After upgrading a system from FC5 to rawhide, GNOME was mostly non-functional. New users got a black background and an _empty_ panel, with messages in .xsession-errors from gnome-panel, suggesting that 'gconftool-2 --load' has not been run. Running gnome-theme-manager failed, suggesting that metacity isn't installed (which it was, of course) or that gconf was misconfigured. Removing the contents of /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults and replacing the entire directory with the contents of same from a newly-installed rawhide machine was sufficient to fix this. But these files don't seem to be owned by any package, and I can't see how they get created.
Found this in /root/upgrade.log... Upgrading system-config-display - 1.0.45-1.noarch /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.30456: line 2: [-x: command not found Must set the GCONF_CONFIG_SOURCE environment variable error: %postun(gconf-editor-2.10.0-2.ppc) scriptlet failed, exit status 1 Cache file created successfully. Must set the GCONF_CONFIG_SOURCE environment variable error: %postun(gconf-editor-2.10.0-3.ppc) scriptlet failed, exit status 1 warning: /etc/alchemist/namespace/printconf/local.adl saved as /etc/alchemist/namespace/printconf/local.adl.rpmsave warning: /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources saved as /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources.rpmsave
Looks like this bug 152238.
Would that explain the whole thing? Or does bug 152238 only explain what I see in comment 1 and not the original bug?
there was a problem a while back where gconftool-2 was segfaulting randomly. I think that would explain this behavior. The bug was a kernel bug, but I can't seem to find it right now. I'm going to close this bug because i'm trying to sweep up bugzilla today. If this is something you've hit again, please reopen the report, because it sounds pretty serious.