[Novalug] Icons vanishing from Ubuntu Karmic desktop

James Ewing Cottrell 3rd JECottrell3@Comcast.NET
Fri Sep 17 20:08:03 EDT 2010


  Peter, this is clearly not your best post.

On 9/17/2010 12:10 PM, Peter Larsen wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-09-16 at 14:38 -0400, Bonnie Dalzell wrote:
>> Recently I have been experiencing loss of all the icons on my desktop
>> during a session. when i restart they come back. I have not yet figured
>> out what may be triggering this.
> Does this happen at a specific point in time? After running a particular
> program? After having it loaded for X number of minutes/hours?
>
> Do you have error messages in /var/log/messages or /var/log/Xorg.0.log?
Good start tho, get more info.
>> is there a way to reboot x without closing down running programs?
> Depends on your definition of running programs (that's very much Windows
> Speak). All gui based programs, such as OpenOffice, Firefox etc. are
> "owned" by X - including your gnome-session process that you're most
> likely experiencing problems with.
What do you mean by "owned"? Ownership to me means File Ownership, what 
chown changes.

Do you mean that all your X Clients are children of the X server? The X 
Display Manager? Some Menu Launcher?

All very common, but they could be started from the command line of 
another window, or even from another machine.
> So killing the parent/owner means
> killing all the children too.
No Way! YOU KNOW BETTER! When a parent dies, all children are simply 
re-parented to process 1, init.

OK, when the X Server dies, all clients now have Nothing To Talk To. So 
most of them just die, but they don't *have to*.
The could easily wait and attempt to reopen a connection if they wanted 
to. Of course, none that I know of do.

So effectively, killing the X Server kills all the X Clients, but it is 
a secondary effect, not a primary one.

> However, all your daemons and system keeps
> going. If your distro is fairly new, the ctrl-alt-backspace to kill X
> has been disabled (it's easy to enable again if you which). It's a quick
> way to restore a desktop but yes, it means killing any work in progress
> doing so.
I'd call that a Gratuitous Change, but that's just my opinion.
> Also, if your problem is gnome-session, logging in/out will restart that
> too.
>
>> I am using Ubuntu Karmic (9.10).
> Time to upgrade?
Wake Up! Time To Die!

JIM




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