xfce4-panel dying?

[Benedikt Meurer]

Josh Kelley wrote:
> We're having problems on several machines with xfce4-panel dying.  (At
> least, I'm assuming this is what's happening.)  When this happens, the
> session manager saves the fact that xfce4-panel is no longer running,
> so on subsequent logins, users get badly confused about the lack of
> any buttons to click on.
> 
> The computers in question are only used in the evenings, only once or
> twice a week, and the users in question seem to not be very technical,
> so I'm not sure that I'll ever get details from them about when or
> under what circumstances the panel is going away.
> 
> Is there a way to enable any logging for the panel, to find out when
> and why it's dying?
> 
> Is there a way to disable the session manager, to make sure that the
> panel always runs on login?  It looks like editing
> /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc would work, but that's not flagged as a config
> file in the RPM I've been using (from CentOS Extras), which suggests
> that it's really not intended to be done.

You can disable the automatic session saving in the "Sessions and
Startup" dialog. Or you could simply add a script to Autostart to
automatically spawn xfce4-panel (the second instance will exit if the
panel was successfully respawned by the session manager).

> Any other recommendations for handling this problem?

It might help if you specify which version of Xfce you are running, and
which panel plugins are installed.

> Thanks.
> Josh Kelley

Benedikt