Intermittent, missing icons and: mate-session[1556]: WARNING: Application 'mate-settings-daemon.desktop' failed to register before timeout

[penguin42]

My fathers machine (an Athlon XP 2200 - i.e not the worlds fastest) running Ubuntu 12.04 + mate-desktop (installed as per http://mate-desktop.org/install/#ubuntu) is suffering from an intermittent problem where upon logging in some of the icons on the panels are replaced by white squares with a red cross; I'm also seeing in the logs:

Jun 9 15:06:35 thedr mate-session[1556]: WARNING: Application 'mate-settings-daemon.desktop' failed to register before timeout

at times I think are corresponding to where these broken sessions are happening.

This is happening about 1 in 5 logins.

Looking at the source I see GSM_MANAGER_PHASE_TIMEOUT is 10 seconds, I wonder if it's a bit borderline for this machine (although I don't know what is included within that period). For a session that works OK, the machine takes about 15seconds from hitting return at the lightdm password prompt until we see the desktop (mostly already formed).

Dave

[penguin42]

Note this still happens if I swap lightdm out and use gdm instead.

[mvglasow]

Similar issue here, MATE 1.4.0 on Ubuntu 12.04: On login, the previously selected theme is not applied. When I try to open the Appearance applet, I get an error message that mate-settings-daemon could not be reached, possibly due to another settings manager (e.g. KDE) running already (which I can rule out - unless Unity comes with a conflicting settings manager).

I am getting the same error Dave described in syslog.

A ps -ef returns two mate-settings-daemon processes (one may be the one that the Preferences applet attempted to start). Killing the corresponding processes causes the daemon to restart and the theme is applied instantly.

Processor is a 1.7 GHz Pentium M, 1 GB RAM. System performance may be an issue here (the system may be to slow to start the daemon before the timeout, especially concurrently with other things that happen at startup.)

[stefano-k]

Fixed in latest commits
4d4b2d9
7910bdf

[penguin42]

Thanks Stefano-k! I no longer have this machine to test it on; but thank you again!