windows don't appear

Other things FVWM General FVWM discussion
1

I’ve experienced some strange behavior with fvwm… sometimes when I open new windows, either by starting a program or opening a prefs dialog or something, the window never shows up.

The first time this started happening, psi (my jabber client) would open and start, but I couldn’t open the prefs dialog. Then a little later it would appear to freeze up. I’m guessing that was caused by a confirmation/alert window that wouldn’t return focus until I clicked something, but it never showed up.

And just today (right after my first boot with 2.6.14 kernel, if that could have anything to do with it), neither firefox or thunderbird would open. I could see traffic coming from them with ethereal and sometimes an alert like “Can’t connect to mail server” (my mail server sucks) would pop up.

Any idea what is causing this? I switched over to fluxbox for the time being, but I already miss my fvwm :slight_smile:

2

If you add:

BugOpts ExplainWindowPlacement On

… to your .fvwm2rc file, then:

tail -f ~/.xsession-errors

… assuming FVWM logs there, what does it say for those
windows that appear not to be visible?

– Thomas Adam

3

Firefox and Thunderbird magically worked when I went back to fvwm. But psi’s prefs still are not appearing, and I may have a clue why. here’s what .xsession-errors says about those windows:

[FVWM][__explain_placement]: placed new window 0x4005b0 'Psi: Options':
  desk 0 (current desk)
  current page
  position 0 2083  (used user specified position)

my resolution 1600x1200, so that window must be appearing off of the screen, right? The 2083 is the y coordinate, right? from the top? Where did I specify that?

Here’s a clue… if fvwm remembers window placement somehow, I copied this configuration from a dual-head setup and changed a few things… could it be remembering the window locations from that setup (even though that display didn’t have that many pixels up and down)? How could I reset that?

4

That is an ill-behaved application. It breaks ICCCM rules by telling fvwm that you told it to start et 0 2083. You can make fvwm ignore that hint with the style NoUSPosition.