Re: Three intermittent, annoying X11 problems
Re: Three intermittent, annoying X11 problems
- Subject: Re: Three intermittent, annoying X11 problems
- From: Bob Portmann <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2006 19:42:39 -0700 (PDT)
--- Mike Zuhl <email@hidden> wrote:
> Maybe someone has seen these problems and can give me a clue. They
> happen intermittently and I have been unsuccessful at forcing them
> to happen. (BTW, I'm running X11 1.1 - XFree86 4.4.0, OS X 10.4.6,
> on a PPC mini. I use X11 constantly so it may be running for days.)
>
> 1) "Infant window death." Starting a new xterm, the window pops up
> and
> immediately closes. Usually happens as the third or forth window
> opened after starting X11. I have never seen it happen when a
> remote host starts an xterm. Immediately sStarting a new xterm
> almost always succeeds. This is not a really annoying problem,
> but
> it may be a symptom of the problem(s) causing the other two
> issues.
Yes, I used to see this often (maybe 10% of the time) but for some
reason it has not been happening for a while. I'm not sure what
changed the behavior for me. I mostly use gnome-terminal instead of
xterm, which may play some role. But I used to see it with
gnome-terminal occasionally as well. People always claim that it is
due to a problem in one of the shell start-up files, but I've had it
happen with a very minimal .bash_profile so I don't think that is the
whole story. I suspect it is a problem in apple-x11. I'd like to
think that apple has fixed this problem but you seem to be running an
up to date system so who knows.
> 2) "Disappearing /dev/tty." Only on local xterms, occasionally won't
> get (or possibly lose somewhere) its controlling terminal
> binding.
> You can test it by "echo x >/dev/tty". The expected result is
> "x"
> being echoed, but sometimes you get "/dev/tty not initialized" or
> something like that. In such a window ctrl-C won't interrupt
> running
> programs. I usually discover it when I can't kill a program and
> then check /dev/tty, altho I have seen it just checking /dev/tty
> first, so I can't be sure whether it's not set up or loses the
> binding somewhere along the way.
>
> I wrote some test scripts to try and force this problem but I
> created
> (serially) several thousand windows without seeing it, so I
> suspect
> there's a race condition that I wasn't able to provoke.
Never noticed this.
> 3) "Windows Banished to the Void." This is by far the most annoying.
> I'll have a number of X11 windows minimized and I'm using Mac
> apps.
> Then I want to restore an X11 window and find them all missing
> from
> the doc. They still show up on X11's "Window" menu, but
> selecting them
> there won't make them restore, either. New X11 windows, started
>
> either
> by the "Applications" menu or fired off from another host do show
> up
> normally. Running "xwininfo" from the command line (on the Mac
> or any
> connected host) shows that the windows and all their information
> is
> still there. So far I have found no way to get the windows back.
>
> Note that *all* the existing windows are gone. I know that some
> of them were minimized, but I can't be sure that there weren't
> non-minimized windows that followed their brethren to the Void.
>
> Last time this happened (yesterday) I went in and killed
> quartz-wm,
> the window manager. As with other X-servers, when the window
> manager
> died all of the hidden windows appeared on the screen without the
> window manager decorations. Then X11 exited, probably because
> the
> the window manager was gone.
I think I've seen something like this but it has been rare and just
seemed to me to be x11 or more likely quartz-wm crashing. It's been
infrequent enough that I didn't worry about it.
Bob
> Any thoughts?
> --Mike Zuhl
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