I have a weird problem that I haven't been able to track down, so here are all the details that I can seem to find after months of looking. The trouble bears some resemblance to one described here under the topic "Keeping X11 connections alive during sleep", but it's not exact, and I don't find a response to that post anyway. (Did I miss something?)
Here are my details:
The gist is, if I have an xterm that displays a shell running over an ssh connection, and I switch over to a different desktop or let my display go to screen saver mode, that xterm might be gone when I come back.
It might not be, and the duration of the switch or the screen saver state don't seem to make much difference.
Sometimes, it hasn't disappeared completely; instead, it's relocated to a different part of the screen, underneath another xterm.
If I minimize the window, that seems to protect it. I've never noticed a minimized window dying this way.
I run all my shells under screen sessions at the remote end, and those screen sessions are almost always still listed as live at the server, so it can take some trial and error to find out which displays I lost.
Maybe relevant: I usually have all my sessions running under a single ssh connection, with their displays forwarded back through that connection. So, it isn't the connection that's dying.
My laptop doesn't go to sleep. The only state that changes (as far as I know) is either the screen saver kicking on, or the window (1, 2, 3 or 4) that I'm on. If I keep my mouse in a hot corner on "Disable Screen Saver", all my xterms will stay up overnight.
Anything I can do to fix this, or to get more information?
Thanks,
Michael