Re: [dev] debugging wmii

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 11:07 AM, Kris Maglione <maglione.k_AT_gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 07, 2010 at 11:00:28AM -0400, Vladimir Levin wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm running the latest hg of wmii, and it seems that once in a while it's
>> causing X to crash on me (mostly during resizing in the floating layer).
>> This also happened to me when I was using the latest stable release.
>> The question I have is how would I go about debugging this problem (since
>> it
>> might be caused by some of changes that I made, or could be just my
>> general
>> setup)...
>>
>> Is there some sort of a guide to this? Some flags I could enable, or logs
>> to
>> go through? Or should I just look up debugging X?
>>
>
> Well, generally the easiest way is to read the virtual files under /debug.
> You can also enable console debugging output with the -D flag (or the debug
> property of /ctl), i.e., wmii -D event+ewmh.
>
> Is there a crash or a stack dump? Also, I don't suppose you're starting
> wmii in a way that X quits when it does?
>
>
So, if I set up a background job that reads from /debug and puts it in a
file somewhere, then I should be able to read what happened right to the
point of the crash? That would be useful.

Quite honestly I don't know if there is a stack dump, since I'm not sure
where to look. I'm not even sure if it's wmii that is crashing or X. All I
see is the computer drops to a console, and then I get back to the login
prompt...

To answer your other question, I'm starting wmii by selecting it as my
session at the login screen (of ubuntu 10.04), and I've done that by adding
a wmii file to /usr/share/xsessions, here are the contents of that file:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=WMII
Comment=This session logs you into WMII
Exec=wmii
TryExec=wmii
Icon=
Type=Application
X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=gdm

Is there a better way of starting this?

I apologize if this is a silly way of doing it, but my knowledge of linux is
not quite at the expert level. I just keep hacking away until it looks like
what I want it to look like :)

Thanks again for your help,
Vladimir Levin

> --
> Kris Maglione
>
> The tragedy of modern war is not so much that young men die but that
> they die fighting each other, instead of their real enemies back home
> in the capitals.
> --Edward Abbey
>
>
>

-- 
Regards,
Vladimir Levin