Weird GNOME behaviour (in Dapper and Edgy)

[John Moniz]

Severin Schoepke wrote:

>Hi list!
>
>I decided to switch from Windows with the Dapper release. I installed it 
>and all went well. But because it was my first Linux installation that I 
>used for daily work, I messed around and tried lots of stuff, which 
>maybe introduced damage... When Edgy was released, I reformatted the HD 
>and did a clean install of Edgy. I tried to keep this installation clean 
>(only using official repos, no EasyUbuntu, no Automatix and so on).
>
>But I have a weird problem with both installations: Sometimes Gnome 
>doesn't allow the creation of new windows: When I'm working and want to 
>start a new app or open a folder, it happens from time to time that the 
>app/folder is not started/opened. There's a new entry in the task bar in 
>the likes of 'Mozilla Firefox wird gestartet...' (FF is being started in 
>english) that just disappears after a few seconds. I then can't start 
>applications, be it via the start menu, a panel launcher, a starter on 
>the desktop or from a terminal that is already open... Then suddenly, 
>after 10 minutes or so, the apps finally start/the windows get opened...
>
>This is really annoying, and a fix for it is to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and 
>restart X... And I find it strange that noone else reported this 
>problem, I can't believe I'm the only one suffering from this...
>
>As I said it happenend on both installations (the probably messed up 
>Dapper and the clean Edgy)... I use a Dell Inspirion laptop with 512 
>megs RAM and with a GeForce FX5200. The binary drivers (nvidia-glx) from 
>the official repo are installed. Most of the time I have quite a few 
>apps running (Thunderbird, Gaim, Rythmbox, Tomboy and a Terminal). And I 
>usually don't shut down the computer but use hibernation instead...
>
>I have no idea where the problem lies: I suspect it could be a X 
>problem, or a window manager problem or maybe a memory problem. But 
>normally everything is working (X and the window manager make no 
>problems other than that) and 512 megs of RAM is not much, but it should 
>be enough and the RAM is fine (I memtested it)...
>
>Does anyone have an idea where the problem lies or how to fix it?
>
>TIA!
>
>cheers, Severin
>
>  
>
Do you have lots of free space in your /home partition (assuming you 
have one).

John.