desktop November 2004

desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org

55 participants
24 discussions

Professionalism
by chapmanccc＠juno.com 10 Jan '05

10 Jan '05

To the developers, The Linux operating system is maturing and we all hope that it will be a major contender in the home and business markets. As it approaches this goal, the customer base changes. Linux is no longer the "geek OS" it once was. Where once the predominant profile of a Linux user was a young male, you now find fathers and husbands (I am both), women (I am married to one) and children (I have three). Linux is my main OS at home and my wife and oldest child also use it. With this evolution, a level of professionalism must also take place. Being that the Fedora project is one of the leading consumer Linux distributions, I would hope the developers would want to 'lead the pack' in this area. This brings me to my point. I was rather disappointed with the content in the "WebCollage" and "Barcode" screensavers. These screensavers have since been manually removed from my system, but I would have preferred them not to be installed by default. When I install Mac OS or Windows, garbage like this is not included. Why? Because the developers strive to build a professional product. Yes, I can install items like this with Mac OS or Windows, but I would need to download or purchase them after installing the OS. Developers, please be considerate when creating the Fedora distributions and let's strive to make Linux as professional as possible. Thank you, Chris ________________________________________________________________ Juno Platinum $9.95. Juno SpeedBand $14.95. Sign up for Juno Today at http://www.juno.com! Look for special offers at Best Buy stores.

11 16

Some analysis of starting a Gnome session under valgrind
by Daniel Veillard 08 Dec '04

08 Dec '04

I wanted to do this for a long time but only now I had the time and a destop beefy enough to try this. Basically I replaced /usr/bin/gnome-session by a shell script : #!/bin/sh /usr/bin/valgrind --trace-children=yes --log-file=/tmp/valgrind /usr/bin/gnome-session.orig $* Then logged on in gdm , and checked what happened from an ssh connection top the box. The good news: - logging went through, but it took a few minutes - everything looked functional though extremely slow - there wasn't many logs reported by valgrind The bad news: - I had to stop the session shortly after the login fully complete the VM was full (1G of Ram + 500M of swap) - reports from the logs are a pain to try to analyze. - one python (rhn applet I suspect) generated a huge log, python-2.3 doesn't seems valgrindable. I them eliminated all the empty /tmp/valgrind.pid* files, I was left with reports from oly 25 processes. First a word of warning, I used the normal optimized code as shipped as part of Fedora devel (fully up-to-date box for todays version), some of the optimizations sometimes defeat valgrind so there may be false positive. I have tried to sort all the reports to gather together what was frequently reported because all apps went through the same code path, for example there is an error reported when opening gdk display which is reported like 30 times by various apps. So what I saw most: - gdk_display_open leading to write(buf) contains uninitialised or unaddressable byte in __write_nocancel though _X11TransWrite hard to tell without a debugging lib if the error is a false positive a lack of initialization gdk_display_open() or within X. Strange thing is that valgrind report the block as being alloc'ed with calloc() offending address is 128 bytes inside a block of size 16384 - giop_send_buffer_write in libORBit-2 leading to Syscall param writev(vector[...]) contains uninitialised or unaddressable byte(s) that time the uninitialized data is 10 bytes inside a block of size 2048 allocated within orbit itself. - pango read_line raises a strange pthread mutex error: pthread_mutex_lock/trylock: mutex has invalid owner in pthread_mutex_lock called by pango_read_line from pango_find_map Apparently the GStreamer code detects it's running under valgrind and manage to shut it up :-) Except those 3 repeated all other the place and consisting of the bulk of the reports, I have seen errors in: - /usr/bin/gnome-session: invalid file descriptors, pango_attr_list_get_iterator uninitialized value. - /usr/bin/pam-panel-icon: 2 invalid file descriptor, seems the same as for gnome-session with value 828 too. - /usr/lib/libwnck: uninitialized values in _wnck_read_icons - /usr/libexec/gconfd-2: repeated g_strdup of initialized values from gconf_set_daemon_ior, gconf_get_lock, gconf_object_to_string, gconf_quote_string, and an fprintf - /usr/libexec/bonobo-activation-server: uninitialized values in CORBA_ORB_object_to_stringr,fprintf,giop_send_buffer_write - gam_server : I got one too :-) - metacity: uninitialized values in gdk_window_new, gdk_window_resize, gdk_region_rectangle, gdk_region_subtract, a couple of strange g_int_equal bugs, meta_display_begin_grab_op, meta_display_end_grab_op - gnome-terminal: terminal_profile_update and _vte_pty_open The best way to double check is to do the same trick as I did for gnome-session, move the original somewhere else, replace it by a script calling valgrind but without recursion to child on a local copy of the program in debugging mode. Enclosed are the data as sorted and recouped for more informations. happy valgrinding, Daniel -- Daniel Veillard | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/ veillard(a)redhat.com | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/ http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/

5 4

Thunderbird 0.9 RPM
by Andre Meyer 01 Dec '04

01 Dec '04

Hi all Finally, we have Thunderbird as (default) email client in FC3. But it is version 0.8, while 0.9 has been available for a while. Where can the RPM for version 0.9 be downloaded. None of the familiar places has it. Why is this so? Maybe the solution is just too simple for me to see ;-) thanks and kind regards Andre

