desktop January 2008

desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org

37 participants
14 discussions

Help: problem with X11 / XFree86-DRI ; who to blame?
by Rob 09 Jan '08

09 Jan '08

Hi, My OS is an up-to-date version of Fedora 7 on a Intel based PC. I use a particular academic/scientific video rendering software VMD ( http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/ ). This software uses GLX/Mesa heavily. My day-to-day window manager is XFCE. When I use VMD, it immediately freezes keyboard/mouse on my console as soon as any video rendering activity occurs. The typical error message in /var/log/messages is: kernel: [drm:i915_wait_irq] *ERROR* i915_wait_irq: EBUSY -- rec: 147447 emitted: 147473 However, when I switch to KDE window manager, all this does not occur. Obviously I first blamed XFCE, but the developers there are convinced that the Xorg and/or related X11-video drivers are to be blamed. Eventually I solved the problem: I disabled XFree86-DRI in the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Is there anybody who knows about this matter and can help me understand what's going on? I'd like to report this problem somewhere, but who is to be blamed? XFCE ? (they deny) Xorg ? Fedora ? XFree86-DRI ? Thanks, Rob. --------------------------------- Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now.

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How to remove some mounted partition icons?
by Valent Turkovic 09 Jan '08

09 Jan '08

Hi, I have Fedora 8 and on the gnome desktop I see some icons from my partitions that I don't wan't on my gnome desktop. I don't have a problem with having my storage partition on my desktop but I also have also 4 other linux distos on my laptop and I see all of their system partitions on my desktop! I know that there is a way to disable ALL partition shortcuts but then I wouldn't see my usb drives on desktop when I plug in usb flash drives and I don't want that. So how do I remove only the shortcuts I don't want from my desktop? I saw an Ubuntu (which obviously also uses Gnome) trick which doesn't work on fedora On ubuntu only drives that are in /media are shown on the gnome desktop. I edited /etc/fstab so that partitions I don't want on desktop are mounted in /mnt - that worked on my Ubuntu but it didn't work in Fedora And ideas? Thank you -- http://kernelreloaded.blog385.com/ linux, blog, anime, spirituality, windsurf, wireless registered as user #367004 with the Linux Counter, http://counter.li.org. ICQ: 2125241, Skype: valent.turkovic

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gnome-pilot with Bluetooth sync
by Bastien Nocera 09 Jan '08

09 Jan '08

Heya, I've built Matt Davey's work on gnome-pilot into a package. We (read Red Hat) provided Matt with a Bluetooth-enabled Palm so he could do this work, and he e-mailed me a couple of days after the Palm arrived with patches, and a tarball of stuff to test. Unfortunately, I didn't have my Palm to test this on holidays, so here it is a bit later than could have been. You'll need the latest pilot-link build with Bluetooth enabled: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=30826 After that, install those beta gnome-pilot packages: http://people.redhat.com/bnocera/gnome-pilot-bluetooth/ 1. Setup your PC as the BT hotsync device on your Palm: Bluetooth → Setup Devices → PC Setup → Bluetooth Hotsync, and select your computer in the list (make sure it's made visible in the Bluetooth applet's preferences) 2. Add the Palm to the gnome-pilot setup: Preferences → Hardware → PalmOS Devices And enable some of the conduits 3. Ready to Sync! Go to Hotsync on the Palm, select your computer in the drop-down, and click the sync icon. Voila! You can use a tool like BTSync to make syncing more automated: http://tinyurl.com/2wgnbf Note that there is a known security problem with the Bluetooth backend: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=508315 This will hopefully be fixed before F9. Cheers

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musings on session service mgmt
by David Zeuthen 08 Jan '08

08 Jan '08

Hi, After investigating (please read the full report including links to desktop-devel-list) https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=427316 I realized what an incredibly poor state session service management is in and what kind of hoops upstream authors jump through because neither X11, nor xdg or GNOME has provided them with useful infrastructure. It looks like KDE has _some_ kind of infrastructure for this. There are basically two problems that we've been ignoring and hacking around for as long as I've used Linux on the desktop 1. There is no good way of starting session services that needs to export environment variables. While one may rightfully argue this is utter crack in most cases, things like seahorse-agent demonstrates that this is sometimes needed. Also, you surely need to do this for the session message bus. 2. I think we've all experienced this one or more times; you log out of your session and log back in. Wow, now things are weird or maybe doesn't even work. The reason for this is that processes from your old session keeps hanging around. In fact, I was bitten by this just before the holidays; I simply couldn't login. Why? An old gconfd process was lingering and that blocked login. The solution? Log in as root on VT1 and do the usual 'killall -9 -u davidz' dance. The latter problem is, I think, on the level of being a security bug. The former is just hindering process and is making people build on top of our platform (speaking in upstream sense here) do really crackful things like rewriting your .gnupg/gpg.conf file. I think with a little work we could fix this on the X11 level and potentially get this upstream too. First, in Fedora we actually got a rather decent way of solving 1.; see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=427316#c15 for the solution. Unfortunately, this a) isn't upstream; and b) isn't as perfect as it needs to be. If you follow the flow, basically this happens /usr/bin/xinit sources /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc sources /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc-common sources /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/*.sh sets up SSH_AGENT, DBUS_LAUNCH, CK_XINIT_SESSION does some weird stuff, then evals three variables above and, essentially, execs gnome-session or startkde Observations a. Ideally SSH_AGENT, DBUS_LAUNCH, CK_XINIT_SESSION would just use /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/. I'm told this is to make sure things are reaped (because of problem 2. above) b. It's annoying that the session bus is started after the stuff in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/ - no session bus for you. c. No way to run code once the session is over. Proposal Assuming problem 2. will be magically solved for us (see below), we could nicely rearrange the flow such that SSH_AGENT, DBUS_LAUNCH, CK_XINIT_SESSION could just use standard constructs in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/. Another observation is that only stuff using environment variables should use /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/ (some man page should spell this out) - everything else should use the XDG autostart spec (where we have UI, e.g. gnome-session-properties). Also, since we're talking about environment variables, we surely need to care about the ordering; e.g. we want 00-ck-xinit-session.sh 01-dbus-session-bus.sh 10-ssh-agent.sh 10-seahorse-agent.sh and so forth. Again, the man page should be clear about this. Also, there should be a README file in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/ that points to the man page. Instead of exec'ing gnome-session, we run it in the background. When we are done we run the same scripts in reverse just with 'stop' instead of 'start' as the first positional parameter. Notably, 00-ck-xinit-session.sh will take care of problem 2. The way it does this is because of the way that ConsoleKit works. It basically will just kill all the processes where the uid and the environment variable XDG_SESSION_COOKIE matches. First it tries SIGTERM. Then after a few seconds, it moves on to SIGKILL (e.g. -9). (of course, any process can unset XDG_SESSION_COOKIE and then fork and that way linger on. But no sane process would do that unless it's hostile.) All of this only includes modifying xorg-x11-xinit. We surely should get this upstream. The benefits? - Things like seahorse-agent, ssh-agent and so forth now has proper infrastructure to use. If we make the docs good enough we can point people to these and hopefully people won't do horrendous things like e.g. rewriting .gnupg/gpg.conf. - We solve the decade-long problem of lingering processes after logout. I think this is a pretty small project that could be done in a few days, maybe a week. Any takers? Thoughts? Am I on crack? David

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desktop January 2008