[OpenIndiana-discuss] More 2021.04.30 strangeness

[Reginald Beardsley]

 The problems I was having appear to have been caused by caja restarting. The system stayed up with the mouse functional overnight. Before I disabled caja it would lock up the cursor in an hour or less.

I'll wrap caja with a script that runs "truss -f -o" to find out why it is failing and do the same with mate-session to find out where caja is being started. IIRC caja is also used to do MS style file indexing which I also do not want.

I definitely want to see this fixed. As I found the problem, I'm going to find the cause. I'm going to start with mate-session as I need to know a lot more about it to control what window managers run on which screen. Historically I did it via .xsession, but that was somewhat of a kludge to avoid figuring out the X initialization stuff in CDE.

I'm also going to look at the text-install log files and find out why this did not happen when I let the script create the pool. That will take longer as I'll need to do two installs on another system to capture comparable logs, though I'll try with just one reinstall using the F2 on the first screen on a Z400 system. That *should* be close enough of a match to the Z840.

I was a bit confused by MATE at first, but then found out what and why. I was amused to see how much like Windows 8.x & 10 Gnome 3.x on Solaris 11 was. That immediately killed any idea I had of running Solaris 11. Ughh!

I engineered running dtwm and twm side by side under CDE without root access at work, so except for bit rot in the intervening 15+ years, I don't think I'll have too much trouble running MATE and twm. But there are always surprises.

The main reason I like twm is I can set a menu icon bar on the RHS of a portrait mode monitor and full size printed page xterms stacked on the LHS. A double click on an xterm name in the icon menu gets it to the top of the stack. This proved very useful doing research support work. I often had xterms that ran for many months while working on multiple projects. Having the entire command line history available avoided a lot of note taking and kept everything related in one place. I actually started that practice in 1989 using an NCD 15" X terminal. Having a full printed page of source code in view was a huge improvement over a VT100. At 1024 x 1024 monochrome, it was also a big improvement over a Sparcstation 1+ with a 16" Sony at 1152 x 900. I came back from vacation to find my X term had been given to a summer intern and I'd been given the Sparcstation. I demanded my X term back and threatened to epoxy it too my desk. I had been given a 386i and DECstation 2000 before I got the NCD. I didn't want any more keyboard layout changes. As my work required running on every system in service the NCD was much more convenient. One home filesystem and one xterm per system type.

Have Fun!
Reg


     On Sunday, June 20, 2021, 11:59:06 PM CDT, Tim Mooney via openindiana-discuss <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org> wrote:  
 
 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

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