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Has your GNOME desktop suddenly reverted to TWM upon a regular restart? If so, you aren’t alone.

Here is what you need to do to restore your GNOME desktop:

1. Check if you can just get away with switching back to GNOME:

   
   yum install switchdesk
   switchdesk gnome
   

   If that tells you that gnome is not installed then proceed to step 2, otherwise you should have gotten your GNOME back.

2. We are going to reinstall GNOME. To do that we need to install one package manually (because of the bug in “nautilus-sendto” package which is a part of GNOME. It requires “libgaim.so.0″ library which is a part of gaim (that was replaced by Pidgin in the latest CentOS distribution). Therefore, this dependancy will fail when running yum. Download nautilus-sendto and install it:

   
   rpm -Uvh --nodeps nautilus-sendto-0.7-5.fc6.i386.rpm
   

   We can now install GNOME by running:

   
   yum groupinstall "GNOME Desktop Environment"
   

   Now run the command to switch desktops:

   
   switchdesk gnome
   

   and you should be good getting your GNOME back upon next restart of your xwindow session (Ctrl+Alt+Bcksp).