Issues with gnome-settings-daemon and SHMConfig

TerryP · Post by **TerryP** » 2010/10/04 00:42:12

Hi, setting up CentOS 5.5 on my laptop. After installing the synaptics driver, I am able to get a functioning X session without any problems (I'm using startx for testing). There are however two problems: 0/ mouse cursor is slow as snails and 1/ GNOME is fouled up.

0: I've tried enabling SHMConfig in my xorg.conf file, and have also tried the HAL thing [url=https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SynapticsTouchpad#Enabling%20SHMConfig]here[/url]. Either way synclient tells me to jump in a lack. I should be able to set suitable adjustments in xorg.conf, but running synclient -l to see what it's currently using would be much faster than hours of trial end error. As Google totally fails to provide anything helpful and I see nothing handy in documentation beyond the 1-line edit to xorg.conf I've already done, how in the universe do I actually enable SHMConfig to synclient's satisfaction? EDIT: scrolling doesn't work either, so access to synclient is even more important; on the upside I have manually tuned the mouse speed by T&E.

1: GNOME was installed through the "GNOME Desktop Environment" and "GNOME Software Development" groups (yum groupinstall GNOME\*) after net' installing CentOS. It has been startx'd through gnome-session. On startup I get a string of Windows: one is a dialog saying that there was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon with a last error message of "Failed to execute dbus-launch to autolaunch D-Bus session". The other two are dialog windows gripe about mail notification. Several icons are missing but gnome otherwise works fine, as long as I do nothing that requires SETTINGS. Searching the web and documentation hasn't helped here either, so how the flub do I fix that?

I expect to be using blackbox or something lighter most of the time, but as GNOME is the default.... it better be working!

pschaff · Post by **pschaff** » 2010/10/04 01:08:26

It's not really clear what may be fouled up after a minimal install with unknown components. Sounds like you are still booting to runlevel 3 after your minimal install. Ideally the groupinstall should bring in everything require but experience indicates otherwise.

First thing I'd try is changing to runlevel 5. Edit /etc/inittab and changing[code]id:3:initdefault:[/code]to[code]id:5:initdefault:[/code]
You may also want to be sure rhgb in installed and the the parameters "rhgb quiet" appear on the kernel line in /etc/grub/grub.conf then reboot. Some things seem not to always get initialized properly for the GUI in a text-mode boot. Is control-center installed?[code]
# rpm -qf /usr/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon
control-center-2.16.0-16.el5
# yum info control-center
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, priorities
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
Excluding Packages from CentOS-5 - Plus
Finished
61 packages excluded due to repository priority protections
Installed Packages
Name : control-center
Arch : i386
Epoch : 1
Version : 2.16.0
Release : 16.el5
Size : 8.1 M
Repo : installed
Summary : GNOME Control Center
URL : http://www.gnome.org
License : GPL/LGPL
Description: GNOME (the GNU Network Object Model Environment) is an attractive and
: easy-to-use GUI desktop environment. The control-center package
: provides the GNOME Control Center utilities that allow you to setup
: and configure your system's GNOME environment (things like the desktop
: background and theme, the screensaver, system sounds, and mouse
: behavior).
:
: If you install GNOME, you need to install control-center.
[/code]
I like ksynaptics (currently locally built from ksynaptics-0.3.3-1.fc7.src.rpm) for Synaptics touchpad configuration, but then I generally use KDE and not Gnome. Perhaps try ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/archive.fedoraproject.org/fedora/linux/updates/9/SRPMS.newkey/gsynaptics-0.9.14-2.fc9.src.rpm after reading [url=http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/RebuildSRPM]How to Rebuild a Source RPM[/url].

TerryP · Post by **TerryP** » 2010/10/04 02:09:19

The control-center package is installed, fwiw.

To be more thorough in testing it, I've just tried:

[code]
[*]booting straight into GDM on runlevel 5 without rhgb
[*]doing like wise with the rhgb quiet kernel parameters added
[*]and again but with XDM in place of GDM
[/code]
They all have the same results with GNOME as stated in the OP.

And oddly, vertical scrolling seems to be working now, just slightly to wide. With the MinSpeed/MaxSpeed options I've setup in xorg.conf, I guess that takes care of the mouse cursor speed with the touchpad.

pschaff · Post by **pschaff** » 2010/10/04 14:09:54

Is dbus-launch installed?[code]
$ rpm -qf `which dbus-launch`
dbus-x11-1.1.2-14.el5.i386
$ rpm -qa dbus\* | sort
dbus-1.1.2-14.el5
dbus-devel-1.1.2-14.el5
dbus-glib-0.73-10.el5_5
dbus-glib-devel-0.73-10.el5_5
dbus-libs-1.1.2-14.el5
dbus-python-0.70-9.el5_4
dbus-x11-1.1.2-14.el5
[/code]
You may not need the -devel packages but I believe the others should be installed. Should also check that the messagebus service is running.

TerryP · Post by **TerryP** » 2010/10/07 23:09:07

Yes, dbus-launch was installed and functional. I conducted several tests with my old session scripts, which rely on that before running a window manager (e.g. fvwm). I also tried using it from the same script launching gnome, but it didn't make any impact.

[code]
#
# launch a D-Bus channel for this session
#
which dbus-launch >/dev/null && if [ -z "$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" ]; then
eval `dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session`
fi
[/code]

Since the packages in CentOS 5.5 were so old, none of the blobs I have to rely on would work and the development pacakges I need would of have to be maintained manually from source, so I've decided to just convert the thing over to a Slackware based system :-(

pschaff · Post by **pschaff** » 2010/10/08 12:35:30

Sounds like you need newer packages more than enterprise linux stability. Good luck with Slackware. That was my first distro, back in the dark ages when it came on ~60 floppies, but haven't looked at it in years.

CentOS