[4560] in testers
Linux-Athena 8.4-2001022316: Varied and sundry
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Fri Feb 23 23:51:08 2001
Message-Id: <200102240450.XAA02864@Press-Your-Luck.mit.edu>
To: testers@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 23:50:56 -0500
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
Here's my list of the 24 top most easily documented issues I've found
with the bleeding edge release. Some of them are less important than
others. Let me know if anything needs clarification, or if there's a
more convenient format for this sort of thing.
SAWFISH
- Frame type 'border only' doesn't work
- I highly recommend turning off the "feature" that gives focus to a
new application window when it first appears. It's really annoying
to say, start Netscape, go type in Emacs for three minutes while it
loads, and then have it steal keyboard focus in the middle of a
word. And that sort of thing happens an awful lot in the course of
a typical login session (at least in my experience). In usability
testing, users seemed to figure out very quickly that if an
application wasn't responding to keystrokes, they should click on
it and try again. Making this change is accomplished by adding the
following line to the system-default Sawfish file, if I'm not
mistaken:
(custom-set-typed-variable (quote focus-windows-when-mapped) (quote ()) (quote boolean))
LOGIN SEQUENCE
- Dialog box on login screen looks dirty and clashes with the red
text and the white panel. Make the background color there pure
white instead.
- Need an environment variable to allow people to detect GNOME
logins in custom dotfiles.
- (not a bug) A friend of mine tried to log in on 9.0 with dotfiles
that specified fvwm as a window manager; this worked, but caused
lots of errors to spew in the console because it is not a
compatible window manager. Upshot: 1.) People get really annoyed if
the console is constantly popping up. 2.) People will probably need
help fixing dotfile customizations to be Gnome-compatible. A
little advance documentation would probably help a lot there.
- Background flashes green then turns white during login sequence
(Nautilus not running)
PANEL
- Have to double-click on tasklist items to iconify them; you should
only have to single-click to toggle iconify/deiconify.
- Lock screen menu selection: Should rub "xss-command -lock", not
"xscreensaver-command -lock"
- Drag-n-drop between panel launchers and menu system not working.
(IIRC, Thomas demoed this working properly on a Debian install of
Gnome on his laptop.)
GMENU
- ignores .order files
- has severe usability problems - see bug-aui meeting (but I don't
think we'll have time to do much about it)
NAUTILUS
- nautilus-launcher-applet repeatedly gives errors on left-click:
ORBit-WARNING **: Request notify, ID -1073750856 was rejected by the authentication mechanism!
Gtk-WARNING **: gtk_signal_connect(): could not find signal "object_gone" in the `Handle to remote Bonobo::Unknown' class ancestry
...but is successful in launching Nautilus. (Why do we need it at all?)
- Problems with daemons being left running:
1. nautilus& (played around, tried to use File/Find)
2. Log out without quitting Nautilus.
3. 'ps' shows gconfd and oafd left running (this is on a private
workstation)
4. Log in again
5. nautilus&
6. Get error and no window:
** WARNING **: GConf error:
Failed:
Failed:
Failed to create file
`/afs/athena.mit.edu/user/b/e/beland/.gconf/apps/nautilus/defaults/novice/apps/nautilus/preferences/8.73258e-270conf.xml': Permission denied
7. Killed oafd, gconfd, and nautilus
8. nautilus&
9. Launches up OK.
- On successful launch, Nautilus spews this line several times:
Gtk-WARNING **: gtk_signal_connect(): could not find signal
"object_gone" in the `Handle to remote Bonobo::Unknown' class ancestry
- On File/Close All Windows: Gtk-CRITICAL **: file gtksignal.c: line
920 (gtk_signal_disconnect): assertion `handler_id > 0' failed.
- No GUI way to exit nautilus completely
- Disable "Eazel Services" intro dialog?
- Disable "Update Nautilus?" intro dialog
- File/Find should is broken without Medusa
- Display of HTML pages is broken without Mozilla
- Web search is broken without Mozilla
(FYI: Mozilla M18 seems to be installed in the mozilla locker.
Personally, I've tested Mozilla 0.7 with Nautilus and it's worked
great. But adding Mozilla to the build may be stretching ourselves
too thin.)
- When I cleared gtest's dotfiles and started Nautilus from the
prompt I got the following error repeatedly
** WARNING **: GConf error:
No database available to save your configuration:
Unable to store a value at key '/apps/nautilus/visibility/apps/nautilus/preferences/home_uri'
INSTALLATION
- Pet peeve: athena-dotfiles overwrote /root/.cshrc without a warning
or a .rpmorig. Ya, it's not in /etc, but it's still a local config
file.
-B.
===============================================================
Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS) - MIT Athena User Interface Project
===============================================================
