RE: I hate the slogan "computing made easy"

["David F. Newman" <dnewman maraudingpirates org>]

On Wed, 21 Jun 2000, Ton Machielsen wrote:

> You want my $0.02 too? I would like to say "I hate graphical environments on
> Unix in general".
> Already for more than two weeks i am struggling to get Gnome up and running.
> The only thing i can get out of Gnome is a perfect coredump as soon as i log
> in.
> Logfiles are obscure or non-existent, help is almost absent, RTFM doesn't
> really work if you are stuck at the same problem all the time and the FM
> doesn't say anything about that.

I share your frustation on getting gnome to work with Solaris 7, however,
I think many of your comments are born out of that frustration.

You just need to know the right places to look.  The problem doesn't
seem to be with CDE, rather it seems to be a problem with either
Solaris or GNOME, but I have not determined which.  I've been debugging
this problem for about the last month and a half.

It seems that the problem is not in how CDE or GNOME is configured,
but that gnome-session is core dumping.  So the issue becomes,
why is gnome-session dumping core.  I built all the software from
source and one interesting thing is that any programs linked against
the gnome-libs dumps core on a Solaris 7 box that does not have the
latest patches also core dumps.  After installing all the patches
most of the gnome programs work, it is just gnome-session that
doesn't.  In the CDE startup scripts an prefixed gnome-session with
truss to find out what is going on.  This is the tail end of that
file for anyone who is interested.  I find this very interesting
because I don't have this problem with any of the other gnu software
I have installed.  And it is alot.

bind(5, 0xFFBEEE88, 21, 3)                      = 0
listen(5, 5, 1)                                 = 0
umask(022)                                      = 0
uname(0xFFBEE820)                               = 1
umask(02)                                       = 022
mkdir("/tmp/.X11-pipe", 0775)                   Err#17 EEXIST
umask(022)                                      = 02
lstat("/tmp/.X11-pipe", 0xFFBEEE10)             = 0
open("/tmp/.X11-pipe", O_RDONLY)                = 6
fstat(6, 0xFFBEED88)                            = 0
close(6)                                        = 0
pipe()                                          = 6 [7]
ioctl(7, I_PUSH, "connld")                      = 0
    Incurred fault #6, FLTBOUNDS  %pc = 0xFEBD0494
      siginfo: SIGSEGV SEGV_MAPERR addr=0x00000000
    Received signal #11, SIGSEGV [default]
      siginfo: SIGSEGV SEGV_MAPERR addr=0x00000000
        *** process killed ***

--
David F. Newman
dnewman@maraudingpirates.org