problems with sawfish

[scratchmonkey]

I just installed my first Linux system yesterday and unfortunately, things are not working out all perfect for me.

My problem is with Sawfish. I am running Progeny 1.0 with Ximian/Gnome on an Athlon 850/1gig RAM, Geforce2 video card. (I don't know if all those details are needed, but they are there just in case)

When I went through the initial installation, setup walked me through configuring Sawfish. I picked my window look and it all seemed ok.

Now, when I go into the Control Center and try to change anything in Sawfish, the Control Center locks up and I have to kill the application totally. Everything else works in the Control Center just fine.

I tried unstalling, reinstalling Sawfish, but that did no good. The settings are still unchangable. Middle clicking to get the Sawfish menu doesn't work either.

Has anybody else had this problem, or maybe know what could be causing it? I am very happy with my first Linux box so far, but would like to get my Sawfish troubles resolved before it drives me crazy.

Thank you,

---tom

[Ralph GL]

I had exactly the same problem of the gnomecc locking up every time I tried to use the sawfish configuration part. To be honest, I didn't need to mess around with it as everything was working fine, but the constant crashing of gnome was enough to put me off it. I didn't even bother installing it last install. Instead I'm going to use KDE until I understand enough to just use a window manager on its own. KDE isn't as pretty as gnome but seems to be a little more stable. Seems that both are a little unfashionable though :)

Ralph

[scratchmonkey]

Ralph,

Earlier today, I gave up. I went ahead and installed KDE 2.1 and it works great.

Using the built in manager, I'm able to configure the heck out of this thing. In fact, I think it looks betted than Gnome....since I am able to change things around to how I like them.

Thanks!


---tom

[Hummer]

Although I can't remedy your Sawfish woes, I can offer a work-around that might mean you dont need to swap over to KDE (while many say that KDE is a great desktop, I've never warmed to it). My suggestion is to check out Enlightenment, a Windows Manager that is vastly superior to Sawfish IMO. If you've just moved over from Windows and are new to Linux, the concept of window managers can be a bit bizzare - but basically, all they do is control the way the windows work in GNOME and KDE (how they look, pop-up, focus, resize, etc). Sawfish is one window manager, and Enlightenment is another - both are sort of like addons for GNOME. So, in other words, you can switch to Enlightenment to control the way your windows look in GNOME, and still keep using GNOME (without using Sawfish, obviously).

The other advantage to this is that Enlightenment has some serious eye candy that you could benefit from with a rig like yours. Some people complain that Enlightenment is slow, but with your setup, I doubt you'd notice any slowdown (I have a 800mhz, GeForce II, and Ximian GNOME, and I dont see any slowdown).

Anyway, if you want to check it out, you can get Enlightemnet 16.5 (the latest stable version) at the website. It's an RPM, so it's easy to install - then all you need to do is choose Enlightenment in the Desktop->Window Managers section in the GNOME Control Center.
http://www.enlightenment.org/

If Enlightenment doesn't grab you (which would surprise me - it'll take your desktop to a whole new level, IMO) there are plenty of other Window Managers other than Sawfish. Blackbox, IceWM, and Window Manager are just a few. I can post those links too if you like.

Hummer

[scratchmonkey]

FIXED IT!!!!!!

Ok, this is the story. From what I found, it seems that many many people may also have this same problem.

The short story:

In the sources list (in /etc/apt/) Progeny has two lists. One list for stable packages, and one list for "updates". That being said, the update list in Progeny updates the rep package to version .13.6

That's all fine and dandy, except Ximain uses rep .13.4

When you try to change things in the Sawfish settings in Control Center, it is looking for files in the directory structure that .13.4 has set up.......but the structure had changed a bit in .13.6

It loops, and loops, and loops, and loops....and never finds what it is looking for. Eventually, you have to kill the application.

The solution:

Remove the line in the update sources list. The entry you want to take out is something like: http://archive.progeny.com/archives/update (I forget exactely what it said...but you will recognize it as the update line)

Then, remove all the packages that have to do with Sawfish:

sawfish
sawfish-gnome
sawfish-theme-progeny
ximian-doorman
sawfish-themes
helix-sweetpill
rep
rep-gtk-gnome
rep-gtk
librep9

Some of these will uninstall with others, as they are dependent on each other.

Once you get that line taken out, and those packages removed.....reinstall those packages, kill everything, and then restart the system.

In theory, like it did on my system......without that line in the update sources list, the older version of REP (.13.4) will be installed and Sawfish will work fine.

After all that pain in the butt, I'll probably end up running Enlightenment after all. Heh.

---tom

additon: i forgot....to test this, run "sawfish-ui"

when i had REP .13.6 installed and ran that file, i got the error that "gui/gtk was not found"

when i ran it again after changing the things listed above (and had REP .13.4 installed), no error came up.

i guess thats the directory that changed bewteen versions .4 and .6

[ 08 August 2001: Message edited by: scratchmonkey ]

[Ralph GL]

Nice one. I'll give it a go if I get the time.

Cheers
Ralph