Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

I have a couple of problems on my N900 that I am trying to resolve, and I need some advice.

First, I noticed that the only time I can change the desktop background is immediately after I boot the device. I have to start tapping the desktop as soon as it appears, and it takes a minute or so before everything is booted up, and the images dialog will come up. After that point, when i tap the desktop and the little gear, then hit change background, sometimes it appears that the dialog is popping up, but ti disappears. Other times, it does not appear at all, but the icons and widgets on the desktop I am on disappear and come back (as if a shadow of the dialog comes up but not the whole thing).

That said, I was doing some research on the system, and found that I had two instances of /usr/bin/hildon-desktop running. I killed the second one, and tried to bring up the change background dialog. It comes up and then disappears again, if I do it immediately. Otherwise, it does the momentarily disappearing icons and widgets. So should two copies of the hildon-desktop be running? If not, where do I turn off the second one? I have tried killing one then the other, but they come back.

The other problem is that widgets seem to disappear. It happens at random, but I only run (thus far) omweather and the calendar home widget. It has happened with one or both running, and even when I just used the calendar applet.

Is this a badly behaved applet, or is this problem related to the two hildon-desktops running?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
--vr

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

i'm not really sure whats happening here but try this, open xterm and run (you need to have 'rootsh' installed)

root
apt-get update
apt-get -f install

also try removing the battery and holding the power button down for a few seconds before replacing it

if nothing works, list your recent downloads, it could be one of them

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

Did that, and everything was installed properly. Interesting side bar, though, doing an apt-get upgrade (I did not commit this) gave me

The interesting part is that there are no updates pending in the application manager. The only one(s) that *may* affect the desktop are libhildon-extras1 and libclutter-1.0-0, but these only provide libraries (libhildon-extras-1.so.0.0.0 and libclutter-eglx-1.0.so.0.1.4 respectively). I did not do the upgrade because since the device is so dependent on python, I didn't want to risk breaking things.

Hmmm...Is there a way to generate a list? The logs are kind of sparse compared to a Debian box...There I can look at /var/log/apt/history.log.

Thanks,
--vr

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

i'm pretty new to linux so i don't know of any log,
i was only interested in the things you downloaded a day or so before you ran in to problems,

running the upgrade shouldn't cause any problems, as far as i know apt won't upgrade any packages that might cause a problem and it could be that something you have downloaded is dependant on one of the packages that need upgrading.
i run an upgrade every day and it hasn't caused any issues

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

I haven't installed anything recently...I don't honestly know when it started, since I don't usually change things that often. I only noticed that the desktop image switching didn't work because I got tired of my current one and tried to change it, and noticed the behavior. It could have been broken for days or weeks prior to that...

You say you upgrade every day. That means you have extras-testing and extras-devel enabled?

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

yea, i'm just careful with what i download so i don't run into problems later down the line

if you're worried about it, make a backup first just incase you have to flash
are you on a standard theme and/or do you use desktop command execution widget

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

Okay, can someone check their device and see if there are two instances of hildon-desktop running?

Open an xterm and type

I'm looking around in the filesystem now. Where does hildon-desktop get called? I checked /etc/init.d/hildon-desktop, but there is only one instance of /usr/bin/hildon-desktop in this file. So I'm wondering if somewhere in either dbus or gconf or both (I'm a KDE user on the desktop, so I am not familiar with the entire gconf thing) it is getting called twice.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
--vr

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

Hi VulcanRidr,

two hildon-desktop instances are normal. I don't know exactly
why there are two (maybe for restarting the desktop if
the "main" instance crashes).

Can you post which desktop widgets you are using and if you have
any theme customizations.

regards
Nicolai

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

Okay. I wasn't sure, but when I kill one of them and immediately try to start the desktop background manager, it tries to start (I can see it come up before it disappears).

