[oi-dev] libpulsecore error

[Tim Mooney]

In regard to: Re: [oi-dev] libpulsecore error, Gary Mills said (at 9:59pm...:

> On Wed, Mar 08, 2023 at 01:47:25PM -0600, Tim Mooney via oi-dev wrote:
>>
>> I believe what the error message is saying is that your current theme is
>> not supplying a value for max-recent-items, but the gschema says there
>> should be one.
>
> So, the cause could be a faulty theme.

That would be my first guess.

When mate-panel isn't actually crashing, doing something like

- remove existing .xsession-errors
# to be thorough, also removing ~/.config or using a fresh account would be
# best
- use the mate "Appearance" application to choose a theme
- log out
- log back in
- check the new .xsession-errors for theme-related warnings

can be used to determine which themes are outdated or have problems.
glib and its theme-related code and MATE sometimes deprecate settings
and layout-related CSS, and if a theme doesn't follow that lead, that
will often show up as warnings or errors in the .xsession-errors.

> I know nothing at all about themes.  Is there a way to find out which
> theme I'm using?  It would have to be in a CLI session, since the
> graphic login never completes.

You can do a lot of setting-related exploring using one of these 3 tools:

 	dconf
 	gsettings
 	gconftool-2

There is considerable overlap between those tools, such that I'm never
sure which one to start with.  In this case, I was able to find an
answer using 'gsettings'.

*Many* of the "overall MATE" settings are going to be in the
'org.mate.Marco' "namespace", so doing

 	gsettings list-recursively org.mate.Marco

will show you a lot of your general desktop environment settings.  In
particular, in there you'll see one for "theme":

 	$ gsettings list-recursively org.mate.Marco | egrep theme
 	org.mate.Marco.general theme 'nimbus'

>Alternatively, is there a way to
> disable mate-panel, as that application seems to be the one that fails
> repeatedly?

In theory you could replace mate-panel with some other compatible panel,
but OI doesn't ship one so you would have to find one, build it, install
it, and figure out how to make MATE use it.

You could try renaming 'mate-panel' to e.g. 'mate-panel.BAK' and then
putting a simple shell script in its place that runs and never exits.  I
don't think you're going to have a great desktop experience doing that,
though.

You might be better off just choosing "xterm" from the lightdm login
screen, at least until you can further debug what's going on with your
environment.

Tim
-- 
Tim Mooney                                             Tim.Mooney at ndsu.edu
Enterprise Computing & Infrastructure /
Division of Information Technology    /                701-231-1076 (Voice)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164