Changing desktop pictures/resolution after wake up

[tduality]

Folks, I'm trying to track that down for a while but couldn't find any clue.

Some time ago my Mac (PM G4/400, 10.2.8, Radeon 9000 Retail, CRT Apple Studio Display) started to change the screen resolution when waking up from sleep when I switched on the display while or before waking up the machine.

Once in a while it changes the desktop picture back to the default blue background. Yesterday it started to select random pictures from the iPhoto folder. System Preferences are not set to randomly change the desktop picture.

I'm not sure whether this happened first after I upgraded to the Radeon card.

Today the Console gave a message 'deskpicture: directory does not contain any files that I can image'. No idea, where deskpicture comes from. Couldn't find it anywhere.

Any ideas, any one?

Thanks

 

[MacsRgr8]

Maybe your desktop pref file is damaged?
Try deleting it: ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktop.plist

Otherwise you can try repairing disk permissions (boot off the Jaguar install CD for it).

 

[tduality]

Thanks for the hint.

Deleting the plist I tried some time ago as well. I just checked it again and found that there were 3 background entries, two with the random flag set to true. Maybe that it is sn indication of the problem. I deleted them now and will see what happens.

 

[shadowfax]

did you try repairing permissions, though, like he recommended? that seems to be the cause of the quirkiest OS X problems imaginable, such as this one.

 

[tduality]

Originally posted by shadowfax
did you try repairing permissions, though, like he recommended? that seems to be the cause of the quirkiest OS X problems imaginable, such as this one.

Yes I did that once, though not after booting from the Jaguar CD. That way it didn't help. I'll give that a try later when it's clear that changing the .plist file didn't help.

By the way, this permission thing confuses me anyway. Does this refer to the Unix access permissions you can set like chmod ugo+rwx? Why do they change and have to be fixed?

 

[shadowfax]

Originally posted by tduality
By the way, this permission thing confuses me anyway. Does this refer to the Unix access permissions you can set like chmod ugo+rwx? Why do they change and have to be fixed?

yes, that's what it refers to. the problem is usually 3rd party software altering the permissions, i think. i'm not totally sure, though.

 

[advres]

Mac OSX sometimes gets cofused as to who can read and write which files. however, the os provides a simple way of fixing this problem run disk utilities and click repair disk permissions.

another more useful way is to download cocktail which can do many different disk utility options with the click of one mouse button - plus they have some cool dock and view options.

 

[tduality]

Just an update on my testing:

After deleting incorrect entries in the .plist file (see previous post) the problem didn't show up again. What happens now is that after waking from sleep, the display goes to a lower resolution for a second or so and then switches to the preselect one (1280*1024).

Didn't fix permissions so far to single out the correct cure.