Sometimes GNOME gets really, really borked, so badly that you essentially need to start over. In situations like that, it's time for drastic action. Here's what you do:
If the gconfd process is running, kill it. Find the PID for gconfd with ps aux, and then kill the process using, uh, kill.
Now delete the following directories:
~/.gnome
~/.gnome2
~/.gnome2_private
~/.gconf
~/.gconfd
Restart, & you now have a virgin GNOME. This means, of course, that all the settings your had in place for GNOME apps are gone too. If that really bums you out, then back up those GNOME directories instead of nuking them, and then carefully put the right config files back into place as needed. Tedious, yes, but less of a PITA than redoing everything.
(Check out all of our posts on GNOME.)
1. I've had to do just that on multiple occasions. Most recently, I had a problem on my laptop where, after logging into Gnome, the P key would stop working. I could fix it by changing the Keyboard Layout preference to a different option. But when I logged back in next time, it P would stop working again. I thought it was poor hardware support, until I noticed that my girlfriend's Gnome account on the same laptop didn't experience the same problem! I blew away my Gnome settings, and I've never had the problem since.
I had copied my home directory between my desktops and laptop, over multiple distributions, and multiple versions of Gnome. So I'm not shocked that eventually I had some bit rot. But, it certainly would be nicer to be able to keep your preferences for life.
Posted at 2:24PM on Jun 26th 2006 by Dan Martin