hmmm this is too strange...
you did restart dbus/hal ?
if you did that could you try a newly created user ?

I had to re-install the latest HAL to make it work. You see, during pacman -Suy it gave me an error message that there was an undefined symbol for a gconf library. After rebooting and re-installing HAL, I am now back in business. However, I still have problems with Gnome's apps:

1. There is no gnome-power-manager??
2. eugenia@lc2430:~> gnome-phone-manager
gnome-phone-manager: error while loading shared libraries: libedataserver-1.2.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
3. The Deskbar-applet dies everytime is tries to load on the panel! I re-installed it, but no cake!

Also, on a pretty bare-system with no GDM, Arch Linux reports 101 MBs of RAM usage, while Fedora Core 5 reports 85 MBs (few services run on both systems, in fact FC5 runs more services). I tried gnome-system-monitor 2.14 on both systems.

And there's a major memory leak going on too. Open gnome-system-monitor in the memory view tab and watch losing 1 MB per minute of free memory -- without doing anything else!

1. We're still working on it. It sure isn't stable at all...
2. gnome-phone-manager isn't in our repositories, so it's not a bug for us. Kick the one who compiled it, probably yourself, it needs a recompile
3. Do you have some more information about that? probably something from .xsession-errors?

About the memleaks: are you using beagle? Beagle can eat quite much memory during its index runs.

About the gconf symbols: I guess we need to run ldconfig after updating gconf.

can you please post 'top -n 1 -b' for both systems, maybe we can clear something up from the mem leak.

1. gnome-power-manager will hit unstable once i have a bit more time.
3. also try runing /opt/gnome/lib/deskbar-applet/deskbar

>2. gnome-phone-manager isn't in our repositories, so it's not a bug for us. Kick the one who compiled it...

So, that would be Arjan? http://www.archlinux.org/packages.php?id=9049

>3.Do you have some more information about that? probably something from .xsession-errors?
>can you please post 'top -n 1 -b' for both systems

Will look at this tonight.

>About the memleaks: are you using beagle? Beagle can eat quite much memory during its index runs.

Beagle is installed, but not running.

if beagle is installed, it does run... latest version will start it on login...

On login of Gnome? Because, I don't have GDM installed you see, neither I run its service or anything.

yeah on login of gnome. look at /opt/gnome/share/gnome/autostart/, beagle is useless if it doesn't run all the time. if you do not want it to run remove it.

eugenia@lc2430:~> /opt/gnome/lib/deskbar-applet/deskbar
bash: /opt/gnome/lib/deskbar-applet/deskbar: No such file or directory
eugenia@lc2430:~> /opt/gnome/lib/deskbar-applet/deskbar-applet
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/opt/gnome/lib/deskbar-applet/deskbar-applet", line 13, in ?
import gtk, gnomeapplet
ImportError: No module named gnomeapplet

As for the memory leak, it does seem to be Beagle, I will investigate more in the future.

Also, remember the problem that i can't run gnome or gnome apps anymore, as explained in the first comment on this ticket? Well, it happened again!! If I reboot, it seems to fixing it. Gnome seems to go busted every other reboot! So, the problem remains...

http://www.gnomefiles.org/comment.php?soft_id=780
I am not the only one with this problem, read down the discussion about the problem with gnome-python-extras.

I guess the memory problem was just Beagle indeed. So, we only have left the deskbar problem and the occasional non-loading of gnome. I had a similar non-gnome loading 2 years ago on Slackware, the problem went away after a kernel upgrade. I don't think it's the same cause though...

Oops, one more:
[root@lc2430 eugenia]# /etc/rc.d/avahi-dnsconfd start
:: Starting Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD DNS Server Configuration Daemon [FAIL]
[root@lc2430 eugenia]# /etc/rc.d/avahi-daemon start
:: Starting Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Daemon [FAIL]

the last thing is not a bug, you will need to load the capability module.

i have been testing deskbar last night, it seems it is highly unstable. but it runs.
i will take a look at fixing it tonight.
i might be pygtk or so.

I am sorry, but this should not be done by the user. If a service requires a special module that somehow hwd doesn't load automatically, then the service should load it. HOW am I suppose to know that Avahi requires that module? All I know is that avahi used to work on my system and after the upgrade it doesn't. For a user, it's as simple and as plain as that. On your archlinux.org page you only mention vftpd, you should have listed all the services that dependend on this module if you are not willing to make it automatic! And is it really called "capability"? Do I just load it as 'modprobe capability'? (what a stupid name).

