help, but with recent updates, this has also gone.
Now, a killall gnome-keyring-manager or a killall seahorse helps.

Since I find seahorse rather useful, I ditched gdm and installed slim instead.
End of problem.

hth,

herd

carolinason

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2008-07-20

Posts: 3

Re: xfce desktop broke - no panels, no icons, no joy

create a new account and see if that works, import the data from old account via sudo cp.

to stop your DT from locking go into the screensaver config via the settings manager. uncheck lock after x minutes

---

-xubuntu current 64 bit
-x58/ich10r | i7-950 | 3@2GB 1600 3x channel | geforce gt240 1GB | 24" 16:9 / 19" 8:5 | 2@120GB ssd / 500GB / 1TB / dvd+-rw sata ahci | 600W | Mesh Case