No Gnome panels at login (F12)

[sej7278]

Intermittently I seem to have no panels when I login to Gnome on my F12 install.

I can fix it by "pkill -USR1 gnome-panel", but there's got to be a root cause for it.

I've found loads of results on Google, but no solutions, mostly Ubuntu users (you never seem to get solutions from Ubuntu users!)

I'm all up-to-date with YUM:

Name : gnome-panel
Arch : x86_64
Version : 2.28.0
Release : 15.fc12

Any ideas?

[wt6g]

Got same problem. Killing the process does not help me. My panels take 5-10 minutes to appear. Once they do everything is fine and everything acts normally form that point on.

System is fully up to date, and otherwise works fine.

Until the panels appear I can run apps, including gui apps, from the terminal. I've tried messing wtih all of the panel applets but no joy.

/Len

[JEO]

I see a problem in F12 with the gnome panel not appearing (and a flickering line at the bottom of the screen, high cpu usage). This seems to happen if I enable the "show hide buttons" in panel properties. Also I like to uncheck "arrows on hide buttons". I usually move the position of the main panel that by default is at the top of the screen to the bottom also.

[sej7278]

i don't have hiding enabled, and delete the bottom panel, i've just got the one top panel.

its very intermittent, i'd say 50% of the time it works fine.

the "solution" at the moment is either not to reboot or to kill it from the terminal.

[wt6g]

When I kill gnome-panel from the terminal it just restarts itself in another process, and as far as I can tell it still takes several minutes to come up. It seems like I'm just resetting whatever is causing the delay so it starts over.

I've got the debugging stuff installed on my system, but I'm not getting any crashes at this point that I can report to bugzilla.

I hope we get this fixed soon. I really don't want to use KDE. (but I do have it installed along with some of its apps, and I'm wondering if that might be related to the problem.

Do any of you having this problem also have KDE apps installed?

/Len

---------- Post added at 09:23 AM CST ---------- Previous post was at 08:18 AM CST ----------

I have just noticed that Brasero crashes the top gnome-panel. This is obviously a bug in Brasero, but it might be a weakness in gnome-panel.

All I did to cause the bug (twice now) was to burn a mini-CD with a file of about 100 MB.

/Len

[sej7278]

i found some oddness on my f12 laptop when i had the cpu scaling applet loaded on the panel (would crash the machine when i plugged into my docking station) but that didn't cause the disappearing panel i have on my f12 desktop.

i've got kde apps installed on both, don't run kde itself though. i don't use brasero, i use k3b.

i've not seen gnome-panel take several minutes to appear (well i've killed it without waiting) although it does seem to pause for a few seconds which i think has something to do with the pulseaudio mixer.

[wt6g]

I have now found that burning CD's tends to make the problem with gnome-panel more apparent, no matter which application you use.

I've caused the control panel to go into slow motion, completely die etc....

Is this mess specific to Fedora/gnome? Does anyone know? I had no issues with Fedora 11, so I either have to go back or switch distros.

[sej7278]

dunno if its fedora-only, whenever i google a linux issue it just comes back with a load of ubuntu threads where nobody is skilled enough to actually solve anything!

[wt6g]

sej7278,

You are right. I tried KDE and couldn't stand it, so I tried xfce. This Desktop manager is very similar to gnome, AND it has one BIG advantage - it actually works.

It has no panel on the top, but I can do without that to be able to function reliably, and there may be a way to add it. I think there is one more desktop available, and based on how well I liked XFCE I'm going to test out another.

/Len

---------- Post added at 04:07 PM CST ---------- Previous post was at 01:29 PM CST ----------

1. There is an updated to gnome-panel in updates testing. I downloaded
this but it did not fix the problem - on the other hand it might contribute
to the solution.

2. I went into system/preferences/startup applications There I found that I had shut down
most of the startup apps. One in particular I had noticed because it is the one that
causes you to get asked for the root password when you try to mess with the firewall.

I believe it is "policy kit authentication agent".

I wound up enabling most of the programs listed there, and now the gnome-panel
starts "relatively" fast. That is, in seconds instead of minutes.

There should be a two level timeout in a program that is key to the operation of your system before it really waits for anything. The first timeout should be a warning that
there may be a problem (especially when a dumb user like me can disable something
that can cause a long timeout), then if you really insist waiting, thats fine.

There might be something in the log files I suppose. I have to admit I looked but not as
hard as I probably should have.

Bottom line, check the software for gnome and the authentication daemon. It could be related to the problem.

[sej7278]

yes i stop most of the startup applications too, could be a factor.....

[wt6g]

I am HOT on the trail of the gnome-panel issue and I think its a major security hole. Here is what I did to find it, and what I recommend. I have NOT YET figured out how to stop the problem, but I've made it much better.

gnome-panel causes network access to take place as it starts up. I set up wireshark and turned on capture mode, then killed gnome-panel, which restarts automatically. Then Is saw the problem. First thing was hundreds of DNS queries, then a lot of network activity - mostly from Ad sites and click counting sites!! I tracked this down and figured out that gnome-panel runs some stuff from the Mozilla configuration, and inside its configuration file (using a text editor, NOT about:config) I found all of these sites listed - hundreds of them). I began to clean up Mozilla, including the hidden folders, uninstalled it, and things got DRASTICALLY faster.

Now I can kill gnome-panel and there is much less network traffic. Next step, I notice that there is a lot of opera generated traffic going on, even though Opera is not running. So I start working on preferences to shut off everything I can. The startup of gnome gets better, but its still not where it should be.

By this time, I'm down to about 20 packet exchanges that appear to be to a control site for a website I administer. Of course whatever is trying to get at that site does not have the prerequesite info so the exchange hangs until an error response is received. This is now the cause of my delay.

My conclusion is that gnome-panel needs an option to stop it from doing anything to the network when it starts up, and that this feature is being overly abused by application programmers. If it is going to do something to the network, it should not hang and wait, it should spawn the task!!! BUT MOST OF ALL it should tell you what its doing for who so you know what the heck is happening on your computer.


This is the kind of crap that destroyed Windows, and now it's happening on Linux.

I can easily tell with firefox that MANY sites were being triggered when gnome-panel started, and its quite possible that some are monitoring my keystrokes or web visits (from the names). This is OUTRAGEOUS.

Anyway, I've got one more source to track down to get gnome-panel completely under control, but I thought I'd made enough progress that it was time to report. There may be a setting in the registry (oh did I say that? Yes and on purpose because that's what they're doing) uh, xml file, using gconf-editor that can be set, but I have no info yet. I did look.

That file is like an old registry file on XP. Its got crap from several version of Fedora in it now on my system. Looks like we're going to get Linux Registry Cleaners pretty soon.... UGH!

Well, good luck. I'll report back when I get the last one fixed.

/Len

---------- Post added at 10:31 PM CST ---------- Previous post was at 07:57 PM CST ----------

GOT IT!!

BUG IS DEAD. KILLED. NO LONGER ALIVE. MORTE!

I finally traced it to .gtk-bookmarks located in your home folder of course.

Delete that file (just a text file of alleged book marks stored there some time by some thing that somehow gnome-panel
decides to try to run.

Now gnome panel has NO VISIBLE DELAY. Only took me all day, but now I can save 2 minutes every time I start the machine. Let's see, that ought to mean I'll break even in about 30 years....

Have fun!
/Len

[JEO]

Those are the bookmarks that you can edit from within Nautilus. By default they are just file folder bookmarks like
file:///home/username/Downloads

Did your file have a bunch of http://, ftp:// (network folder) ones? How did you create them?