Problem w Gnome

[Redshadow]

Just installed RedHat 8 tonight. My first linux experience since using the VAX in college many years ago. While tinkering with gnome trying to get everything set up the way I wanted I, I seem to have lost everything on my taskbar except my application quick launch. Not lost as in I can re add the items, but really lost. All gnome menus are now blank until i mouse over them, and don't show icons, just text, and adding an item to the taskbar has no effect on it. This is only when logged in as root, while on a different log-in, gnome looks fine though it doesn't show active tasks anymore (didn't turn this off, but haven't tried to turn it back on as of yet). At the time this happened I was adding the e-mail notification applet, then everything went bad. Remember, I've spent maybe 3-4 hours w Linux so I need walked through fixing it fairly specifically.

[z0mbix]

I can't tell you why that is happening but you should not be logging into X as root. Just log in as a normal user and use su to switch to root as and when you need to. All packages in RedHat 8.0 that need root access will prompt your for the root password before running and hold that authorisation in the system notification area for a short time so you don't have to constantly type your password in.

[mrBen]

Sounds like your preferences for the taskbar have got messed up. Probably the simplest thing is to copy the preferences file from your user home directory into the root home directory. They'll probably be in a hidden file somewhere poss /home/username/.gnome or something like that.

[agricolae]

My problem is similar to Redshadow's. I'm running Mandrake 8.2 & I've installed Ximian destop, Gnome 1.4.1.

In the panels there are no more references to applications nor in the controls centre, no references to Global Applications. Nor am I able to adjust file types or anything of signifigance - it merely allows adjustments in the cosmetic sense, i.e., background, screensaver, default applications, sound, keyboard and mouse. Everything else has disappeared and I mean disappeared..

And yes, I thought about referring to the .*rc files, but there's no reference to any of that stuff. Was it a mistake going to Ximian? I tried finding out some answers at the Ximian site but I ended up going around in circles.:mad: .

Any ideas, anybody?