Lost RH9 gnome desktop after "dist-upgrade"

From: John Velman (velman_at_cox.net)
Date: 11/21/03 

Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 17:32:17 -0800

I've been using Fedora to keep my RH 9 up to date for some time now with
no problem. Synaptic always hangs on trying to install or upgrade
something, but apt-get works with no problem. Synaptic is still good as a
visual index to what's installed, what can be upgraded, and so on.

Having recently gotten an upgrade of synaptic, I tried a dist-upgrade
using synaptic. (Whether this has anything to do with my problem, I don't
know, but for completness --.) As before, it hung after downloading
things. There were a bunch of upgrades that became available a couple of
days ago (list below).

So, I killed synaptic, and did an apt-get dist-upgrade.

Then, had to go run some errands. Shutdown the machine. I've been using
a standard RH 9 boot using the RH, and using the RH version of what I
guess is the gnome WM. When I rebooted, the display refused to start
(giving a message that I unfortunately forgot to write down) and it threw
me into a console login.

Well, fortunately I found twm, set up a simple .xinitrc in my $HOME, and
was able to get a gui going with startx.

_Most things that I use seem to work. Pan itself gives the following
error message on startup:

        (pan:3786): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading menu image: Image header
        corrupt

but it seems to work OK (so far!).

When I try to start synaptic, I get:

$ synaptic &
** (synaptic:3860): WARNING **: Cannot open font file for font Luxi Sans 10

(synaptic:3860): Gtk-CRITICAL **: file gtkwidget.c: line 1756
(gtk_widget_hide): assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed

[3]+ Done synaptic $

The packages that I "upgraded" today were:

 XFree86-tools_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-truetype-fonts_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-twm_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-xauth_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-xdm_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-xfs_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-base-fonts_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-devel_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-font-utils_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-ISO8859-9-100dpi-fonts_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-ISO8859-9-75dpi-fonts_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-libs_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-libs-data_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-Mesa-libGL_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-Mesa-libGLU_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-100dpi-fonts_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm XFree86_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-75dpi-fonts_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-ISO8859-15-100dpi-fonts_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
XFree86-ISO8859-15-75dpi-fonts_4.3.0-2.90.43_i386.rpm
glibc_2.3.2-27.9.7_i686.rpm
glibc-devel_2.3.2-27.9.7_i386.rpm
nscd_2.3.2-27.9.7_i386.rpm
glibc-common_2.3.2-27.9.7_i386.rpm
postgresql72-libs_1-4.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-contrib_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-devel_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-docs_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-jdbc_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-libs_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm postgresql-pl_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-python_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-server_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-tcl_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm
postgresql-test_7.3.4-3.rhl9_i386.rpm ethereal_0.9.16-0.90.1_i386.rpm
ethereal-gnome_0.9.16-0.90.1_i386.rpm

Any ideas what is bad and how to fix it?

In a way I think this cloud has a silver lining. I have an old slow
machine and was beginning to be a bit unhappy with the weight of bells and
whistles in the standard RH9 user interface-- was thinking of going to
something lighter--but not necessarily today!.

My only problem with twm so far is that I'm using it with all defaults and
I can't seem to adapt to the way it likes to hang on to the focus of the
previous window when I think it should change. But I'm sure to find some
apps that I would like to use that don't work, sooner or later.

Best,

John Velman
velman@cox.net

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