Running Gentoo 1.4_rc1 stable. I'm running PWM (x11-wm/pwm-1.0.20010309) as my window manager. The problem comes when I try to start gmplayer (media-video/mplayer-0.90_pre10) from the PWM menu, it will lock PWM, and I'll have to ctrl-alt-backspace to kill X. Other programs howerver, run from the menu as expected. If I start gmplayer from an xterm, it will run fine. This problem is only experienced in PWM, other window managers handle it fine. Any ideas on what might be causing this? I'm assuming it's a bug in the PWM code itself and not a Gentoo issue, although I haven't tested it elsewhere.
I found a workaround to the problem, although definitely not an elegant solution. If you execute "gmplayer > /dev/null &" from the menu rather than just "gmplayer" it will not lock PWM and will run as expected. It seems PWM doesn't like the excessive output to stdout from gmplayer. If it's dumped to an xterm it's ok, if it's dumped to /dev/null, it's ok, but if PWM has to handle it it dies. I'm not at all familiar with the PWM code, but I'll take a look at this and see what I can find. It seems like it should be a fairly simple fix (but I don't want to speak too soon...). Anyone with more knowledge of this, feel free to step in :)
Came across this while doing some searching: http://rt.fm/ion/archive/2002-09/0005.html So it seems there are other people experiencing the same thing.
I've found a few more reports of the same thing happening with mplayer and PWM, so it seems to be an upstream issue with PWM directly. The sad thing, is that the last ChangeLog entry for PWM is dated 2001-03-09, so i've got a feeling that it may not be fixed anytime soon (I think all the effort for a tabed window manager went to Fluxbox). Piping things to /dev/null seems to be the fix everywhere I can find one. If it's working for you that's about all I can recomend, unless you're up to editing the cide itself =).
