Gnome panels do not display

[Rod Roark]

Binary package hint: gnome-panel

Ubuntu 10.04 updated as of 2010-06-04.

Problem: The Gnome top and bottom panels do not display after bootup.

This system is set up for running the MythTV front-end, and so display is on the TV Out port of an Nvidia GEForce4 MX 4000. The display is a standard (not HD) TV with 640x480 specified in xorg.conf. The problem also happens with this resolution set to 800x600 or 1024x768. I have also seen the problem with these resolutions on a standard monitor, and it seemed to disappear at 1280x1024 and higher.

This system is also configured for automatic login.

I can work around this by opening a terminal window (Crtl-Alt-T) and typing either "killall gnome-session" or "gnome-session --replace &". Another method is to create a startup task that spawns another process which in turn sleeps for 20 seconds and then runs one of the above commands. So this seems to be some sort of race condition.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: gnome-panel 1:2.30.0-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-22.36-generic 2.6.32.11+drm33.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-22-generic i686
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Jun 4 09:28:29 2010
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/gnome-panel
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100429)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-panel
XsessionErrors: (polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:1056): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion `initialization_value != 0' failed

[Rod Roark (rod)]

This might be a duplicate of bug #572550. Taking a tip from comments there, I removed compiz and compiz-core, and the problem went away.

[Rod Roark (rod)]

It appears we are not welcome as a duplicate of #572550:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-mga/+bug/572550/comments/31

So perhaps the duplicate flagging should be removed?

[Larry hibberd (ljhibberd)]

I have this bug on 5 computers with Lucid, but a different video - see bug 601769. The panels sometimes appear correctly at login, and sometimes don't display at all. They never display scrambled, so the symptoms are different than bug 572550 and duplicates of 439448.