Greetings all -- it's good to see that ctwm is alive and well. For a while I had switched to OpenBox because ctwm had problems, including not being able to handle full screen flash, and some problems with switching desktops.
I did manage to get a working environment using OpenBox, with my usual 8 or 10 desktops (+ use of hibernate and resume to retain their contents for weeks or months), illustrated here: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/laptop/openbox/ But I always missed the flexibility of ctwm, and the ease of configuration using .ctwmrc instead of Openbox's XML format (more structured I know, and easier for a program to parse, but much more cluttered and verbose for human consumption and editing.) At some point I discovered that ctwm had been patched and worked properly with flash and so I returned to it and have for some time been using version 3.8.1, downloaded from http://ctwm.free.lp.se/ (On Fedora, I found that in order to build it I needed to install: libXmu-devel libXpm-devel libjpeg-turbo-devel I guess the libraries will have different names on different versions of linux.) A sample of my current use of ctwm is here: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/laptop/ctwm/ctwm-full-screen.jpg (Explained in here: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/laptop/linux-desk-top-environments.html) "Michael O'Donnell" wrote > ... > > [ Wow! I'm seeing email traffic from the CTWM list > again! Excellent! Does this mean some list problem > was found and fixed? Unfortunately, my own postings > are still apparently not being sent back to me... >-/ ] > > > Richard, If you're gathering patches prior to generating a new > release, please also include my patches (originally posted back in > July) that defend agaisnt the SIGSEGV caused when the global Scr > pointer is accidentally allowed to remain NULL. Others here have > mentioned mysterious crashes that may also be addressed by my fix. > ..... > > To: Debian Bug Tracking System <[email protected]> > Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:42:25 -0500 > Subject: debianBug#662860 - ctwm: SIGSEGV when changing workspaces > > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=662860 > > Package: ctwm > Version: 3.7-3.2 > Severity: important > Tags: upstream patch > > Dear Maintainer, > > I'm a longtime CTWM user who finally got tired of the random > crashes that occur, typically when I'm switching workspaces. > I can sometimes go for a month without seeing them and sometimes > it happens several times a day. I've analyzed this to the point > where I can see that code in DispatchEvent() is occasionally > leaving the global Scr pointer NULL which causes a SIGSEGV on > our next pass through the loop in HandleEvents(). It looks as if debian should switch to the latest ctwm 3.8.1 ? > I've provided a patch that adds a few lines of defensive code > which seems to have improved the situation, though I have not > analyzed the root cause, which appears to be that, for unknown > reasons, either XFindContext() or FindScreenInfo() seem to be > unable to return the answer expected of them. I've been finding CTWM totally robust on three different linux machines. (A desktop running Scientific Linux 6, another running Fedora 16 and a lpatop running Fedora 16 -- just changing to F17, on which ctwm also works, without recompiling). Having tried gnome and kde I cannot understand how anyone tolerates them! Aaron Sloman http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs
