GNOME randomly reverts to default theme, then refuses to touch Nautilus

[RutherfordTheBrave]

I just had the some thing happen -- was working and suddenly my whole theme reverted, with Nautilus refusing to switch back. However, I was unable to locate the segfault in my system log. I was running Chrome, FireFox, and Virtual Box at the time.

[darius.k]

My issues seem to be a bit different from the ones people in this thread are experiencing.

In my case the theme only reverts to gnome default upon boot. The login screen got the correct theme, but as soon as I log in it's the gnome default. This does not happen every time I boot, but only sometimes.
Also I do not have such a error message in my syslog. It happened again today, and there's nothing from gnome-settings.

I had this issues already with previous ubuntu versions, but they never persisted.

[STurner31]

Bumpin with a status report. I'm still trying to get a backtrace, but it's kind of a tricky process.

The problem I'm having now is that I don't know how to track the gnome-settings daemon using gdb. The daemon starts at (or before) the gnome session startup. So, I tried Ctrl-Alt-F2 to a new terminal, started a new X-session on display :1, started gdb, and then started a new gnome session. If I'm correct, this should allow gdb to track the gnome session and all of its daemons. Unfortunately, I was unable to recreate the bug. Can anyone confirm that this is the best way to generate a backtrace for this bug? Am I on the right track?

[STurner31]

Success?

So, I managed to recreate the bug by using gdb to start a second gnome session. After the bug occured, I killed the gnome session in the terminal running gdb, then I used "bt" to get the following output:

(gdb)bt
#0 0x0012d422 in ?? ()
#1 0x00a16b86 in poll () from /lib/tls/i686cmov/libc.so.6
#2 0x007ac4eb in g_poll () from /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
#3 0x0079f0ac in ?? () from /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
#4 0x0079f817 in g_main_loop_run () from /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
#5 0x002873c9 in gtk_main () from /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
#6 0x08062033 in ?? ()
#7 0x0096dbd6 in __libc_start_main () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.co.6
#8 0x08051291 in ?? ()
(gbd)

I don't know if this is helpful to anyone, but hopefully one of the more experienced Ubuntu geeks can make sense of it. It would make me feel a little more confident about this backtrace if someone else ITT could generate the same output on their machine.

[motorcity909]

The second solution in post 4 of this thread
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1483838

has worked for me. It did mess up my desktop icons so I had to resize them and it lost some font sizes (Window border)

I first had this problem occur last Friday after I upgraded to 10.10 and after using that solution it was fine over the weekend but then reoccurred this morning, so I had to run that solution again.

I hope I don't have to do this every 3-4 days!

[STurner31]

The second solution in post 4 of this thread
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1483838

has worked for me. It did mess up my desktop icons so I had to resize them and it lost some font sizes (Window border)

I first had this problem occur last Friday after I upgraded to 10.10 and after using that solution it was fine over the weekend but then reoccurred this morning, so I had to run that solution again.

I hope I don't have to do this every 3-4 days!

I appreciate the help. As far as I can tell (and I'm still new to Ubuntu) that command that is suggested simply removes the configuration file(s) for your desktop and restarts the computer. That's why it's not a permanent fix. Earlier ITT, a few of us noted that logging out and logging back in fixes the theme, but again, it doesn't fix the bug.


In other news, I think what we have is a repeat of the bug reported here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...on/+bug/588155

so I linked this thread to that one and vice-versa. Hopefully, someone with some code-knowledge can sort this thing out soon.

[STurner31]

Update: I did a clean install of Ubuntu Lucid last night. After going through all the updates, I added the Ubuntu Studio suite again. Then, after some more updates, I installed the sun-java6-plugin package through Synaptic and its required libraries. It was at this point that the bug surfaced again.

I'm going to remove the sun-java plugin, but I do have some apps that won't work with its openjdk/icedtea analogues. My expectation is that if the sun-java plugin is causing the bug, then removing it will remove the bug. This might explain why the bug affects multiple users, yet clearly is not affecting all users (if it were affecting everyone, I assume this thread would have exploded with comments by now).

I realize this bug could be caused by numerous other things, like gnome-do/docky, anything from the Studio suite, planetary alignment, emotional fragility of my RAM, and/or graphics-driver syphilis. I'm going to start removing these packages one by one until I get a solid week without seeing the bug. I'll report back here periodically, and I'd really appreciate if someone else would join me in trying to isolate this bug.

[GN_]

I have the same problem. When I close Qt app (for example: Krusader), my theme reverts to default theme

/var/log/messages:

Nov 21 12:22:20 gn-desktop kernel: [ 4802.407815] gnome-settings-[1698]: segfault at 4 ip 051c796f sp bf9388b0 error 4 in libclipboard.so[51c5000+5000]

p.s. GNU/Linux Ubuntu 10.04

[STurner31]

As promised, here's the update. Not counting the Thanksgiving holiday, I have now had about a week of normal usage without seeing this bug. What I did:

1)removed the sun java plugin for firefox
2)stopped using Gnome-Do/Docky

I think the problem lies in Gnome-Do/Docky. After I removed the sun-java plugin, I was still experiencing the random theme changes. Then I went back to using the regular Gnome-panel instead of Docky, and the bug hasn't been seen since.

I realize that there also might have been some package updates that came down the line and fixed the problem. So my next step is to start using Docky again to try and recreate the bug behavior.

[darius.k]

I stopped using Gnome Do yesterday, because I switched to Synapse. This morning my theme reverted again, but I hadn't removed the remaining config up to that point. It did not use Docky though.

Concerning the firefox java plugin, I've got it installed but I am not using firefox (chromium).

Since I've also had a relief period in the recent week, there might be some updates that are related.