RE: X server crash from icewm

[Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir at technion dot ac dot il>]

On Fri, 20 Jul 2001, Harold Hunt wrote:

> Tazfir,
>
> > I have currently downloaded and installed icewm. I didn't bother much with
> > tweaking (just configure; make; make install).
>
> Well, that topic would border on being off-topic for this mailing list.
> About all we can tell you is that icewm hasn't been throughly ported by
> anyone, so lots of stuff will be broken.Of course, you have the power to
> change all of that...
>
> > * make install gave an error when trying to install the docs. Something
> > with pushd and popd. Ifigure that there is some script that assumes that
> > /bin/sh is bash, (I have installed ash. Maybe it wasn't that smart). but I
> > haven't checked this.
>
> Error messages have to be very specific.We aren't too bright.

Not a cygwin-spesific issue. Their makefile uses 'pushd' and 'popd' for
pieces of scripts in the makefile that are to be run by /bin/sh . /bin/sh
should not be assumed to include popd and pushd, IIRC. This is clearly a
problem of icewm and not of cygwin

>
> > * The cpu meter and network meter don't work. Butthose are probably
> > contain platform-dependent code.
>
> That's expected, but you could probably add the necessary functions to
> Cygwin, or figure out why they aren't working correctly if they are already
> present.

Thank. I generally intended for the above two points to be oly provide
information that may help whoever else will want to build icewm on cygwin.
I wouldn't have bothered with them if it wasn't for the crash.

>
> > Fatal server error:
> > negative sized edge?
>
> That is a problem with the X font libraries that showed up either before or
> after XFree86 4.1.0.I haven't seen the problem reported for other
> problems, but there have been several occurences of the error on
> Cygwin/XFree86.Search the mailing list archives for "negative sized edge"
> and you will get the history of the error message as well as some pointer I
> gave on looking into it.Of course, no one followed up on those helpful
> pointers...

I'm not sure I agree here.

The most recent thread about it has only a hint about fonts and does not
end with a resolution of the problem:
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2001-q3/msg00147.html

A thread before that one has something about a java app that uses the
whole display (is it the same issue? does the java program happen to use
the problematic fonts? Maybe something else?)

http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2001-q2/msg02500.html

A thread before it seems to be about X authority. It starts at:
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2001-q2/msg02482.html but the
error message is only mentioned in later messages of the thread.

(I must point out that I have a bit obscure config with relation to
Xauthority. I currently run 'xauth generate $DISPLAY; xhost -' in my
.xinitrc . There probably should be a better way to use xauthority, but I
couldn't figure it from any documentation)

Only going back to
http://xfree86.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2001-q2/msg01456.html (about 2
monthes old) to find some useful diagnostics.

So it seems that the problem is with displaying Type1 fonts. Indeed I was
able to crash XFree by simply running 'xfd -fn "-xfree86-*" .

I disabled the xfree-cursor and all the lucidux fonts (by remming-out
their lines in fonts.dir and updating the lines count in the first line of
fonts.dir). That seemed to have helped a little. But I ended up
remming-out all the others as well.

Where exactly is the font path set? there is no /etc/X11/XF86Config . I
saw /etc/X11/fs/config , but there seems to be no xfs running.

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:tzafrir@technion.ac.il
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir