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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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