Re: Will Gnome _EVER_ be stable?

[Henry Katz <henry katz iscs-i COM>]

"Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH" wrote:

On Thu, 2002-03-21 at 19:28, Henry Katz wrote:
> > Login in using gdm. Log right back out (within say 30 seconds).
> > The WILL trash your panels.
> >
> > Hope that helps.
>
> Bollocks!!

Actually, no.  I tend to get multiple panels during GNOME startup;
recently I determined that it's a timing issue:  apparently one or more
applets times out trying to connect to the panel if the system is too

Ah - true. I deliberately waited until those finicky applets came to life
before shutting down the
window mgr. In fact, I've noticed that some of the clock applets are
real memory hogs and
eat up too much CPU..

 
busy, and starts a new one --- usually leading to many of your applets
dumping core.  At some point I may go digging through the applet libs
looking for a CORBA communications timeout to set/increase.

In the original poster's case, logging out before the panel is
initialized might well result in it dying while saving its settings.

> When I logged in again, the only thing that was amiss was
> that two terminals
> had shrunk in size to something < 80 x 24.

Sawfish vs. gnome-terminal.  From other odd symptoms (notably, my 262x7
console messages terminal sometimes opening really HUGE), I think some
gnome-terminal windows get their sizes saved in pixels and restored in
characters, or vice versa.  On a slower system I can even see the
windows open at the correct size, then when sawfish starts up it resizes
them to the weird size (sometimes with some flickering between the two);

Hmmm--- this sounds like sloppy coding practice. I wish I had a free cycle
- don't we all ;-)

 
so, once again, I suspect it's a timing issue of some kind between when
gnome-terminal sets the window hints to size by character cells and when
sawfish records the window's size.

I'd be suspicious of the memory size difference here:  GNOME is rather
memory-hungry, and certainly on my laptop the difference in startup
times between 128M, 384M, and 512M is dramatic.  The extra 192MB might
conceivably make gnome-session save the (incomplete) session and shut
down faster than the panel initializes....

Is gnome 2 better or worse with memory?
> So, probably some work needs to be put into synchronization/timing
> issues during session startup/shutdown.
Yep - that's why when I want rock stable I shift to my other keyboard and
use Sol 8 with CDE.

Henry
 

 

--
brandon s. allbery   [linux][solaris][japh][freebsd]
allbery kf8nh apk net
system administrator [openafs][heimdal][too many hats]
allbery ece cmu edu
electrical and computer engineering
KF8NH
carnegie mellon university    ["better check the oblivious first"
-ke6sls]
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I didn't say it would be easy. I just said it would be the truth.
-Morpheus
ISCS, Inc	Henry Katz, ScM	henry.katz at iscs-i dot com
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