Long story short; I have a debian system that's been running the unstable
tree for over a decade straight (through fire, flames, and multiple hardware upgrades, but that aside). However, a while ago while Debian was transitioning to gnome3 and the gnome-shell
desktop there were a couple of hitches in the process, and one or another of those left my regular user with an unusable configuration — gnome-shell
starts up and immediately crashes.
I tried setting up a completely blank new user, and everything runs fine for that one, so it's definitely an issue with a setting local to my main user somewhere… It's just that I have no idea where to start looking, and I don't want to blanket erase all configuration files because I kind of need the vast majority of them. So instead I'm looking to surgically remove all the configuration files and/or options that pertain to gnome-shell
and let it rebuild them from scratch when I start it, then work from there.
EDIT: My bad, slight naming fail. The problem seems to be in gnome-shell
rather than gnome-session
.
Best Answer
How do you know it's a gnome-session problem? It may just as well be program launched by gnome-session.
When it comes to configuraion, gnome is ... colourful. Configuration may be stored in
IIRC gnome-session doesn't do a whole lot. It starts the required components listed in gconf under /desktop/gnome/session (see /desktop/gnome/session/required_components for the programms that actually fulfill the requirements). After that it's rather passive.
To access this data you can either use a graphical user interface or
gconftool-2
. To browse through your configuration you couldgnome-sessions "config" is under
/apps/gnome-session
. What may also be interessting for you is/apps/gnome_settings_daemon
, its subdirs and of course the/apps
entries for all required components.After that you need to scan through the directories. According to my experience most interessting options are in .gnomerc .gnome and .local. But I think .local is more of a recent thing in Gnome so your problem is probably not there.