monline

From time to time it happened to me (and a couple of my colleagues) that after a successful login to our Ubuntu server my Gnome Panels would not appear. It took not too much to discover that starting with a clean HOME directory solved the issue ... however it was quite annoying and building up a new HOME from scratch and copying stuff from the old HOME one by one ... not too much joy. Last week I had enough and tracked down the problem by removing stuff from my HOME one-by-one til the issue was gone.

Unfortunately I took the longest possible path: I tried to narrow down the circle of possible culprits by removing stuff in decreasing order of occupied space. And as it turned out, the problem was caused by a single file in the root of my HOME and this file was one of the smallest. In the end I had only 5 files remaining in my HOME and then I took a lucky guess and got the little bugger. It was the file .gtk-bookmarks which contains the list of items in your Places container (you see this list in left pane of Nautilus too). And the actual problem was that this list contained a reference to a folder that was on a stale NFS mount. The NFS server was down and the NFS export was mounted via the hard option (the default method), thus every access to anything on this mountpoint resulted in a blocking wait ... the process was blocked til the NFS exported dir got up again.

It seems that Gnome Panel tries to access all the items in the Places list before it starts up its GUI. And apparently it does this in a single thread ... and since my NFS mount was blocking, the code never got to the GUI initialization part.

The solution is trivial: remove the problematic item from .gtk-bookmarks and all is back to normal.