Xfce Forum

mrhappy

Member

Registered: 2009-05-30

Posts: 3

problem with xfce4-session manager

Hi all.

I have an Acer Aspire One running Linpus Lite.  It's DE is based on XFCE allthough out of the box it is rather locked down.  However, I had enabled the XFCE desktop and menu and applied many other tweaks to the AAO which made it a whole lot more useful to me.  Unfrotunely I recently broke the damn thing by fiddling - as usual.  I found the Software Updater under System in the XFCE Menu, and consequently installed all the available updates (with the exception of yelp and one other which had missing dependencies), which included xfce-desktop, xfce-utils, dbus, hal, bash, term, x11 / xorg etc.

Everything seemed to work ok at first, with updates for Network Manager and KPowersave providing more tweaks.  I then found that the Sessions and Startup Settings prog. works (it hadn't before the updates).  This, I think, is where it all went wrong...

So I enabled the setting to automatically save the session.  I noticed that were options to enable GNOME and KDE components but these were unchecked by default so I left them alone.  Upon reboot, the desktop has completely changed: icons have changed or disappeared, themes don't work (Emerald), windows are missing their title bars, Compiz doesn't work, many of the XFCE Menu items now don't work such as Display settings, Desktop Settings, User Interface, Thunar blinks on and disappears ("segmentation fault"), etc. etc.

I think, and correct me if I'm worng, that this has something to do with the GNOME and KDE components that now aren't being loaded. Could I be correct?  The trouble is, I now cannot get back to the session manager.  If I run xfce-session from a terminal the system tells me that there is another session manager running. How do I get the xfce session manager back or enable the GNOME/KDE options from the terminal?

I'd really appreciate it if someone who knows what they're doing could help me!

Cheers, James

s0ulslack

Member

From: Idaho

Registered: 2005-12-25

Posts: 291

Re: problem with xfce4-session manager

The KDE/GNOME components shouldn't be needed, they're just things like gnome-keyring-manager etc.  something big was updated and broke a number of things from the sounds of it.  try running xfce4-session-settings from a terminal and see if anything helpful is spit out, same for other apps that won't run... it should atleast give you a direction to look.

Try to re-launch compiz from a terminal too if you don't have any window borders/titles, it'll tell you whats missing if anything.

mrhappy

Member

Registered: 2009-05-30

Posts: 3

Re: problem with xfce4-session manager

S0ulslack,

Thanks for your reply.  Last night I managed to fix things a little so I now have all the xfce menu icons and apps back, everything seems to run now off the menu.  to fix, I removed the following and related dependencies using 'sudo yum remove' in the terminal:

• xfce-mcs-manager, including:

  • [li]xfce-mcs-plugins

  • xfce4-session

  • xfce4-session-engines

  • xfwm4

  • xfwm4-themes

  [/li]

• thunar, including (not exhaustive):

  • [li]xfce-utils

  • xfce-mcs-plugins-extra

  • xfdesktop

  • xfdesktop-acer

  [/li]

Then I proceeded to install the above packages through yum.  I now have propoer windows and all functions.  I only have a couple of problems now.

Compiz:  Doesn't run with the error ""compiz(core)Screen 0 on display ":0.)" already has a window manager; try using the --replace option to replace the current window manager.  (No manageable screens found on display :0.0)".  The --replace option only removes the WM and leaves me with nothing because of "Fatal: GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap is missing".  At which point I have to restart xfwm4.
Emerald:  Themes don't work because of Compiz.
Xscreensaver:  "xscreensaver-demo is running as user "user" on host "localhost.localdomain". But the xscreensaver managing display ":0.0" is running as suser "user" on host "localhost".  If those two machines don't share a file system that is, if they don't see the same ~user/.xscreensaver file) then xscreensaver-demo won't work right."  I have to manually restart the demon at this point to get it to work. Other wise the xscreensaver will just display a blank screen when it becomes active.
Thunar: Fails to mount usb with the error "org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable no <-- (action,result).
xfdesktop-acer:  I cannot get this back, it doesn't seem to exist in any of the repos I have tried.  Not so bothered about this one.

I would like to fix these issues if I can because the system is almost back to normal and I can't be bothered to start over with a clean install! Any thoughts?

Cheers, James

s0ulslack

Member

From: Idaho

Registered: 2005-12-25

Posts: 291

Re: problem with xfce4-session manager

Atleast your partially there!
Compiz: try running with "LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 compiz --replace ccp"
Xscreensaver: not too sure, make sure your not running X as root (might have to google abit)
Thunar: check http://en.opensuse.org/Talk:Acer_Aspire … wrecked.29 and google abit more, error+Aspire One

Good luck!

mrhappy

Member

Registered: 2009-05-30

Posts: 3

Re: problem with xfce4-session manager

Well, I WAS nearly there, but it broke again.  Can't remember exactly what happened this time, but I ended up removing xfdesktop/session/mcs-manager etc and was left with nothing! My bad, I suppose.  I have given up, and installed Ubuntu Jaunty (which works extremely well I have to say).

Thanks for your help tho! James