[Gllug] Ximain/GNOME strangeness

[William Palfreman]

On Mon, 15 Oct 2001, John Hearns wrote:

> Folks,
> I'm running the Ximian/GNOME desktop.
> 
> It seems to have gone off its trolley today.
> On startup, it is claiming that the window manager which is running is
> not Gnome compliant, then when it does start up I get a very weird
> behaviour -
> ie. all windows are fixe size, stuck in the top left hand corner.
> Seems to me there is no window manager running.
> 
> I was sure that I was running Sawfish, as per Ximian defaults.
> Can anyone tell me how to make SURE that I'm running a certain
> window manager - ie. what files to poke and prod etc.

Weird.  This just happened to me too.  I was about to make some rude
remark about ps ax | grep sawfi and sawfish &, (I see someone else got 
the grandmother's and eggs comment in before me too :-() but I thought I'd
give is a try first, and...

The same thing happened!

I hadn't used the gnome on this installation before, just KDE.  What
happened was that the gnome startup screen paused longer than normal on
starting a windows manager, the the main gnome desktop came on with lots
of windows on the bar (gmc?) and obviously no windows manager
running.  Each item on the panel was actually an icon (started twm and
sure enough, the all have label-bars over them twm-style) and if I closed
one of them, the whole panel restarted.

Anyway, killed off twm and tried to start sawfish:

[william at tower william]$ sawfish
Xlib:  extension XINERAMA missing on display localhost:0.0.
error--> (file-error No such file or directory sawfish/wm/misc)

And it didn't start either.  This is on a mostly-virgin Redhat 7.1
installation (apart from 'undreds o' kernels and some KDE usage) and I
have never seen that happen before.  I don't have either an .xsession or
an .xinitrc file in my ~ directory, but I do have an .xsession-errors file

[william at tower william]$ cat .xsession-errors
_IceTransmkdir: Owner of /tmp/.ICE-unix should be set to root
SESSION_MANAGER=local/tower:/tmp/.ICE-unix/747
aumix:  error opening mixer
Xlib:  extension "XINERAMA" missing on display "localhost:0.0".
error--> (file-error "No such file or directory" "sawfish/wm/misc")
subshell.c: couldn't get terminal settings: Inappropriate ioctl for device

** WARNING **: Root window clicks will not work as no GNOME-compliant
window manager could be found!
Message: resetting focus according to XGetInputFocus() for 23068690

I haven't tried any of people's later advice yet, but I will.

Bill.

-- 
W. Palfreman.
PGP key on ftp://ftp.palfreman.com/pub/wfpkey.asc
PGP id: 0x26C72581

 


-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug