Re: Windows Borders Disapear

[hobbit aloss ukuu org uk]

On Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 05:37:21PM -0800 or thereabouts, ArielC wrote:
> Hello all,
> I'm running gnome1.4 on a solaris 8 (Ultra 10) machine.  About twice a
> day all borders from every window that I have opened disappear, and my
> workspaces disapear leaving only one workspace.  The only way to get it

That's a perfect description of a window manager crash. The window
manager is responsible for window borders, titlebars on windows, 
and workspaces and/or viewports and/or whatever the wm chooses to
call them (there's at least two different concepts and at least
three different names, so that bit gets confusing).

> to make sure there are no windows hiding somewhere.  This takes about 5
> minutes to do this and usually happens about twice a day and it's become
> extremely annoying.
> 
> I have gone through my settings and I can't see anything there that
> would result in this problem.
> I've removed my .gnome dir but I stil have the same problem.
> 
> Anyone seen this before?

I don't use sawfish, but I've seen window managers crash before.
If you have a terminal open, and can get focus in in, you can
restart the thing by typing "sawfish" or "sawfish &" in the terminal.
(The second will give you your prompt back in that terminal.) 

I have just had a look on Gnome bugzilla. I went to "search"
then selected "sawfish" in the product, and "Window Manager" in
the component. I left all the other fields black and hit "Run
this query".

There are a lot of bugs which are just enhancement requests, but
oh dear:

65039	Sawfish on Solaris is awfully not stable (Solaris 8/SPARC)
71214	Constant crashing 	(with OS selected as "other")

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.chi?id=65039
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71214

If you have a file called "core" around and "file core" says it's
from sawfish (or perhaps rep), you could run a debugger on it:
I use gdb on Linux, but whether it's gdb or dbx (was that it?)
on Solaris I'm not sure. I believe bug-buddy will be invoked if
you double-click on core files. 

If bug-buddy is not doing this, you can do the donkey work
yourself. Run "script" beforehand if you don't have cut and 
paste hanging around. (Control-D to get out of script: it logs 
everything into a file for you, so you can grab the backtrace. 
The file will probably be called "typescript". It tells you when 
it starts up.) 

I don't know how dbx works, but with gdb, you start it at the prompt: 
gdb /path/to/binary/of/sawfish core
..and watch a pile of output. When the output stops, type
bt
And then you'll get a pile more. This is the backtrace. You
may have to hit return for the next page(s) of it. That's it.
quit
..to get out. If you ran script beforehand, hit ^D to end the
script, or it'll keep on logging the rest of the session :) 

Alas, I have no idea how to use the Solaris ones. If gdb's
there, you're okay. If not, one of those nice Sun people who
lurk here will have to say :) 

If you get a lot of this: 

Core was generated by `sawfish'.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
#0  0x401ab6b7 in XFindOnExtensionList () from /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6
#0  0x401ab6b7 in XFindOnExtensionList () from /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6
#1  0x401a58bb in _XF86BigfontFreeFontMetrics ()
   from /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6

...then it has useful information, and attaching it into Bugzilla
under either 65039 or a new bug would be very helpful.

If you get a lot of:

Core was generated by `sawfish'.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
#0  0x401ab6b7 in ?? () 
#0  0x401ab6b7 in ?? ()
#1  0x401a58bb in ?? ()

...then that's not very useful. This second might well happen. 
If it does, don't put it in bugzilla. I am not sure how Solaris
packaging works, but the obvious thing to track it down is 
"Get a sawfish package with debugging enabled and which is 
unstripped, run it, wait for the crash, and point bug-buddy at
the core file."

Of course, "getting an unstripped package for Solaris" would be
the rub, and if you're not root on the box, I imagine that means
"asking root nicely".

I hope that wasn't too long, and made sense. If you already know
all about this stuff, then I apologise in advance :) 

Telsa