[4912] in testers
Re: Athena Release 9.0 bugs and feedback
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Jun 27 11:54:32 2001
Message-Id: <200106271554.LAA10165@egyptian-gods.MIT.EDU>
To: Jonathan McIndoe Hunt <jmhunt@MIT.EDU>
cc: testers@MIT.EDU, iggy@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 27 Jun 2001 11:24:11 EDT."
<5.1.0.14.2.20010627102645.0642aca0@hesiod>
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 11:54:26 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
> I was really disappointed that the active window did not follow with
> the mouse cursor. This is one of the things I have loved about
> Athena and have at times hacked my Windows machine to do the same.
[...]
> A window kept popping up when I left the cursor on a window edge or
> bar that was annoying. With 4 xterms in my customization, this
> happened a lot.
These things are both really easy to customize with the middle mouse
button menu, if you want to change them for yourself. For the
default, we're pretty sure that click to focus is right (even if none
of us prefer it ourselves). Tooltips are perhaps less obviously
useful, but they still seem like the right default.
You can also make your zephyr windows not have title bars, using the
matched windows dialog. We'd consider making that the default, but it
would make it hard to figure out how to move zephyr windows (you have
to Alt-left click on a border, if I recall correctly; if you simply
left-click on a border you get resize).
> The one major (to me) bug I encountered was with the new colors used
> for the SawfFish Window Manager, my color aliceblue failed to work
> and made my zephyrs practically unreadable.
It's not just sawfish at fault; the panel itself uses up tons of
colors. I'm afraid we can't do a lot about this; the new interface
just isn't all that great on an 8-bit display. (Which there aren't
many of left in the Athena environment; just the private sparc
5/170s.)
> The extra processes running (plus the changed interface) made me
> think initially that my machine had been hacked. sawfish & dustbust
> (plus rep and esd) have names that could be related to hacker files.
That's unfortunate. I hope the security team's workload of reassuring
users isn't too high. (We plan to have posters in the clusters, which
should help some, though it certainly won't reach everyone.)
> It would be nice to be able to have an xload meter in the bar along
> the bottom, that may be possible, and I just don't know how.
I think that may be possible, if we have the right applet installed in
the Athena release. You right click in the panel and add the right
applet (I forget the name). I recall it being one of the flakier
applets, unfortunately.
> The mail button opens xmh, when I typically use exmh as my mail
> reader from athena (which is very rarely). I imagine this is
> customizable. I am not sure that assuming xmh is the mail reader of
> choice is appropriate. I do not have any information on this other
> than my habits.
Yes, it's customizable (right button). xmh is, sad as it is, the
recommended GUI mailreader for Athena. We'd really like to replace
it, but didn't have time for this release. Pointing at exmh isn't a
great idea because it isn't supported by IS.
