[ale] Gnome-panel failure (seeking critque on solution)

[Richard Faulkner]

If anyone is terminally bored or wants to critique my approach to
solving this issue (especially anyone who wants to share a BETTER way of
resolving this issue -- I'm all ears!)

For the record I am not a CLI junkie (but I'd like to be one of sorts)
and although I consider myself comfortable with supporting the distros
that I'm familiar with; I am limited as that's more from the GUI than a
CLI standpoint.  Enter today's problem....

<PROBLEM>

Last week my wife did an upgrade on her Ubuntu 9.10 box to 10.10 without
knowing the potential consequences.  Needless to say her Internet box
was more than a little "funkified" after the procedure.  As I already
had good back-up for the system I opted to blast it and reinstall 9.10
(which runs really good on that machine) and make some improvements
while I went.  After completing that work I ran into this little wrinkle
today.

After starting the machine (cold boot) the desktop launched but
gnome-panel crashed and never launched (no menus or icons).  Having some
desktop icons and a mounted external USB drive mounted at least I had
some tools.  Knowing that I needed a terminal window I figured I could
find an internal path to that application online.  (I only know these
features by heart for Window$ and haven't learned them yet for
GNU/Linux).  The only problem was that I had no panel with Chrome on it
or a Terminal launcher to get there.  Knowing that Chrome saves bookmark
back-ups as .HTML files I browsed to the mounted back-up drive and
launched a browser process from the Chrome back-up file.  Now I could
access the web...  Some quick digging yielded the needed command to
restart the panels.  Now all I needed was a way to get to Terminal.  

By referring to the properties of the Terminal launcher on my Fedora box
I found the commands needed to create a launcher on my wife's Ubuntu
desktop.  Now with a desktop launcher for Terminal I could run the
command "killall gnome-panel" thus killing and restarting the panels.
Bingo!  I'm back in business...sort of.

A restart showed that the panels were still buggered-up (process died
for some reason) so reflecting back on what had been done to them before
the machine was shut-down; I recalled that I had added Weather Report to
the top panel.  I had added two (one for Atlanta and one for Wellington)
and both at the time appeared to be running.  Again I stop and start
gnome-panel and once again it launches properly but now I can see that
both Weather Reports now MIA.  This leads me to suspect that they were
buggered-up as well and perhaps causing (or contributing to) the failure
in panels.  

With my limited experience in troubleshooting these issues for Linux I
decided to try creating a new panel and populate it with new menus and
features.  (Out with the old and in with the new).  After this I blew
away the old panel, did a "killall gnome-panel" once again; confirmed it
restarted and then rebooted to check the results.  It worked and all is
back to normal.

</PROBLEM>

I know there must be a better way of doing this.  The question is just
"how?"  All I did was use all of the tools that I know for Linux and
attack the problem with what I had.  Anyone care to critique?  

Thanks and best Easter wishes to all!


Rich in Lilburn


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