Gnome Do Theme Issue
This evening, with a few helpful suggestions on IRC at #gnome-do on freenode, I was able to work around (but not solve) an issue I’ve been having with Gnome Do, the Quicksilver-like launcher for GNOME.
My issue was as follows: every time the program started up on GNOME session start, it would revert to an unfashionable theme that I didn’t want. The configuration showed that it was on the Glass theme, as I wanted, but it was clearly not. Every time I ran the program otherwise, it would successfully take on the appropriate theme.
Long story short, it turns out the issue is likely related to compiz not being fully started yet, so it defaults to its non-pretty theme. I first wrote a script that waits for compiz to start then runs, but the process “compiz” existing was not good enough. So I created a 3-line script to delay Gnome Do’s startup by 2 seconds, and it works:
#!/bin/bash
sleep 2
gnome-do
Heck, this could be a one-liner, but whatever. I actually tried to use GNOME’s built-in session manager to invoke the sleep, but it didn’t work out for me at first and I didn’t feel like trying again, so this works just fine.
I had an intermittent problem where gnome-do would not work on start-ups. I’d write firefox for example and only see the letters I wrote and not the Firefox logo. This solved the problem. Thanks!
Update: The problem still happens but less frequently. If you have any idea what causes this please let me know. Berk