Weird GNOME behaviour (in Dapper and Edgy)

[Severin Schoepke]

Hi list

thanks for all the suggestions so far...

To your suggestions:

1. "This sounds a bit out of my league, but as an experiment, you might try
installing an addition window manager, such as Fluxbox, and see if the
problem repeats itself there."

I worked with XFCE some days, and it did not happen there... But it 
happens only once or twice a week in Gnome, too... So I might just not 
have tested long enough... I'll try Fluxbox for a longer time and will 
report back...




2. "Also, use a text editor to read the file .xsession-errors -- it's in 
your user
directory and it may have some clues in it."

Checked the file... There's mostly Tracker output in there... One 
warning though:

'(gnome-panel:4702): Gtk-WARNING **: gtk_widget_size_allocate(): attempt 
to allocate widget with width -3 and height 24'
but I have no idea which widget/applet this could relate to... Then the 
file ends with

'Watching directory /home/schoepke/uni/KI/KI Programmieraufgabe 1/Graph 
Doc/doc/ch/unibe/iam/graph/drawing/class-use (total watches = 1804)
...Too much output, ignoring rest...'






3. "Sometimes applications don't exit properly and this will prevent them
from starting again. Next time this happens, check with either the
Gnome System Monitor or "top" in terminal that there isn't already an
instance of that app running. If there is, you will need to kill it
first."

I don't believe that this is the case since I can't start any 
applications at all and not just single ones... Also, like I said, they 
open after 10 minutes or so, so this would mean that they are suddenly 
killed then... And I don't think this happens, or does Linux have some 
kind of Garbage Collection?



4. "Do you have lots of free space in your /home partition (assuming you
have one)."

No, I don't have a separate home partition... I have a swap partition 
(1gig, double the RAM size) and a partition for the file system (which 
includes home) with 24 gigs free space...


I hope someone has any other clues... And I'd like to thank you again 
for your efforts so far...


cheers, Severin