A few things solved from the list about Lenny
These things have been working for weeks now, it's just that I've been too lazy up till now to write it all down! :-D
I have found a new workaround for the notorious Xv flickering bug in my mature S3 Trio3D video card. I have tested it in fullscreen before but it invariably makes it worse: it only displays (the upper) half of the canvas (while the other half is blue). However, I seem to have forgotten to experiment more on this issue, as resizing the window seems to alter the bug. It's plainly correlated to the window size: shrinking it makes it worse, while enlarging it makes it somewhat better. This is so pronounced, that enlarging it to full-window (not fullscreen) fixes it entirely! :-D
In the same session a few hours back in time, the weird focus loss bug has happened to me yet again! I have been running Epiphany with the proprietary flash plugin, a flash video has just loaded in the very instant that the (unstable) MPlayer from debian-multimedia has brought up a window playing an .FLV while throwing out it's usual insane amount of frame dropping debug warnings (to it's standard output - what a quirk!). I'm not sure if any other action was in queue, perhaps I was also triggering some window manager action. And this has done it. Everything went on smooth except that I couldn't interact with the system anymore! :) The last action I wanted to commit was stopping the second video (why watch two at the same time?!). The mouse pointer's motion was flawless, but no button nor key was effective. Not even ALT-CTRL-Fx! :-S
I was more patient than last time: I went for dinner instead of grouching. However, by the time I came back, the computer was playing it's 49th flash video from its playlist, and similar progress has been made by MPlayer! :-) I have unplugged the ethernet cable in the hope that lowering processor usage would make a difference. The videos have eventually stopped, leaving the machine idle, but still in this zombie state. I felt uncomfortable with rebooting or trying ALT-CTRL-Backspace (not that it would have worked), so I kept on pondering.
In a few moments, the BUSIER sequence popped in to my mind. I had bad experience with the former, as I have once accidentally switched off my computer with it! (It's in the native kernel layout and not dvorak, so 'R' translates to 'O', which is short for 'off'! :-D) To my delightment, pressing ALT-CTRL-SysRq+R (or P for dvorak) enabled me to switch to a character console, from which it was easy to continue. I logged in, restarted the window manager with 'killall -sighup fluxbox' and I was back in business in notime! :-D All applications were preserved as expected, except for the minor bug I mention below. As a side note, maybe restarting Fluxbox would not have been necessary after all...
However, I have isolated a new issue while I was at it. The tiny application 'alltray' does not re-iconify its windows after restarting the window manager (tested under Fluxbox).
I also had many instances of 'ggitick' hogging my CPU by doing absolutely nothing after having tested all of these, because I'd been messing with MPlayer's unstable version and its various video output choices and that one always bought the farm at exit. :-S
And a last issue with Fluxbox: closing the last window of a tab group (after having merged many windows by dragging their title bar on each other with the middle button) does not obey the small 'X' in the corner, and you have to call in the context-sensitive menu from the titlebar for example and choose 'close' manually from there.
Next time, I will write about how you should absolutely _not_ format your system drive accidentally.
I have found a new workaround for the notorious Xv flickering bug in my mature S3 Trio3D video card. I have tested it in fullscreen before but it invariably makes it worse: it only displays (the upper) half of the canvas (while the other half is blue). However, I seem to have forgotten to experiment more on this issue, as resizing the window seems to alter the bug. It's plainly correlated to the window size: shrinking it makes it worse, while enlarging it makes it somewhat better. This is so pronounced, that enlarging it to full-window (not fullscreen) fixes it entirely! :-D
In the same session a few hours back in time, the weird focus loss bug has happened to me yet again! I have been running Epiphany with the proprietary flash plugin, a flash video has just loaded in the very instant that the (unstable) MPlayer from debian-multimedia has brought up a window playing an .FLV while throwing out it's usual insane amount of frame dropping debug warnings (to it's standard output - what a quirk!). I'm not sure if any other action was in queue, perhaps I was also triggering some window manager action. And this has done it. Everything went on smooth except that I couldn't interact with the system anymore! :) The last action I wanted to commit was stopping the second video (why watch two at the same time?!). The mouse pointer's motion was flawless, but no button nor key was effective. Not even ALT-CTRL-Fx! :-S
I was more patient than last time: I went for dinner instead of grouching. However, by the time I came back, the computer was playing it's 49th flash video from its playlist, and similar progress has been made by MPlayer! :-) I have unplugged the ethernet cable in the hope that lowering processor usage would make a difference. The videos have eventually stopped, leaving the machine idle, but still in this zombie state. I felt uncomfortable with rebooting or trying ALT-CTRL-Backspace (not that it would have worked), so I kept on pondering.
In a few moments, the BUSIER sequence popped in to my mind. I had bad experience with the former, as I have once accidentally switched off my computer with it! (It's in the native kernel layout and not dvorak, so 'R' translates to 'O', which is short for 'off'! :-D) To my delightment, pressing ALT-CTRL-SysRq+R (or P for dvorak) enabled me to switch to a character console, from which it was easy to continue. I logged in, restarted the window manager with 'killall -sighup fluxbox' and I was back in business in notime! :-D All applications were preserved as expected, except for the minor bug I mention below. As a side note, maybe restarting Fluxbox would not have been necessary after all...
However, I have isolated a new issue while I was at it. The tiny application 'alltray' does not re-iconify its windows after restarting the window manager (tested under Fluxbox).
I also had many instances of 'ggitick' hogging my CPU by doing absolutely nothing after having tested all of these, because I'd been messing with MPlayer's unstable version and its various video output choices and that one always bought the farm at exit. :-S
And a last issue with Fluxbox: closing the last window of a tab group (after having merged many windows by dragging their title bar on each other with the middle button) does not obey the small 'X' in the corner, and you have to call in the context-sensitive menu from the titlebar for example and choose 'close' manually from there.
Next time, I will write about how you should absolutely _not_ format your system drive accidentally.
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