Many of the trickier problems you may meet in GNOME are in fact X. This often means that fixing them will involve editing text files instead of using the GNOME tools. For now, at least. Everything is HUGE! This is commonly met by people who are used to Macintosh or MS Windows systems and are now using XFree86 on a GNU/Linux box. X can run at different resolutions. When it is first configured, the various programs to configure X (Xconfigurator, XF86Setup, SaX and so on) will look at video card details and pick "safe" resolutions, which are generally low. Often they will pick a variety. If you have a low resolution, you can try experimenting with control alt + and control alt - (NB: these refer to + and - on the numberpad pad of the keyboard) to cycle through other available resolutions. If not a lot happens, and you are confident that your monitor and card can handle it, you can re-run the setup tool of your choice for X and feed it different values, or if you know what you're doing you can attempt to edit the XF86Config which holds the relevant values yourself. Editing this is not the recommended first tactic: if you must try it, take a backup copy of the file first. Don't be tempted to change things when you're not sure: this is one of the few ways you can actually damage hardware. (Far less true than it used to be, but it's worth being aware of this before trying it.) If you are still stuck with 640x480 or 800x600 and one of the huge things is the panel, you have a couple of options. First, you can use the arrows at the end of it and tidy it away when you don't need it. Or you can use the autohide feature so that it hides mostly offscreen until you move the mouse over it. If you are using gnome-core-1.1.x or gnome-core-1.2.x, then there is also an option to shrink the width of the panel, available by right-clicking on the panel and following Panel Properties Size and picking Small or Tiny. If applications habitually open so large that they go off the edge of the screen, you should be able to resize them with your window manager before closing. On re-opening, applications which are session-managed by GNOME should re-open at the new size. If you can't get to parts of the application, your window manager probably has a way to move the window about without using the titlebar of the window. For WindowMaker and Enlightenment, the default way to do this is to hold the alt button down, and then move it with mouse button 2 (the middle button). For Sawfish, it's the same but mouse button 1 (the left button). Netscape icons get displayed in black and white. There is a specific problem with Netscape and particular resolutions and bit depths. This is a problem with Netscape and X rather than GNOME. Netscape defaults to 1-bit (mono: ie black and white) if it doesn't recognise the bit depth. GNOME-specific icon problems are covered below. Why do I get Gdk-WARNING **: shmget failed! when I try to run some programs? This error indicates that the application is not able to get a shared memory segment. There are a number of reasons why this could happen, including: shared memory is not set up (properly) on the system all shared memory segments are being used GNOME and Gdk applications use a lot of shared memory segments (typically 6 segments per process that uses shared memory), so it is possible your system was not configured with enough segments to support GNOME with a lot of applications running. (Note that many GNOME applications can be run without using shared memory by starting them with the flag --no-xshm.) The following instructions apply for the Linux kernel. First, find out the maximum number of shared memory segments your kernel is configured for by typing ipcs -l. Look for the line starting with max number of segments = . If it is 128 or less, it is likely that this is not enough. Depending on how many applications and applets you use, you made need quite a few more. To increase the number of shared segments with kernel 2.2, you have to increase the _SHM_ID_BITS variable in /usr/src/linux/include/asm/shmparam.h. The number of shared memory segments is 2 raised to the power of _SHM_ID_BITS. Thus, 7 corresponds to 128, 8 to 256, 9 to 512, and 10 to 1024. You will then need to rebuild your kernel and reboot for the change to become active. Everything else works, but I get a message about Unix98 ptys when trying to start gnome-terminal. Two possible answers here, both applicable to Linux kernel issues. It is (remotely) possible that you are trying to install binaries for a newer version of your distribution on an old machine, where "old" means "running a 2.0 Linux kernel and a similarly old glibc". This won't work. If you have Red Hat 5.2, for example, you need to find or build rpms for that and not to try to install rpms for 6.2. This applies similarly to SuSE. It is more likely to be problems with the permissions of the files which involve ptys. In particular, check the permissions of /dev/ptmx. They should be 666 (or crw-rw-rw when you do ls -l /dev/ptmx). If they aren't, change it with chmod 666 /dev/ptmx (as root). You will find more about this in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/general/Changes. Icons get displayed all funny in 8-bit colour. Netscape, imlib and/or gdk-pixbuf are fighting over colours. Try starting applications with private colormaps. Also try adjusting settings in Programs Settings Imlib Configuration options . Icons have black backgrounds. Icon loading is broken in some way. This is usually due to a misinstalled libpng, so check your installation and/or upgrade the libpng package. Some icons are displayed. Others aren't. This happens for some users and not others on the same machine. It is possible that removing the metadata.db file from your .gnome directory may fix this. (But not guaranteed, alas. More definite fixes wanted.) The menu panel (the narrow one at the top) is sitting in the middle of the screen when I start GNOME. This may be a sawfish-specific problem. If you are using sawfish, then open the control center and find the options for sawfish. Under Placement you will find a checkbox for Ignore program-specified window placements.. This needs to be unchecked. If this doesn't work, take the longer route provided by Robert Soros on gnome-list: I ended up logging out and switching to console to edit my ~/sawfish/window-history file... which contained the line ("panel (type . unframed) (position 0 . 23)) Editing the file (with 0, 0 coordinates) during the gnome session then logging out was useless as it would just resave the file as upon exiting.. My panel vanished. When I try to restart it, I get a dialogue box saying "Panel detected. Do you really want to start another?" Whatever I say, I get no panel. This is an old and annoying bug that results from panels announcing they exist, and then dying in unusual ways that stop them saying they are dying. The fix is to upgrade to a recent gnome-core. If this does not work, a quick and dirty fix is to delete your ~/.gnome/ directory. This is a nasty hack which fixes only the symptoms and not the cause of the problem, and it will lose any and all settings and changes to those settings which you have made to your GNOME desktop. esound is weird: I can get sound out of GNOME: beeps and bings in menu selection and so on. But xmms won't play. GNOME expects all noises to go through esound, which talks directly to your sound card. xmms has different plugins for outputting sound. Right-click on xmms and then on Options to bring up the Preferences dialogue box. Where it says Output Plugin, look at what is selected. If OSS Driver is selected, xmms is trying to talk directly to the soundcard, seeing that it is in use (because esound is talking to the soundcard), and xmms is waiting politely for esound to stop using the soundcard. So nothing happens. Tell xmms to use esound in the Output Plugin box, and your music should happen again. Problems with sound in general are sometimes due to the sound card driver being used. This is well outside the scope of this FAQ, alas. GNOME takes ages to start and I get a message about "Could not look up internet address". When GNOME starts, it wants to know the network address of the computer it's starting on. If it can't find out, it will keep asking until it times out after a minute or so. If you are experiencing this problem, look at the file called /etc/hosts. There should be a line about the IP address 127.0.0.1 and it should say this: 127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain Suggested solutions vary. Some people report success with adding the machine name at the end of that line, separated by a tab. Others find this doesn't help. I found a bug! Now what? Cool! Please take a few minutes to investigate and then send it in. If you have an oldish package, it is worth checking the announcements for newer packages to see whether it's been fixed. If it hasn't been fixed or mentioned and you can't find it by searching the bug tracker, then start off bug-buddy from the main menu with Programs Utilities Bug report tool or type bug-buddy at the command-line. Follow the directions from there.