RE: X server crash from icewm

["Harold Hunt" <huntharo at msu dot edu>]

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. I  figure 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.

> * The cpu meter and network meter don't work. But those 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.

> 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 noticed that all the sample startx scripts have an explicit 'screen'
> parameter for XWin. Is it really needed? Isn't it better to default to no
> -screen parameter' which should give an XFree window that occupies the
> whole available screen space (right? at least this is how it works for me)

The default -screen parameter is very new, as of perhaps Test39 or so, and
that latest executable is not yet included in the default binary
distribution of Cygwin/XFree86.  Even so, it wouldn't much matter if the
parameter was there or not after the new server executable makes it into the
default distribution.

> (This is not related: I have tried using an explicit -screen parameter in
> .xserverrc , and still I get the same crashes)

Correct, it shouldn't have any effect.

> Any ideas? (besides the obvious "don't restart")
> What should I check?

Don't restart.

I know nothing about icewm, and I suspect that nobody else here is an expert
on its internal workings either.  Thus, I think the only thing I can tell
you to do is to start working with the icewm folks to verify that all icewm
features work correctly on Cygwin/XFree86.  Yup, that could takes weeks or
months.  Unfortunately, that's the way porting works...

Best of luck,

Harold