Desktop is completely unresponsive after Jaunty upgrade

[Fabio Bossi]

After upgrading from Intrepid to Jaunty my GNOME desktop is completely unresponsive: there are no icons on it and right clicking on it doesn't trigger a menu. I'm using an nVidia Geforce 8600GT and have already tried both proprietary and open source drivers with no success.

[Fabio Bossi (fabio-bossi-deactivatedaccount)]

I have done as suggested at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/gnome-desktop-icon-disappeared-27724. That is, I've opened a terminal and typed nautilus: everything now seems to work again. Isn't that odd?

[Fabio Bossi (fabio-bossi-deactivatedaccount)]

Looks like the operation must be repeated after every restart, which makes the situation pretty annoying.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

gnome-desktop is the about GNOME dialog and a library nothing to do there

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Could you add your .xsession-errors to the bug?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

what do you call unresponsive there?

[Fabio Bossi (fabio-bossi-deactivatedaccount)]

Sorry for choosing the wrong package and thank you for your quick response. By unrensponsive I mean that it does not respond to commands at all, in particular:

1) No icons are displayed on it, even though the Desktop folder is not empty and they all displayed correctly in Intrepid
2) Right clicking on it doesn't trigger a pop up menu
3) Left clicking and dragging to choose a desktop region does not work

The top and bottom menus work regularly though.

[Fabio Bossi (fabio-bossi-deactivatedaccount)]

I realize that I haven't explained myself very well: when I wrote GNOME Desktop I didn't mean the whole GNOME application but only the portion of screen on which the wallpaper is drawn (BTW, the wallpaper is the only thing that is displayed correctly on it).

[Fabio Bossi (fabio-bossi-deactivatedaccount)]

After starting nautilus from a terminal to fix the problem I see several lines like this .xsession-errors:

(trackerd:3828): GLib-GIO-CRITICAL **: g_file_hash: assertion `G_IS_FILE (file)' failed

[Fabio Bossi (fabio-bossi-deactivatedaccount)]

The line:

Fallimento: Inizializzazione del modulo non riuscita

Can be translated to:

Failure: module initialization was unsuccessful

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the issue seems simply that nautilus doesn't run, that's it which draws the desktop and the icons on it etc, does it work with an anoter user on the same box?

[aras (arasbm)]

I just did a fresh install today. I can reproduce this error.
There is no desktop icons. Right click or left drag on the desktop does not display anything.
When there is a CD in one of my cd drives I can not run nautilus (in the terminal I get segmentation fault as soon as I run it).
If there is no CD in that drive nautilus runs fine.
But I never get my desktop icons or right click back, even when nautilus runs.

I'll try making another user and post the results.

I'v attached some log files of when nautilus crashes. This is the first time I created these logs, so if there is something missing please let me know how to improve them.

Thanks

[Fabio Bossi (fabio-bossi-deactivatedaccount)]

I have tried to create a new user and it is NOT affected by this bug.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

there is something in your configuration triggering the issue then, could you start your session and copy directly .xsession-errors to the bug?

[Fabio Bossi (fabio-bossi-deactivatedaccount)]

I'm not sure I understand: the .xsession-errors I gave you was taken right after the start of the session. The only other thing I have done was running firefox to browse to this page.

[Mike Rogers (mikerogerz)]

I'm having the same issue but have found a repeatable case. Everything loads fine on session start. The desktop disappears when I cut & paste from a local filesystem to a SFTP share in nautilus.

I can work-around the problem by copy/pasting instead of cut/pasting. Also, if I forget and cause a crash, I can restart nautilus by running "nautilus" in the shell.

I've attached a clean .xsession-errors file showing the crash in a new session.

[auxbuss (launchpad-auxbuss)]

I get this issue. To fix, I do the following:

- open the gnome registry editor
- check app/nautilus/preferences/show desktop

Make sure you switch it off again if you also use kde - and kill the service it invokes - as it causes horrible desktop issues and performance problems there. This is an awful piece of "design", imo.

[Sense Egbert Hofstede (sense)]

Because the reported hasn't answered the question asked in April this year, because the it seems to be caused by corrupted settings -- suggestiont to fix: remove the .gconf2 and .config directories from your home directory when logged out of the graphical environment and log back in -- and because the next release of Ubuntu, Karmic, has been released previous month I'm marking this bug as Invalid.

If it does occur again in karmic, please feel free to open the bug again and attach .xsession-errors.
Thanks to all participants for their help to this bug report.

[Fabio Bossi (fabio-bossi-deactivatedaccount)]

Which question was that? They asked me to attach my .xsession-errors, which I did, and they asked me if newly created users are affected, to which I replied negatively. I haven't noticed any other question.

The bug is surely caused by corrupted settings, the problem is that they were corrupted by the upgrade process itself.

[Fabio Bossi (fabio-bossi-deactivatedaccount)]

Forgot to mention that I have wiped out my HD and installed Karmic, so I can't help with this from now on.