Hi Duncan, René, et al,
WOW, I'm impressed! THANK YOU for all your thoughts on this matter.
I have some responses and some good news. ...I usually don't delete stuff,
but this time I'm going to delete a bunch to focus on just the pertinent
bits and comment "in-line:"
I may or may not be much help, but this is sure interesting! ...
;-) I found it _frustrating!_
Slight detour, but knowing the name of those "console windows" you mention
I'm going to just jump right in here, responding to but skipping quoting
your comments on Virtual Consoles:
This particular environment, and in fact all Unixes and Red Hat, then
Fedora, at least so far as I can recall behave thus:
1) From the "console" and ONLY the "console", you can at any time enter
control-alt-F1 through F12, and it will instantly "jump" to the chosen
VC, and at least 1 to 8 will be active logins. Some 'nixes give you all
12, most modern ones only give to 1 to 8. On some OSes (including
modern Fedora), from f9 on up are dedicated for some kind of output or
use I'm not familiar with, though I DO recall seeing some type of
logging output on these some years back. I THINK they're used during
installations and the like.
2) There is often a delay in switching, usually short but sometimes WAY
longer than you'd think, so have some patience!
3) The VCs don't go away when you switch to another one - there's always
at least a login prompt, even if the system is set up for a GUI target.
If you exit, the system just gives a new login prompt. And if you go to
a different VC, when you come back it'll be right where you left it
unless some outside influence (such as perhaps a kill command
somewhere) caused it to go away, in which case you'll be greeted with a
new login prompt.
4) I don't recall with certainty anymore but I think that Ultrix, SunOS,
Solaris, and the other 'nixes I used in the late 80s and first two
thirds of the 90s all would start x in the VC you ran startx or xinit,
effectively replacing it, but it would return depending on how you
exited.
Red Hat, I don't recall with certainty, either, but Fedora I know ONLY
provides the windowing environment in VC 1 (ctl-alt-f1). I had imagined
this is common across modern distros, but apparently not the distros
you are familiar with where it's #7! I find this very interesting, but
not particularly useful at this moment - a sort of intellectual lint
caught in the lint screen of my brain. Maybe it'll be useful for me
someday!
5) Pertaining to sound, if I was in KDE and started a song via, say,
RhythmBox, it would play, unheard. And when switching to another VC
sound would ONLY appear if that VC was logged in to the same user
profile (UID) that was running the music program, e.g. RhythmBox. Thus,
songs would neither start nor stop when one switched into the VC,
rather the sound would either appear or disappear. Keep switching
between VCs, and it'll just be later in the song, for example.
BTW, you're not doing audio via HDMI off the video card, right?
Like you, I have a "stub". In theory, according to the manufacturer, I
should have six separate HDMI channels (at least stereo pairs, if not more
than just that) I can use, and according to the marketing literature on
the box, this works even on Linux. However no, I haven't tried it.
Instead, I've got a motherboard installed chipset that provides eight
different versions of sound, 6 of them analog and two digital.
I have given a half-hearted attempt at figuring out how to get the HDMI
based sound working but realized that even if I succeeded it wasn't going
to work out that well for me unless I had REALLY good control over it;
you'd need audio channel bonding, the logical equivalent capability of
network physical link layer bonding (such as a bonded DSL pair that used
to be common) but for audio instead of networking to be able to configure
it correctly. I seriously doubt anyone has done that already! ... If I had
a spare lifetime, I might enjoy taking a half year plus to make such a new
tool-set.
Another key reason I didn't pursue it is because I know the other hardware
works!
For troubleshooting at least, you might want to investigate weston as a
low-deps basic/backup wayland compositor.
I certainly WILL make (am making) note of this! So far I loathe Wayland
but maybe someday? I try not to be closed minded.
Where Dave runs:
/usr/bin/dbus-run-session /usr/bin/startplasma-wayland
I run:
xinit /etc/X11/startplasma-x11
Yes, back to how x is started! KEY!
I recall x being run from root, and was surprised when I found it no
longer works correctly doing that. But then, maybe I SHOULDN'T have been
surprised!
OK, two things to try, or one to try and one question to ask and maybe
try...
First the question. When you run xinit from your CLI login, does X
start(etc).
I think I addressed these already.
I don't recall a VC
