Really botched my system

[rharvey@cox]

I'm running Gentoo 2.6.3-r1 on a Pendium 4 Asus machine with 3 SCSI HDD and one IDE HDD. / is on /dev/sda5. I'm using cups to run an HPLaserjet6P on a parallel port.

Last week I was having problems emerging openoffice. I kept getting messages that there wasn't enough disk space on /var/tmp/portage. I went out and bought a 160G IDE drive, installed it, and used Webmin to mount it as /var/tmp. I did nothing about the /var/tmp that was on /. I didn't rename the directories or anything else. I was able to emerge Open Office and it works fine.

A couple of things broke after the emerge and I don't know if they're related to my inept assigning the IDE drive to /var/tmp without somehow hiding the /var/tmp on /.

Since the emerge of openoffice and as a user other than root I cannot print from any application other than gedit. No printing from Star Office 6.0, Open Office, Mozilla, nothing. I can only print from gedit.

As root, I can print from any of those applications.

Another thing I've experienced is that the little computer icon on my Gnome desktop no longer works. The little tool that allows me to use the GUI to access drives like my floppy and cdrom. Clicking on that icon results in this little message:

The action associated with "computer" is invalid. You can configure Gnome to associate a different application or viewer with this file type. Do you want to associate an application or viewer with this file type now?


Well, you bet I do. This is busted for root and all other users. I'd like to have my printing functionality back as well. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to approach this problem?

I have already unmounted that IDE drive mounted as /var/tmp. All the old files on the / directory (/var/tmp) are there again. Printing and my little GUI computer Gnome icon are not coming back to life.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Bob
_________________
"The beatings will continue until morale improves"

[rharvey@cox]

Oh, and here's something else I just ran into. Previously I could have multiple, independent tabs open in Mozilla. In one tab I could hit a link that would bring up a new web page. I could hit the "x" in the right upper hand corner of Mozilla and it would bring me back to the the previous web page. Now hitting that "x" brings up a message that there are multiple tabs open, do I want to close all tabs? It seems that something in Gnome got broken.

One other thing. I was having problems with generating reports in Gnucash. After some help from the web community I found that I had to start /usr/bin/gconfd-1 prior to starting Gnucash in order to generate reports. That workaround works. I'm running Gnome 2.6.2-r1 and it was not starting up /usr/bin/gconfd-1 prior to my using it to prod Gnucash in to generating reports. Gnome 2.6.2 has /usr/bin/gconfd-2 running after boot.

That data makes me wonder if I should unemerge and reemerge Gnome to see if that fixes all the problems (printing, GUI icon, etc), but this is my office machine and I'm gun-shy about breaking it even further.
_________________
"The beatings will continue until morale improves"