On Sat, 2 Dec 2000, Jukka Marin wrote:

> Is gnome running reliably on NetBSD 1.5 for someone?  Is there a known
> problem that I can fix?  I know gnome is huge, but this new machine seems
> to be "fast enough" to run a GUI (gee, my Amiga 1000 was "fast enough" and
> I think it had less than 1/100 of the horsepower of this new machine..)

I've been using gnome on NetBSD/i386 through the 1.5 release cycle.
Gnome has been "fragile" from time-to-time, but right now I use gnome
built from the netbsd-1-5-RELEASE tagged pkgsrc, afterstep (with the
GNOME compatibility module) as the window manager, and it all hangs
together pretty well. (No segfaults lately.)

On the 486, running 1.4.3, it's too slow to use, but it doesn't crash.

I've noticed certain window managers fail to start correctly under
gnome. The "sawfish" docs recommend that you make another window
manager the default, and always switch after starting (phew!). I've
also found that the session state is easily corrupted, especially on
the initial save. I had to "rm -r ~/.gnome*" a couple of times until I
got it right, but lately I can push every button on the control panel,
save a session, and it just works.

> P.S. I'm running netscape, gimp, etc. on the new machine and they do NOT
>      crash (nor did any pkgsrc or kernel build), so I _think_ the hardware
>      is OK.

The GTK image drawing routines use shared memory unconditionally if it
was enabled on the build machine. The GTK developers and the
application developers seem to have different ideas about who is
responsible for seeing that there's adequate shared memory available.
I set SHMMAXPGS=32768 in the kernel config, and don't worry about it.


Frederick