Bug 11704 – PWM locks when starting gmplayer from menu

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED INVALID

[Description Matthew Rickard 2002-12-06 20:28:31 UTC]

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.

[Comment 1 Matthew Rickard 2002-12-06 20:57:47 UTC]

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 :)

[Comment 2 Matt Keadle 2002-12-11 11:44:06 UTC]

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.

[Comment 3 Matt Keadle 2002-12-11 20:31:02 UTC]

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 =).