Description of Problem: My HP Omnibook 4150 boots to RL5. The first time I login to the desktop, the panel apears as normal, the Start Here apears and then the panel disapears. if I ctrl+bkspace and login again everyting is fine. I tried the ctrl backspace without the login and then login, but the panel disapeared again on the first login! Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Downloaded 7.2 ISO with the gnome workstation install. How Reproducible: Fails every time on this laptop. Works just fine on a couple of desktops that I have. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot to run level 5, login.. it fails 2. control+backspace and login again and it's fine 3. Actual Results: Expected Results: Additional Information: The system has a NVidia video chip, I have the panel set at 1024x765 16M colors.
I just tried the combination ctrl+bkspace a few more times (after the second one) and the panel did not disapear again...
Open panel menu, go to Panel->Global Preferences..., on the Miscellaneous tab, change the setting to keep panel above other windows, let me know if that fixes it or not.
No such luck .. I did as suggested and got the same result. I checked that the change was still in place and it is. Sorry...
Do you have any problem if you log out normally (choose logout from panel menu) instead of ctrl-alt-backspacing?
How do I get to the logout option.. I can't get to the panel to open the system|logout .. The first login does not show the panel. Once I restart X the panel works, then when I want to shutdown I logout properly. Gary B
Doh, of course, sorry. Hrm. OK, possible useful info: is the panel gone because it's not running, or because it's hidden? If you do "ps jaxwww | grep panel" is the panel running? If it's running, then we can probably blame sawfish for putting the desktop on top of the panel, and I'm coincidentally working on new sawfish packages you could try. If it's not running, it might be crashing, and that will be pretty darn hard to debug unless I can get it to happen on a machine here...
The ps jaxwww|grep panel shows it as being active .. when I startup RL5 for the first time .. I see it for about a second or two then it vanishes as if it was in AutoHide... but that feature is not enabled... and when I get back in.. it does not autohide, so the feature is not active. Gary B
Hum .. .I just noticed something else, I started the menu with the ctrl-esc keys and could run programs but all the window 'frames' .. ie the minimize, maximize and X where missing from all the screens.. sounds like the window manager failed somehow.. Gary B
Out of interest, I had exactly the same symptom when sawfish (or other WM I guess) was not set to start in my GNOME session but both the panel and nautilus were. At login, first the panel is started (and so gets drawn to the screen), then later nautilus is started and (as it is set to draw the desktop background) draws over the panel. Hence the panel is running but is obscured by a nautilus background.
See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69333
This is a duplicate of either the "sawfish puts panel under desktop window" bug which is fixed, or the "panel crashes on startup" bug which has a million dups (#55119 I think)