r3dux.org

When configuring your Gnome appearance and icon themes in Ubuntu 9.10 do they keep reverting to some ugly defaults? Yeah, mine were too. The problem’s related to gnome-settings-daemon, as seen here.

The fix:

Modify the file: /etc/X11/Xsession.d/55gnome-session_gnomerc so that it contains the following two additional lines (shown in comments):

# ADD FOLLOWING LINE
rm -f /tmp/session-is-gnome
BASESTARTUP=`basename "$STARTUP" | cut -d\  -f1`
if [ "$BASESTARTUP" = gnome-session -o \
        \( "$BASESTARTUP" = x-session-manager -a \
        "`readlink /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager`" = \
                /usr/bin/gnome-session \) ]; then
  GNOMERC=$HOME/.gnomerc
  if [ -r "$GNOMERC" ]; then
    . "$GNOMERC"
  fi
  # ADD FOLLOWING LINE
  touch /tmp/session-is-gnome
fi

Then modify the file: /etc/X11/Xsession.d/99×11-common_start to contain only the following code:

if [ -f /tmp/session-is-gnome ]; then
  exec /usr/bin/dbus-launch $STARTUP
else
  exec $STARTUP
fi

Fixed! Next!

Update: Although gnome-settings-daemon is definitely the guilty party here, the above fix doesn’t resolve it dying on login all the time, although it does increase the odds of starting correctly. If your icons switch back to some drab default, or other such off behaviour, check gnome-settings-daemon hasn’t died on start with ps -ef | grep gnome-settings, if it’s not running, you know it’s the problem. Will have to research this a bit more…