Even if you have followed every instruction to the letter, sometimes unforeseen problems arise. Anything can go wrong, from a misreading of the instructions, to a bug in the software, to a bug in someone else's software. Here, we try to address problems that people have run into with GNOME.
Here are some more general questions that arise often. Specific problems are later in this chapter.
OK, first thing you do is pause, relax, and take a deep breath. Next, look through this FAQ, the Users Guide, and any other documentation you have handy and see if any of it comes close to solving your problem. Next, look through the mailing list archives (instructions are given above) to see if someone else talks about your problem. Then try whatever it was you were doing one more time to see if the solution suddenly presents itself. If none of that works, it's time to ask on the list.
First of all, you are subscribed to gnome-list, right? If you aren't, instructions on how to subscribe are given above. Now, when asking for help on GNOME-list, give lots of detail. Posting "The panel doesn't work, this sucks!" doesn't help you or us. You still have the problem, and we have a possible bug which we have no information about. It is more useful (but still not sufficient) to say "Whenever I select the foo item from the Foot menu, the entire panel disappears suddenly; by the way, what is this file that GNOME keeps putting in my home directory, it's called core."
Ideally, we need several pieces of information from you. First, exactly what kind of system are you running on? No, not everyone runs the same operating system you are using. We need processor type: Sparc, MIPS, i386 (this includes Pentiums, AMD, Cyrix, etc), PPC, Alpha, ARM, 680x0, et al; we need operating system: Linux distribution, FreeBSD, HURD, OpenBSD, Solaris, IRIX, CrayOS, OS/400, whatever. Also include the version of the operating system. For example, the machine I'm on right now is a GNU/Linux RedHat/i386 Rawhide machine, a friend of mine uses a Solaris Sparc 2.6 machine.
Next, we need some relevant vital statistics of what is on your system. On a GNU/Linux system, the kernel and libc version numbers are almost always relevant. On almost all GNOME problems we need your glib, gtk+, Imlib, ORBit and gnome-libs versions. If you aren't sure if you need any of the above, include them anyway. Other things that are so