6 8

Faster login
by David Zeuthen 29 Nov '04

29 Nov '04

Hi, So I had a brief look at shortening startup/login time and tried disabling rhgb in favor of starting gdm early. It looks pretty promising; here are some wall-clock numbers from two runs of each configuration: | gdm_early | rhgb+gdm | ----------------------+------+-------+-------+------+ GRUB timeout | 0:00 | 0:00 | 0:00 | 0:00 | Starting udev | 0:13 | 0:13 | 0:13 | 0:14 | HW init done | 0:25 | 0:25 | 0:26 | 0:26 | rhgb visible | N/A | N/A | 0:36 | 0:35 | gdm login visible | 0:43 | 0:44 | 1:25 | 1:26 | gdm login entered | 0:52 | 0:52 | 1:31 | 1:32 | GNOME banner visible | 1:13 | 1:14 | 1:40 | 1:41 | Nautilus Background | 1:33 | 1:32 | 1:51 | 1:52 | Panel visible | 1:43 | 1:43 | 2:02 | 2:02 | HD activity off | 1:59 | 1:56 | 2:13 | 2:14 | The milestones should be pretty self evident. This is on a stock FC3 system running on a IBM T41 1.6GHz (running on AC power), 512MB RAM without any services manually disabled. In addition to starting gdm early, the modifications also start up a few services, D-BUS, HAL and NetworkManager, that is critical to the GNOME desktop. Some random thoughts/observations: - We get the gdm window 40 secs faster - The 12 secs from "Starting udev" to "HW init done" can be mostly shaved away/run in parallel - Kernel bootstrap time (13 secs) can probably be much shorter (that's what some kernel guys say anyway) - With this hack we shave twenty secs of the booting time (e.g. from GRUB until you can use your PC) but booting still feels much quicker because of the interaction with gdm in the middle (YMMV; e.g. placebo effect etc.) - rhgb+gdm spawns an X server each which is sort of stupid and unsafe (or so some Xorg guys tell me). This solution, per design, avoids doing that - we don't get the kudzu screen nor the fsck screens or any other console interactions. However, IMHO, such screens are not good UI in the first place - we should instead have GUI replacemnts that possibly notifies you when you log into the desktop session (stuff like NetworkManager and HAL alleviates such problems for networking and storage devices) - we don't get service startup notification, but, uhmm, is it really useful learning that the "Console Mouse Service" or "Printing Sub- system" have started? Instead, this stuff could just be put in gdm - it could be interesting to make /sbin/init own a D-BUS service that gdm and other stuff can query and interact with. Could also be fun to completely replace it with something a'la the SystemServices prototype that Seth did last year; links http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=4711 http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/2003/Sep/27 - Could be interesting to instrument the kernel with some pagefault counters etc. and attempt do more readahead on e.g. the GNOME libs (both Windows XP and Mac OS X does all that; I think we do too but I've been told it can be improved) So, anyway, I think it could be interesting to discuss starting gdm instead of rhgb. If you want to try out my crude hack, grab the file here http://people.redhat.com/davidz/newinit.sh put it in on your system as /newinit.sh, chmod a+x it and change this line /etc/inittab si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit to these two lines #si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit si::sysinit:/newinit.sh and you should be set to go! If it breaks you get to keep both pieces; e.g. try this at your own risk [1]. Cheers, David [1] :if it doesn't work you can boot your kernel with init=/bin/sh, do a 'mount -n -o remount,rw /' and edit your /etc/inittab file to point to the original sysinit.

16 27

Long shutdown time behind firewall
by Andre Meyer 29 Nov '04

29 Nov '04

Hi all In FC3 I experience a strange effect that was not there in previous versions: when I shut down at my work location (I have a notebook computer) it takes a few minutes before anything happens. Using the same machine elsewhere does not show this effect. Can this be related to the firewall that is used at work? What might FC3 be waiting for? thanks and kind regards Andre

1 0

fc3 fails to stop on shut down
by a j 29 Nov '04

29 Nov '04

7 6

Suspend to RAM/Disk
by Jamie Larsen 28 Nov '04

28 Nov '04

Does anyone know how to do Suspend to RAM/Disk with FC3? I have an HP xe4560 notebook (Athlon XP-M 2500 with 512 MB DDR). Suspend to RAM seemed to work with FC3 ("echo 3 > /proc/acpi/sleep"). However, once the machine goes into the suspend mode, I can't get it back other than a cold reboot. A couple a days ago, I bought a thin-and-light notebook (Avertec with Athlon XP-M 2200). Suspend-to-RAM works flawlessly with Windows XP/Home. Before I overwrite it with FC3, can anyone tell me whether it may allow the suspend to RAM/Disk operation?

2 1

XMMS defaulting to ARTS
by Sean Bruno 26 Nov '04

26 Nov '04

Was wondering if it was intentional that XMMS defaults to using ARTS for it's output plugin.

1 0

OOO not auto-saving by default
by Sean Bruno 26 Nov '04

26 Nov '04

It appears that OOO doesn't have auto-save turned on by default. I just ran into this with my spouse, who is not very tech savy. She has never experienced(until now) the loss of a document do to a tech glitch or other oddities of computers. I "assumed" that this auto-save feature would be turned on, I would be incorrect... :) I enjoy letting my better-half poke around with Linux as it gives me a better perspective on what works and more importantly what does not. Anyway, fair warning to all OOO users, turn on your auto-save now, before it's too late! Sean Bruno

6 13

How to start only one app in GUI?
by Edilmar Alves - Lista 25 Nov '04

25 Nov '04

Hi, I have a Fedora Core 2 Linux + VNC Server (running into xinetd). Then, the users may connect remotely to this server and run an app that I put into desktop (shortcut). But the users have access to other apps like OpenOffice and Mozilla, and I want: 1) the user may logon and the app starts automatically. Where do I do this? 2) none taskbar, console, etc, the app must start using full-screen, with no way to change to other apps like Alt+Tab shortcut. Is it possible? 3) the GUI must be light, I'd like to use some GUI with lower resources than GNOME and KDE. What's the better for this case? 4) the users may be in slow links, I think to use in the future softwares like FreeNX, and the GUI must be really with low graphical complexities... Thanks for any suggestions...

1 0

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desktop November 2004