Menu and task bar doesn't appear in Gnome

[Mario Vukelic]

On Wed, 2008-04-30 at 14:38 -0300, Túlio Henrique Alves dos Santos
wrote:
> Hello everyone!
> 
> I just installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron in two computers, one at my work,
> and another in my friend's house. Both work perfectly. After about one
> day using the system, When I do the login, just the icons and
> wallpaper are displayed, nothing more. The task bar and menu bar just
> don't appear. I re-installed the system three times, and the problem
> don't go!
> Somebody have any idea how to fix it?

It seems that the gnome-panel process is crashing. This should not
happen, and certainly not predictably and three times in a row on new
installs.

What is especially weird is that the panel seems to disappear for good,
because there is a safety guard against panel crashes (which you can
never rule out 100%, and several crashes have been reported to the
Ubuntu bug database). If gnome-panel crashes, it is supposed to be
automatically restarted.

I would first check that this is indeed so on your system:
While you still have a functional panel, go to menu System >
Preferences, and open the Sessions control panel. Go to the second tab,
Current Session. Find the entry for gnome-panel and select it. Below the
list there is a menu button that should now read, "Restart". If this is
not the case, change it to "Restart", then click the Apply button next
to it. Close the session properties. Now you can at least be sure that
the gnome-panel /should/ be restarted when it crashes and disappears.
Use the system and see whether the panel crash happens again, and
whether the panel does not restart. Please back report your results, so
that we can know what is going on.


I was inclined to tell you that when your panel crashes, you can press
the Alt and F2 keys simultaneously, which would bring up a "Run ..."
dialog, where you could enter "gnome-panel" and restart it this way. But
alas, when the panel is not present, Alt+F2 does not work either, so we
need another way to let you restart the panel. The best way to achieve
this in this case is probably to place a launcher on the desktop. Go to
menu Applications > Accessories, and find "Terminal". Rightclick this
menu entry and choose "Add this launcher to desktop". If you check your
desktop, you will find it there.

Now, next time your panel disappears, doubleclick this launcher. Then
enter the following and press enter:

ps aux | grep gnome-panel


If you see any output after this command, please copy and post it back
to the list. (To copy, select the output with the left mouse button; to
paste it into an email, press the middle button or, if your mouse has
only 2 buttons, press them simultaneously.) 

If however the output of the above command is nothing at all (that is,
if you are simply returned to an empty prompt), then your panel has
indeed crashed. In this case, enter the following line and press enter
(else, read on further below)

gnome-panel&

Your panel should reappear now. Note that you should not exit the
terminal at this point, as this would also exit gnome-panel. Instead, go
to the Sessions control panel as described above and make sure, again,
that gnome-panel is set to "Restart". Then go to the third tab, "Session
Options", and save click "Remember currently running applications".

As the next step, we need to find out what caused the crash. To do so,
go to the Places menu and choose Home Folder. A file manager window
appears, go to menu View and choose "Show hidden files". Now find the
file .xsession-errors (note the dot at the front of the filename; it's
what makes it hidden), open it and scroll down. See if you can find
anything that mentions "gnome-panel", copy it along with the surrounding
error entries, if any, and post the result back to the list. If in
doubt, copy large amounts of text :)

Go to the View menu again and hide the hidden files.

Log out and log in again and see if the issue has vanished completely.
Please report your results to the list.

Good luck :)