On Sat, 16 Jun 2001 00:34, Charles Darcy wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've lately installed LM8.0 and had it running well for the last
> month.
>
> The only problem I've had is Sawfish crashing periodically. I
> think this may be linked to the Desk Guide applet, which crashed at
> the same time Sawfish dies. I've been able to continue by restarting
> Sawfish. The problem occured about once a week, until last night,
> when it happened several times.
Hmmm... I thought I was the only one with that problem. I found that
the problem for me was with the version of GTK+ that comes with GNOME
1.4 (1.2.10). Here's how I solved it:
1. In a root console, I uninstalled libgtk+1.2, libgtk+1.2-devel, and
gtk-engines.
$ rpm -e --nodeps libgtk+1.2 libgtk+1.2-devel gtk-engines
2. I got the equivalent packages from my Mandrake 7.2 CD-ROM (gtk+,
gtk+-devel, and gtk-engines). If you don't have a 7.2 CD handy, you
can have a look on Mandrake download mirrors (there's a list of them
at http://www.linux-mandrake.com) or on http://www.rpmfind.net. You
can even use packages from Helix/Ximian GNOME 1.2 (not the latest
1.4). These will have a similar name but will have "mdk_helix"
somewhere in the filename.
3. I put these packages in their own directory (so they wouldn't get
mixed up with other files) and installed them.
$ rpm -Uvh *.rpm
I have been going like this ever since Mandrake 8.0 was released, and
I have not had a single problem.
4. If you use the below solution to fix X, you'll have to do the above
again.
> This morning when I booted Linux, I was presented with the
> non-graphical console login screen, instead of the usual graphical
> login. I thought the X server might be the problem, so I tried to
> start it manually with 'startx', which gave the following messages:
>
> FontTransSocketUNIXConnect: can't connect: errno = 2
> failed to set default font path 'unix/:-1
> fatal server error: could not open default font 'fixed'.
Usually when I get this error it means the X font server (xfs) has
crashed.
> I'm afraid I'm too new to Linux to know what to do to fix this
> problem, so I very much appreciate advice from anyone as to how to
> fix it. As a very last resort I guess I could try re-installing
> LM8.0, but its taken me weeks to get my development environment
> nicely setup, and I would hate to have to do it over again.
The one time I got this error and it wasn't a problem with xfs, I
first tried running DrakConf from a console. There is an X
configuration option there.
I finally managed to fix the problem with the 'sledgehammer' approach
(after trying everything else I could think of first, of course). I'm
sure there *is* a proper way to fix it, but I couldn't find it. Note
that this should *only* be an option of last-resort:
1. From a root console (you need to be root to use RPM,
$ rpm -qa |grep XFree86
2. Uninstall the resulting files using the --nodeps tag.
3. Pop your first Mandrake CD in and reboot. When the installer
(Drakx) asks if you want to upgrade or install, choose install. When
you get to DiskDrake, mount your drives as they were before, but don't
format anything. When it comes to installing packages, uncheck
whatever you can. Go through the rest of the install without changing
anything from what it was before. If you can get X working in Drakx
(towards the end of it), then you should be fine. Reboot and all
should be well.
4. You should have been able to keep most of your old settings with
this method. You may need to run userdrake (as root) to verify all
the user settings are correct.
5. If you had used my solution to fix GTK+ (above), then you'll have
to do it again.
--
Sridhar Dhanapalan.
"There are two major products that come from Berkeley:
LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
-- Jeremy S. Anderson
