I had a very nice version of Gnome - loaded rapidly, four desktops,
menus by key letters, cd player and mixer worked fine.
A windows application overwrote my debian system, uncorrectable errors.
Rebuilt from scratch - i.e. from a set of 4 official binary i386 cd's
which installed Debian 2.2.17 and then allowed me to select many
applications from the simple lists of packages.
When I originally did this I had the very nice version of Gnome. After
the rebuild X Windows opened with a large Debian logo and a limited menu
selection. I continued with a full dist-upgrade, downloaded
kernel-source-2.2.19 and built a new kernel then added a file .xsession
in my home directory containing exec /usr/bin/gnome-session.
Now X Windows takes 30 seconds to load a completely different layout of
Gnome - one desktop, menus by mouse only, cd player works but mixer does
not. Selecting mixer results in a message that the kernel must be
compiled with sound! It is, of course, and both cdcd and Gnome's cd
player work perfectly but I need the mixer to turn up the volume on the
ES1371 chip.
Both versions of Gnome include all the programs I use and run them
rapidly but I strongly prefer the version I had from my original
installation.
Any suggestions as to how I can get the first version back and correctly
installed?
Tom George