Re: Newby question

[Owen Taylor <otaylor gtk org>]

Dave Caswell <davec@asylum.apocalypse.org> writes:

> Is it possible to set up widgets in positions specified by arbitrary
> numeric coordinates, without packing them in vboxes or hboxes??
>
> How do I gow about doing it?
>
> For a first gtk project, I was trying to port a game I wrote using the
> xforms library, and it just seems way too complicated to set up a
> bunch of boxes to pack controls into to get the desired results.

The GtkFixed widget does this. But I would not recommend using
it to do layout of dialogs. I think you'll find that the GTK
boxes/tables approach is vastly superior for this.

 - It can do reasonable things when the window is resized.
 - It can do reasonable things when the font is changed
 - You don't have to worry about how big all the sizes are in pixels.
 
> Is there a tool like fdesign from xforms to make laying out a program
> easy?  

There are several such projects underway. (Glade and GLE). Neither is
is useable for real work yet. There is also a GtkPacker widget
announced here recently that may be a more intuitive way of doing
layout.
 
> And finally, there's a bug somewhere.  If I run the testgtk program,
> and run the shapes demo, then move each of the three icons, and quit
> the demo by pressing the shapes button again, my X server dies with a
> signal 11.   Is this a bug in my X server, or in gtk??  What do I need
> to do to get more information about the problem?

This is an X server bug. If your X server crashes, it is an
X server bug, always.

It is just possible that GTK is doing something strange that
triggers the X server bug, that we can work around, but the
fix really needs to be in the server.

(What system/server? The easiest approach to finding the problem may be
to just tell the vendor/maintainer to download GTK+, compile it and do
the above - since running the XServer under a debugger
would help a lot)

The following procedure might help narrow things down:

 - Run testgtk in a console window or separate machine with DISPLAY
   pointing to the X server, under a debugger, with the --sync flag.
   
 - When the X server crashes, the client should get an X io error.
   A backtrace at that point may help figure out what calls triggered
   the X server crash.

But it will probably require a fair bit of experimentation and
poking around.

Regards,
                                        Owen