Disappearing menubar?

Ricky arcanericky at gmail.com
Wed Aug 1 22:53:59 CEST 2007


This week, I happened to take a look at this, and the only ways to get the
panel at the top back (besides rebooting) are rather painful, especially if
done on the Neo itself (without ssh).

My guess is that it disappeared when you were fiddling with the "Antenna"
(the gsm applet) on the panel.  This is when it happens to me.  The problem
is, this gsm applet is "joined at the hip" to the panel application at the
top (via a shared object).  If this applet has a problem and abnormally
terminates, it brings down the panel with it.

This seems to be all tied into the GSM functionality, which I understand is
being heavily worked on so it's probably not worth directly troubleshooting
for the moment.

The short and least painful answer to getting it back is to reboot.

The simplest alternatives I can find are to ssh into the Neo (or bring up a
terminal on the device - but that's about to get painful).  Once you have a
command line, you can restart the X server.  Normally this would be as
simple as:

/etc/init.d/xserver.nodm restart

But because of Bug #605, it's a no go.  You'll need to stop it manually and
then start it up again.

To stop the X server:
killall xinit

Then to restart it:
/etc/init.d/xserver.nodm start

You'll get a lot of garbage on your screen, but once you logout it will go
away.  You should really redirect this gunk to the console or /dev/null, but
that just takes even more typing.

The one step solution - to just restart the panel - takes more typing.
That's why the above is easier (and reboot even easier).  But if you insist,
the command:

matchbox-panel-2 --start-applets=openmoko-panel-mainmenu,systray,startup \
  --end-applets=openmoko-panel-battery,openmoko-panel-gsm,\
  openmoko-panel-gps,openmoko-panel-usb,openmoko-panel-bt,\
  openmoko-panel-clock --display :0 &

Will bring it back.  (Hey - I told you it would be painful).

I expect one of two things may happen before there is a final product.
Either all of the applets used in this panel will need to become extremely
stable so this doesn't happen.  Or the call to the panel application itself
will need to be wrapped in such a way as to restart it when it crashes (my
preference).
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