Problems With 4.4.1 Upgrade

[Robby Workman]

Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Sun, 7 Oct 2007, Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
> 
>> Definitely a Slackware issue; we certainly don't touch this file. Though
>> it seems odd that Slackware would touch anything in $HOME either.
> 
>    That's what I thought, Brian. I've no idea why the setup file changed.
> But, with the change in how X is packaged, we're told to make a new
> /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and for each user to run xwmconfig. The latter, as I
> understand the man page, only selects the window manager to be used. Any
> way, when I tried running it the only response was 'cancelled.' Strange.


None of the official Slackware packages touch anything in $HOME -
sorry, Rich, but if something in there got deleted, it has to be
PEBKAC  ;-)

The reason for making a new xorg.conf is due to the FontPath changes
and other path changes due to the move from Xorg 6.9 to modular Xorg;
the old xorg.conf from 11.0 simply won't work properly on a 12.0
system.  Re-running xwmconfig is along those same lines - several
parts of the system changed from 11.0 to 12.0, and some of those were
file paths called in the various $WM.xinitrc scripts.

You are correct about the purpose of xwmconfig - it does indeed set
the desired window manager.  It essentially copies the $WM.xinitrc
from /etc/X11/xinit/ to $HOME/.xinitrc - you can certainly do this
manually.  As for why it's failing, from looking at the script, I only
see two potential failure cases:
  1. $HOME is not writable by your user
  2. /etc/X11/xinit/ is empty
I'm not even certain that #2 will cause the script to exit with
the "Canceled" message you saw, but I am certain that #1 will.


>> You negelected to mention what your old version of Xfce was.  If it was
>> 4.2.x, then some of this is normal -- the panel configuration file format
>> was changed between 4.2 and 4.4, and unfortunately there's no migration
>> script.
> 
>    Yes, it was 4.2.x.


As Brian indicated, some parts of the configuration simply aren't
compatible.  If nothing else, wipe out $HOME/.config and perhaps
$HOME/.local (better to just wipe the things in there which are
related to Xfce, actually) and start over.

However, the "random white blocks" and such mentioned in your first
mail sounds like video driver problems - I experienced the same with
one of the early 'intel' drivers and high resolutions.  If you have
something using the 'ati' or 'radeon' driver, you might have one of
those annoying chipsets that the stock xf86-video-ati driver doesn't
like - if so, check in /extra for an older release that should work
fine.


>    Well, when I get things working properly in the rest of the upgrade, I'll
> re-do the appearance of Xfce to suit my preferences.
> 
>> As for panel plugins, they'll need to be update for the new panel as well
>> -- if there aren't Slackware packages, you'll have to do that on your own.
> 
>    No Slackware packages; I'll get new ones as the last step.


I've got most of the panel plugins packaged (and build scripts are
available) on my site.  I've been meaning to push them up to
SlackBuilds.org, but time is winning the battle so far...

RW