Installing Netbook Edition alongside Desktop Edition corrupts Gnome settings (incl. Gtk theme)

[Henri Sivonen]

I upgraded my system from Lucid to Maverick (originally installed as Karmic and upgraded to Lucid). The Gnome theming worked and my anti-aliasing settings were remembered.

Then I followed the advice given in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity in order to test Unity. That is, I ran sudo apt-get install ubuntu-netbook and logged out, at which point my computer froze and I had to reboot it using the power button. I then logged into the Netbook Edition side.

The window decorations looked right, but the theming within any app window was ugly. I tried switching themes in the Appearance control panel. The theme preview in that window worked right. However, after selecting a theme, only the window decorations were affected and anything drawn by the Gtk theme engine still looked like the mid 1990s-style Gtk built-in default theme.

I logged out of Netbook Edition and into Desktop Edition. The problem persisted. I also noticed that other Gnome settings, such as the anti-aliasing setting had reverted to default.

I removed the Netbook Edition and Unity and then ran Computer Janitor to get rid of the deps they had brought in. This didn't fix the problem.

Restoring .gconf, .gconfd, .gnome2 and .gnome2_private from a backup fixed the problem.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: ubuntu-netbook (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-22.35-generic 2.6.35.4
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-22-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Nov 9 09:45:02 2010
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: netbook-meta

[Henri Sivonen (hsivonen)]

Looks like the real bug is bug 676999.