Re: Bluecurve theme disappeared following RH9 to FC3 upgrade [RESOLVED]

Mike Fleetwood wrote:

After upgraded directly from RH9 to FC3 the Gnome desktop is very
spartan and not displaying the Bluecurve theme.  Instead a default
desktop is displayed with virtually empty panels.  After adding the
Main Menu it only contains names and no icons.  Lost more ugly
default theme everywhere, no key binding including Alt-TAB, etc ...

Also running gnome-theme-manager (Main Menu / Preferences / Theme)
produces an error dialog box containing:
  The default there schemas could not be found on your system.  This
  means that you probably don't have meatcity installed, or that your
  gconf is configured incorrectly.

metacity-theme-viewer reports loading "Atlanta" theme.

Is there someway to get Bluecurve theme and associated settings back?

James Wilkinson asked:

Does adding a new test user get what you want? If so, you may want to
copy the ~/.gnome* and ~/.gconf* directories somewhere else and re-start
X.

Mike replied:

Unfortunately this made no difference.

A brand new test user still had the same problem.  Even took the machine
to run level 1 and killed gconfd and a few other processes before
returning to run level 5 and testing the user for the first time.

James asked some more:

Hmm. Since it's an upgrade, I assume that you're still on x86, not
x86-64 (which might involve multi-arch issues).

What does
rpm -V redhat-artwork
and possibly
rpm -V gnome-utils metacity
show?

Mike replied:

Correct assumption. x86 arch before and after.
These RPMs are installed and report no verification problems, hence Bluecurve is installed.

I have been doing some reading of Gnome, its configuration and GConf.
gconftool-2 -R / | grep 'no value set' | wc -l
Reports 554 unset values. Some of them look relevant. Is there a way to on mass reset all my GConf settings to those Bluecurve sets?

I have now resolved the problem, but not yet solved the problem.  (Got
to the most basic reason as to why).

The Fix:
1) Empty the file /etc/sysconfig/i18n;
2) Run system-config-language and reselect English (Great Britain) as my
   language of choice;
3) Logout and in.  All of the Bluecurve theme now works.

The Investigation:
After much reading of how GConf works I noticed the key difference
between my RH9 -> FC3 upgraded box and a freshly installed FC3 box.
GConf reported the default value as unset for the upgraded case and set
for the freshly installed case when querying the schemas loaded into
GConf.

Specific example: Query of parameter "show_splash_screen".
Upgrade case:
$ gconftool-2 --get /schemas/apps/gnome-session/options/show_splash_screen
...
Default Value: Unset
...
And for the fresh install case:
$ gconftool-2 --get /schemas/apps/gnome-session/options/show_splash_screen
...
Default Value: true
...
This pattern repeated for over 500 parameters in GConf. No wonder
Bluecurve wasn't displayed and everything looked blank as all the
configuration parameters reported as unset.

Examined the XML file /etc/gconf/schemas/gnome-session.schemas into
which the defaults had been loaded.  Both machines had the default set
to true.  So why did the upgraded box report it as unset?

After looking at all the translations and languages in this XML file I
though of checking the language setting. On the upgraded machine:
$ env | grep LANG
LANG=en_GB
On the fresh install machine:
$ env | grep LANG
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
So on my upgraded machine I try:
$ LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 gconftool-2 --get /schemas/apps/gnome-session/options/show_splash_screen
...
Default Value: true
...

So this is how to fix it!  After a quick search I find that LANG is set
from the content of the file /etc/sysconfig/i18n.  (The i18n file has
not changed since 1999, about RedHat 6 times).  So either edit this
file to contain the same as on the fresh install machine, or use the
correct system-config tool.  I would normally have just edited the file
changing it from:
  LANG=en_GB
  LC_ALL=en_GB
  LINGUAS=en_GB
to (matching the contents from the freshly installed machine):
  LANG="en_GB.UTF-8"
  SUPPORTED="en_GB.UTF-8:en_GB:en"
  SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"
but it is always nice to find the "easy" GUI way!  A quick trial and
error with system-config-language tool revealed the fix instructions at
the start.  This set the contents of the i18n file to:
  LANG="en_GB.UTF-8"
  SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"

The Unknown:
Final anomaly is that on the freshly installed machine:
  $ LANG=en_GB gconftool-2 ...
displays the default value as true.  So there is still a fault with my
upgraded machine where by setting LANG=en_GB causes gconf to not report
default correctly where as this works correctly on the freshly installed
box.  Hence this problem is only resolved and not fully solved!

ATB,
Mike
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