Gnome startup/gconfd errors
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The Issue
If ubuntu is not booting all the way to login, and is giving various errors related to gnome component configuration files, then this wiki may help solve the issue.
Overview of the procedure:
- First, make sure the main partition is not full. If it is, then backup/remove some files and try a reboot and work from there
- Check to see if the gconfd server is running. If not, then try the next step.
- Backup and delete the gconfd 'saved_state' file. This may be keeping gconfd from starting properly.
First make sure the disk is not full
open terminal and run:
df
output should look like:
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 5148288 3670952 1217412 76% / tmpfs 1046856 0 1046856 0% /lib/init/rw udev 1023448 24 1023424 1% /dev tmpfs 1046856 4 1046852 1% /dev/shm
if the main partition (ie. /dev/sda1) is 100% full, then some files need to be backedup/removed before anything else can be done. Make space on the partition, and check to see if the machine starts up. If no startup, then please fix issue and post steps to fix here.
If the drive is not full, proceed to next section
Check to see if gconfd-2 is running
Gconfd is the daemon that manages gnome configuration settings. These are instructions to check if the gconfd server is running. If the server is not running, the next section gives instructions to help it start on reboot.
run in terminal:
ps aux | grep gconfd
this prints running processes using ps, and then filters them using grep to return matches to the phrase 'gconfd'
output should look like:
1013 10036 0.0 0.1 4592 2580 ? S 09:57 0:00 /usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconfd-2 1014 10206 0.0 0.1 4588 2564 ? S 10:00 0:01 /usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconfd-2 tech3 10924 0.0 0.1 4480 2548 ? S 11:06 0:00 /usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconfd-2 tech2 12352 0.0 0.1 4480 2552 ? S 12:36 0:01 /usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconfd-2 tech2 14534 0.0 0.0 1804 636 pts/5 S+ 14:35 0:00 grep gconfd
gconfd-2 is the gconfd server. This is the process that should be running. Ignore 'grep gconfd'.
If you see that gconfd-2 is running, then this wiki may not help you; see the external links at the end for insight into the problem, and update this wiki.
If gconfd-2 is NOT running, then try next step
Reset gconfd 'saved_state' file
These instructions will backup and delete the gconfd 'saved_state' file. This may be keeping gconfd from starting properly.
the file is located in:
~/.gconfd/saved_state
use mv to backup/remove the file to saved_state.bak[date]:
mv ~/.gconfd/saved_state ~/.gconfd/saved_state.bak[date] (put today's date in place of [date])
Reboot, and see if issue still persists
External References
http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/
http://810intrepid.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/a-rather-nasty-crash/
RT: #26349: Nancy Chevalier