Still on FC4
OK, Sawfish isn’t looking real happy in FC4. I ended up rebuilding Sawfish because paths to rep stuff had changed. Two problems:
- rep-gtk had to make its own version of a couple GTK functions in the past. Those functions seems to be in FC4’s GTK. However, they must work differently: sawfish-ui makes an assertion failure.
- When I cycle windows in Sawfish with alt-tab, the box that appears with the window name in the center of the screen stays up until I press another key. So: press alt-tab to cycle to next window, box pops up with name of window that now has focus, box does not disappear like it used to. Press any other key and the box disappears. Key seems to be sent to window that appeared to have focus, too.
So the RPMs I posted earlier are not a panacea. I’m trying to get by with Metacity, presently. Its window placement is likely going to bug the shit out of me. Tip: hold shift while dragging a window with mouse for “gravity.” (Pretty extreme gravity when there’s only one window on the screen. Try it and see what I mean.)
I go to try and fix my mouse problem/switch to the NVIDIA X server simultaneously. Turns out the latest NVIDIA X server, 7664 I think, doesn’t support the GeForce 256 or the GeForce 2, and I’m sure I have one of those. dmesg has a note from the driver telling you to check out the “NVIDIA Legacy drivers” or something, but they don’t exist yet I gather. NVIDIA’s website is kind of a maze. Solution: ATrpms has 7174 packaged for FC4. That seems to work. (BTW, information cleaned from nV News forums.)
nscd is crashing all the time still. I think I figured out how to run gdb over it. Will try and post link to inevitable Fedora bug later.
Turns out the kernel correctly detected my mouse as “ImExPS/2”. I
needed to go set Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2" in
/etc/xorg.conf. I also used system-config-mouse to change my
mouse type to a PS/2 wheel mouse, and edited /etc/sysconfig/mouse so
it looks something like:
FULLNAME="Generic - Wheel Mouse (PS/2)"
MOUSETYPE="exps2"
XEMU3="no"
XMOUSETYPE="ExplorerPS/2"
DEVICE=/dev/input/mice
Now scrolling up no longer simulates both scrolling up and right
click. Seems like I’ve been here
before.
Kind of wonder why I can’t select this as a mouse type in
system-config-mouse and have this stuff set for me.
I just noticed that Metacity is giving focus to new windows that pop up. That’s probably not cool. I wonder how hard it is to hack on Metacity. I’d use another window manager, but of the ones I’ve reviewed I’ve been kind of disappointed. Window Maker looked kind of promising, but development seems stagnant and there were some annoying placement bugs, IIRC. wmii would probably be cool, but I really want to use gnome-panel. Plus some applications really did behave weird with it; but I could probably get around that with more configuration, or else get used to it. Ion would be neat, but I seem to recall running up against some limitations WRT its Lua bindings, limitations that made me not care to use it anymore. I was fine with using rep (almost-kinda-looks-like-LISP) to script/configure the window manager… not that I ever needed to: sawfish-ui gave me about every option I could think of needing. There are some rumblings on the Sawfish mailing list, someone’s kind of forked it, but I don’t count on bug support. I’m relegated to using the GNOME window manager as long as I want to use the latest GNOME-and-friends.