Sure. As follows:

Desktop 1

• MediaBox shortcut
• Mappero shortcut
• OMweather widget (until it crashes)

Desktop 2

• FBreader shortcut
• Rapier shortcut
• Xournal shortcut
• XTerm shortcut

Desktop 3

• Addressbook shortcut
• email shortcut
• phone shortcut
• Calendar Home widget (until it crashes)

Desktop 4

• Maemo Select bookmark
• Ovi Store bookmark

Still running the original theme that it shipped with. (I like the blue better than the orange, and I wanted to figure out/fix the desktop image problem before I complicated it by mucking with themes...

--vr

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

The shortcuts should be a problem. The calendar home
widget is pretty stable. Anyway I bet it is one of
the widgets. What happens if you remove the two widgets
and reboot, then wait until the desktop is fully loaded and
try to change the desktop image.

nicolai

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

I assume you meant the shortcuts *shouldn't* be a problem. The widgets are both gone now, and I did as you suggested, with the same problem result. The icons disappeared but the desktop background list did not appear. This is very frustrating.

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

Yes I meant "shouldn't" :-)

If you have many images in your image Folder
(/home/user/MyDocs/.images), in the top level
(not in any subfolder), at least it may take long until the
dialog loads. But I have no idea why it doesn't show up
at all.

nicolai

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

Now *that's* an interesting question. I wonder if I have too many images in there. Let me move that directory elsewhere and put a few things in there...I currently have 252 images in that directory. I will move out all but the ones that are either 3200x480 or have .desktop files to another location and see if that helps.

Thanks nicolai

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

Okay, I moved 118 image files out of that directory and tried again. Same indications. Rebooted, and was able to change backgrounds if I did it *as* the desktop came up. After that, I was unable to get the backgrounds screen to come up...So it wasn't the count of images (since most of the ones remaining are the ones that ship with it).

At this point, I am starting to think about whether I should a) restore from backup (need to see what the backups on this device entails), b) reflash or c) wait for the next release to see if that fixes it. Personally, I'd rather fix it than reflash...

Thoughts?

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

I don't think the next release will help, as far as I know,
there isn't a known bug that could cause this.

I think reflashing is the simplest and fastest "solution".

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

This is the first time I have ever flashed the N900 (and its been about 2 years since I flashed the N810). Do you think I can get away with just the OS flash or should I also do the filesystem flash as well?

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

I'm not sure if you have the same problem I had, anyway, I've posted what I did to sort out my prob: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...8&postcount=13

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

have you tried reinstalling hildon-desktop
maybe its corrupt somehow
just a suggestion after reading the thread
cos i know its VERY frustrating when problems pop up from nowhere!
good luck with it anyway bro

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

I have reinstalled hildon-desktop as well as installing hildon-desktop-kinetic to get improved kinetic scrolling performance. Neither has affected the background image problem.

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

Hey gang, I just found something interesting I was looking around in the filesystem trying to figure out what is causing my desktop background switching problems, and I noticed the file /etc/gconf/schemas/hildon-desktop-background-settings.schema. Here is the contents of this file:

Well, I don't know that much about xml, but the gconfschemafile xmlns has a valid url, so I went to it. The site said, among other things:

The hildon-desktop-background-settings.schema is part of the hildon-desktop-background-settings-002 package. Did I miss an update on this? I figure that if this were a real problem, more people would be up in arms.

So, I did an

No change appears to have occurred. Behavior is still consistent with before, I still can't change backgrounds, even after a reboot.

Any ideas? Am I barking up the wrong tree?

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

Hi VulcanRidr
I have the same /etc/gconf/schemas/hildon-desktop-background-settings.schema
and no problems with the desktop backgrounds.

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

Believe it or not, I "fixed" the problem (at least the background images menu not appearing). Previously, I had moved about half of the images out of /home/user/MyDocs/.images. Well, on a whim this morning, I moved the rest of the files out of that directory. And magically, the menu showed up. I moved some images into the .images directory, and it still worked. Thus I moved the images I wanted (both 3200x480 and a few multi-image plus .desktop files) into .images. Things are working now, and I am going to see if my widgets are more stable.

Up next, I want to set up syslog, install the powerusers kernel and overclock.

Thanks to all who responded.
--vr

Re: Disappearing widgets and can't change desktop image
 

Nice to hear that it works.