System restore progresses, new problems seen

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 9:45 PM, Cybe R. Wizard
<cyber_wizard at mindspring.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 7 Nov 2011 21:25:32 -0800
> "Kevin O'Gorman" <kogorman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> After a few harrowing weeks, my rebuild of my decade-old server has
>> gotten to the point that Ubuntu 11.04 boots up and it's serving my web
>> pages.  Whew!
>>
>> There are, however, one or two problems, however.  On bootup, a dialog
>> appears with a message I wrote down as
>>     The config defaults for gnome-power-manager
>>     have not been installed correctly.
>>    Contact your computer administrator.   (Of course, I'm the computer
>> administrator and I have no idea what to do about this.)
>> In addition, a bit later in bootup and on all attempts at a user GUI
>> login, another appears:
>>     There is a problem with the configuration server.
>>     (/usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconf-sanity-chaek-2 exited 256)
>> And the login attempt fails.  That's what makes this one urgent.  No
>> user graphical logins.
>>
>> The problem occurs for a brand-new user account as well as inherited
>> ones.  Non-graphical logins are okay.   Strangely, if I create a root
>> password, root can log in graphically.
>> The user cannot log in if I delete all dotfiles and directories from
>> the home directory.  Neither does it work to copy over all of root's
>> dotfiles and directories and change ownership.
>>
>> Note that this is a restored backup of the system as it was, at the
>> same release level but on vastly different hardware.  So if there was
>> special configuration to be done on installation, it did not get
>> re-done for the new machine.  This is a fairly heavily configured
>> system, and I really really don't want to re-do it.
>>
>> This may be all one problem originating with the gnome-power-manager,
>> but I have already done a reinstall.  It does not help.
>>
>> Any ideas what I should look at now?
>>
> Googling on, "gconf-sanity-check-2 exited 256," produced this forum fix:
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=917306
> There are four pages of various fixes so don't be discouraged.
> It looks like a permissions problem in the /tmp directory.
>

I did not see a reference to /tmp in the page you linked, but sure
enough /tmp was 755.  I set it to 1777, as I always taught my students
to do and all is well.  Both dialogs went away and graphical logins
are fine.

Thanks.  On to the next problem.  Stay tuned.

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD