Lost tooltip menu, then toolbar function

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Adam Bogacki wrote:
> Hi, I had been a confirmed user of xfce for a number of years
> when recently (concident with a recent upgrade ?) I first 
> lost the tooltip menu, themes, background image, found 
> that "xfce-settings-show" did not work, and more recently 
> applications starting from the panel (such as gnome terminal) 
> failed to open.

Sorry what do you mean by "tooltip menu"?  I'm not sure I understand.

If you've upgraded to Xfce 4.6, xfce-setting-show doesn't exist anymore. 
  It's been semi-replaced with xfce4-settings-manager.  You can't as 
easily launch individual settings dialogs; you need to find the command 
to run them in its associated .desktop file.  Usually you can find it by 
grepping for "DesktopSettings" in /usr/share/applications/.

If your gtk apps aren't themed, it's possible xfsettingsd isn't running, 
or isn't installed.  It's a part of the xfce4-settings package.  Not 
sure if Debian has renamed it.

If your background image is missing, xfdesktop is not running or is not 
installed.  Install it and start it.  If you're seeing a default 
background image and can't change it, something is wrong with your dbus 
setup, or xfconfd isn't running or isn't installed.

> I am now using Fluxbox which, though lacking xfce functions,
> "just works".

Of course it does.  It's a single program with virtually no dependencies 
that does a small fraction of what Xfce does.

> I am using a mixed stable/unstable Debian system which
> might explain what could be dependency conflict during
> transition to the latest xfce version.

Possibly.

> I would however be interested in any constructive comments
> which readers might make.

Find out if there's a recommended way to upgrade xfce properly on 
Debian.  It's possible that you just left out some packages when 
upgrading (again I'm assuming you upgraded from 4.4.x to 4.6.x).

	-brian