[PLUG] It just happened again (Resolved)

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 6 Dec 2009 10:04:17 -0800
Michael Rasmussen <michael at jamhome.us> dijo:

>On Sat, Dec 05, 2009 at 03:32:30PM -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>> I did, but the results were inconclusive.
>> 
>> The results of diff are hard to read and understand. Finally, I just did diff
>> --brief and figured I would look at the files in Gedit or something myself
>> manually. Even that didn't help. And sometimes diff lied. For example, it
>> said two small text files were different, but when I opened them in Gedit and
>> compared them line by line they were identical, at least as to content.
>
>As Tony pointed out diff pays attention to whitespace - in some cases that is
>very relevant.  
>
>Consider using context diff, the -c option, to be presented with the most 
>human readable diff output.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I finally nailed it.

The ~/.local-original/share/applications folder for the new user had only two
files. My ~/local/share/applications folder has many entries. I don't know what
they do. Some appear to be part of the Applications menu, but others clearly
are not. And I also have launchers in Applications that are not reflected in a
file in this folder. 

However, I was especially interested in a file called metacity.desktop. I noted
that the new user's original folder did not contain this file. I tried to
rename it, but Nautilus would not let me. I certainly own the file and have rw
permissions for it, but Nautilus just wouldn't let me. No matter, as root from
the command line I renamed it metacity.desktop.old. Then I rebooted. And after
logging in metacity launched as it is supposed to. Everything else seems to be
working normally.

I have no idea what rogue process created this file.

It is a text file that can be opened with Gedit. Looking at the contents I see
nothing that says "don't launch metacity for this user." 

If any of the Gnome users on this list have such a file, it would be
interesting to compare notes. I feel an obligation to file a bug report, but I
in order to make the bug report useful I need to figure out what is the purpose
of the file, what created it, and where it went wrong.