Anyways, thanks your replies so far.

The stock kernel has support for different security models. One of them gives specific capabilities to users, which is what the name says. Without security model support, capability isn't needed at all.

I'll update the init script to modprobe the capability module when needed, I don't think it's hard to find out.

about the deskbar-applet try reinstalling gnome-python-desktop

Seems something goes wrong with it update... not sure what..

I am closing-in to the problem. I still can't load gnome you see as either "eugenia" or "root" (the root user hasn't used gnome for more than 1 hour the last 1.5 years btw). I created a brand new user, and tried to load gnome-session in it via .xinitrc. IT LOADED. And then, I enabled the gnome-system sounds. Kaboom! Everything stopped working! I restarted X, and now I get the SAME empty X screen as I get with the other users! So the problem has something to do with sound! Please note that I have the 2.6.16.1-8 installed from your repos and have rebooted to take effect.

Trying to manually load gnome-settings-daemon it gives me errors that xrdb doesn't exist.

I also include here my Xorg log. There are some unrelated font errors that it would be nice if you could tell me how to fix them anyway.

This time Gnome has randomly started. It's one of the few times that it actually starts. And it gave me an error message:

There was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon.
Some things, such as themes, sounds, or background settings may not work correctly.
The Settings Daemon restarted too many times.
The last error message was:
System exception: IDL:Bonobo/GeneralError:1.0 : Child process did not give an error message, unknown failure occurred
GNOME will still try to restart the Settings Daemon next time you log in.

I think there are missing libraries in the system, even after re-installing dbus. I had to create a link ln -s libdbus-1.so libdbus-1.so.1
So, any ideas what is wrong with my system?

well yes, you compile thing @random on your system.

my suggestion would be to reinstall gnome by doing :
pacman -Rc gtk2
pacman -S gnome gnome-extra

Arjan, I suggest you stop the blame game. I only compile user applications on my system (e.g. Monotheka, or, GCFilms) and not system software. And usually, these are very few that I do. If your operating system can not handle third party applications, then it needs robustness anyway. I re-installed a lot of gnome packages earlier, but I didn't remove them first. I am not going to go through all this removal and re-installation again. It is several MBs and it will take almost an hour to go through it. Any other ideas?

I did give you an pointer earlier. Gnome-settings-daemon needed xrdb and that executable does not exist in my system. Where do I find it? If you don't package it, you might consider do so, because obviously gnome-settings-daemon needs it.

About the dbus issues:
Put your pacman sources at ftp://ftp.archlinux.org or ftp://schoolbak.dyndns.org/pub/archlinux and try to upgrade. Something went wrong in the mirror synchronisation process on some mirrors, causing all kinds of problems with out-of-date packages on your system.

/usr/bin/xrdb is owned by xorg-server-utils 1.0.0-1

if this will solve the problem i will add it to control-center as a dep.

and about the 3th party apps, if you compile them yourself i can hardly give support on it. in the past we had people install old gnome libs in /usr/lib and it broke there gnome, this will break any gnome in any distro. i am not blaming you, but telling you that if you compile 3th party apps you will need to maintain them yourself.

yes, after installing this it makes things much easier. It hasn't failed once loading gnome! Thanks!

ok i will rebuild it with this dep tonight. any other issues still ?

The only thing that really bothers me is that "/" (root) hard disk icon in the desktop. I know that it supposed to do things like OSX does where the main mounted volume is shown on the desktop, but the / name is just ugly. I know I can disable this in the gconf-editor, but I don't want to do this, because it also disables all other mounted volumes. Is it possible to specifically make the change in the nautilus or gnome-vfs package to call that volume "Arch Linux" instead of "/"? :)

Other than that, all things are smooth. For now. :)

These things show up as "32MB volume" on my desktop, so it's the description given by hal to it. I guess you set some filesystem labels when creating them, if these are present, hal shows them instead of other names. Changing the labels shouldn't break archlinux, but it might break other distros installed on your system (Redhat uses filesystem labels to find the rootfs for example)

I installed this system 1.5 years ago. I don't think I was ever given any option to label it when installed the system... So now I am stuck with that / thing? :)