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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!)<BR>
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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....<BR>
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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.<BR>
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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. <BR>
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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.<BR>
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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. <BR>
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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.<BR>
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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? <BR>
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Thanks and best Easter wishes to all!<BR>
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Rich in Lilburn<BR>
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