A number of people have encountered a bug which causes nautilus and
panel to crash on login, preventing thedesktop from being used.
The symptoms are:
-Nautilus crashes immediately on login, bringing up bug-buddy dialog.
-Panel crashes immediately after the user clicks the Launch menu.
-Any gtk application which makes use of gtk icons crashes.
The bug is only experienced on some hardware and may not occur on every
install even on hardware where it fails. It is caused by a file access
race condition during the post install phase. The file access conflict
causes an ASSERT in the gtk-update-icon-cache which forces this
application to core during install. The user is left with incomplete
and corrupt icon cache which causes failures of all applications
depending on the gtk icon cache.
The bug is described in more detail here:
6631419 - gtk-update-icon-cache dies on first boot after install/upgrade
Fortunately, there is a simple workaround:
Login as root
for d in /usr/share/icons/*; do
[ -d $d ] &&
gtk-update-icon-cache --force $d;
done
This bug has been intermittent and is known to exist in Nevada build 84
and build 85. A fix is planned for an upcoming build.
