[OpenIndiana-discuss] More 2021.04.30 strangeness

[Tim Mooney]

In regard to: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] More 2021.04.30 strangeness,...:

> This is the LiveImage text install to an existing pool so I could do
> both RAIDZ2 and RAIDZ1. So it *is* a bit different. I had to create dump
> and swap among other things.
>
> I found via top that caja was restarting 6 times per second, so I turned
> off execute permissions which stopped that. It *may* have been the cause
> of the other problems I was seeing. I should know in the morning. So
> far, so good.

If you're in the mood to do a little research, I would be at least a
little interested to know what was triggering the misbehavior with caja.
I know you don't plan to use it and I too rarely use the graphical file
manager, but if there's an edge case that you can reproduce, it might be
nice to identify it and get it fixed.

If you can figure out which component is restarting it, you can probably
truss that with -f and get an idea of what error caja is encountering
that's causing it to act that badly.

> I don't have PulseAudio running that I know of, but I also didn't, and
> have *never* started caja.

caja is one of many components of MATE.  When MATE forked from GNOME 2.x,
because of the direction GNOME 3.x was headed, the overall environment
was named "MATE" and virtually every component of the fork was renamed
to something else, to distinguish it from the GNOME 3.x component.  I'm
not sure how the names were chosen, but I think "caja" is most closely
descended from "nautilus".  Even after a couple of years of using MATE,
I still sometimes confuse the old GNOME 2.x names (like "evince" for the
document & PDF viewer) with what things are named under MATE ("atril" is
the MATE rebrand for evince).

Unlike the simple graphical desktop environments you prefer, the modern
desktop model (and this is true with KDE, MATE, GNOME 3.x, and other
desktops) often has components auto-started by other components.  Just by
virtue of lightdm launching "mate-session" for you, a lot of stuff gets
launched behind the scenes.  It may not have been "mate-session" that
started caja directly (I'm not sure either way), but one of its
descendants likely did.

>I didn't even know what it was until this
> afternoon. I'd seen the name, but simply ignored it. A search on the
> gksu extensions revealed that it was for caja and that was a filesystem
> browser.

caja is a bit more than just a filesystem browser, but you're right that
the browser part is its biggest function.

> I'm starting up via lightdm.

That's good and it's definitely what I would recommend.  Some time down
the road, I think it would be useful to try creating a "twm.session" so
that you can get lightdm to launch TWM, since that's the environment you
have indicated you would prefer, but as long as what you have right now
is working, it's ultimately up to you.

Tim
-- 
Tim Mooney                                             Tim.Mooney at ndsu.edu
Enterprise Computing & Infrastructure /
Division of Information Technology    /                701-231-1076 (Voice)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164