Gnome Desktop is Broken

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The Gnome stopped working on our server running RH Ent. 5.
Users are running X11 servers on their Windows PCs and connecting to their desktops on the server via ssh clients.
Users can run something like 'xterm' on their PCs and it will open a new terminal window. When they are trying to run some Gnome applets (gedit, nautilus, etc.) it returns the errors: "The application ,nautilus has crashed", "The application gnome-power-manager has crashed", etc.
If I am (as a 'root') connecting to the server's console and trying to run gedti - I am getting the same bunch of errors.
I was playing with gdm for few days trying to fix things, no show. I even rebooted the server, the same thing.
As a temporary solution I had users connect to their KDE instead of Gnome and it's working but eventually they will need Gnome.
Can someone please point me to the right direction.

HK
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Responses

Christian Labisch's picture Guru 9710 points
7 May 2018 3:44 PM

Hi Henry,

Do you have a system backup image (highly recommended) ? Restore it back - the most convenient and easy way to solve this.
If you didn't create any system backup (hope you did), try to solve it by reinstalling the whole GNOME desktop environment. :)

Regards,
Christian

HK Newbie 17 points
7 May 2018 3:54 PM

Christian, thank you for the quick response. We do have system backups but I cannot just restore the whole system to a specific date -let's say 4/25/2018 (I don't know the exact day when Gnome got broken). I will loose all the users data changed/created between 4/25 and today. Do you know specific system configuration files that comprise Gnome environment in RedHat Linux 5? I can restore those. As of Gnome reinstalling - I am trying to avoid it.

Christian Labisch's picture Guru 9710 points
7 May 2018 4:09 PM

Hi Henry,

You can backup the users data before, restore back the latest stable system backup image and then restore back the data afterwards. What you described sounds as if many things are broken, changing some configuration file contents won't bring back a properly working DE. Reinstalling the DE is not complicated, just reboot the server when finished. Also, you may want to consider taking the current 'mess' as a chance to install the latest stable RHEL 7.5 edition ... :)

Regards,
Christian

HK Newbie 17 points
7 May 2018 4:28 PM

Unfortunately it's not that easy in our case. Our server in question is a head node in the "rocks linux cluster". I cannot just use rpm or yum to reinstall applications. Everything is under "rocks" control and it's kind of complicated to do it. Speaking of RHEL update... We are on RHEL v.5 now and it cannot be upgraded "in place". There is very old environment here - both hardware and software. We are in the process of refreshing everything. I just wanted some quick temporary Gnome solution if any available.

Christian Labisch's picture Guru 9710 points
7 May 2018 4:37 PM

Hi Henry,

Okay, understood ... but as I said before : many things seem to be broken, so no "quick solutions" - unfortunately.
When you have to stick with RHEL 5 for the time being, the best solution would be the backup/restore method. :)

Regards,
Christian

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