document gives some hints for isolating them; the more information
you can give me about the problem, the better the odds that I'll be
able to fix it. But, if you don't have time to go through these
- steps, report the bug anyway -- even vague bug reports can be
- better than no bug report at all.
- --------
+ steps, please report the bug anyway -- even vague bug reports can
+ be better than no bug report at all.
+ --------
STEP ZERO:
What are you doing here? Go read README, and then the man page.
STEP ZERO, PART TWO:
Do you have the most recent version? Go make sure.
- http://people.netscape.com/jwz/xscreensaver/
+ http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/.
-BUILDING:
+COMPILATION PROBLEMS:
If you get an error running the `configure' script, the first thing
you should try is deleting the `config.cache' file, and running again.
* rearrange your $PATH so that the broken gcc is not on it;
* or pass $CC in the environment, like so:
- csh: setenv CC cc ; ./configure
- sh: CC=cc ; ./configure
- After doing this, you'll need to nuke `config.cache'.
+ csh: setenv CC cc ; ./configure
+ sh: CC=cc ; ./configure
+
+ Before doing this, you'll need to nuke `config.cache'.
- If you get errors about not being able to find Motif or Athena (the
- Xm/ or Xaw/ header files), and you can't find them on your system,
+ If you get errors about not being able to find Motif or Gtk (the
+ Xm/ or gtk/ header files), and you can't find them on your system,
then your system is horked and your vendor is lame. Perhaps the
problem is that you don't have some kind of ``development option''
- installed. Xt/ and Xaw/ (Athena) are free and available on all
- systems; Xm/ (Motif) is available on all commercial systems except
- SunOS 4.x and some early releases of Solaris.
+ installed. Xt/is free and available on all systems; Xm/ (Motif)
+ is available on all commercial systems except SunOS 4.x and some
+ early releases of Solaris. Linux and other free Unixes systems
+ usually come with Gtk, but a Motif clone is also available from
+ http://www.lesstif.org/.
-RUNNING:
+RUN-TIME PROBLEMS:
For runtime errors, it's important to keep in mind that there are
two parts to xscreensaver: there is the screensaver driver process
- (the part that detects idleness, deals with locking, and launches
+ (the daemon that detects idleness, deals with locking, and launches
the demos); and there are the demos themselves (independent programs
that draw pretty pictures.)
- * Compile with `make CFLAGS=-g'.
+ * Compile with `make CFLAGS=-g' (so that if you get a core
+ dump, there will be debugging info in it.)
* What platform are you running on? What does the included
`./config.guess' shell script print?
- * Is the problem in the driver, or in the graphics hacks?
+ * Is the problem in the driver (`xscreensaver'), the GUI
+ (`xscreensaver-demo'), or in the graphics hacks?
- * If the problem is in the driver, was the driver built using
- Motif, or Athena? Which version?
+ * If the problem is in the GUI, was it built using
+ Motif, Lesstif, or Gtk? Which version?
* If the problem is in one (or more) of the hacks, which ones?
- If you're not sure, try
-
- xscreensaver-command -demo
-
- to go through the list of them and see which work and which
- don't.
+ If you're not sure, try running `xscreensaver-demo' to go
+ through the list of them and see which work and which don't.
* Does the problem occur when running that hack by hand, in
- its own window?
+ its own window (i.e., when started with no command-line args)?
* Does the problem occur when running that hack by hand, on
- the root window (the `-root' option)?
+ the root window (i.e., when started with the `-root' option)?
* IMPORTANT: What visual are you using? Send the output of
the `xdpyinfo' command.
* If it dumps core, what does the core file say? Run the
program under a debugger, and show me the stack trace.
- (If you don't know how to do that, that's ok.)
+ To extract a stack trace from a core file with gdb, do this:
+
+ gdb ./the-program ./core
+ bt
- * If it gets an X error, where did it come from? Run the
- program under a debugger; set a breakpoint on `exit';
- start the program with the `-sync' command-line option;
- and show me the stack trace when it stops.
+ To extract a stack trace from a core file with dbx, do this:
+
+ dbx ./the-program ./core
+ where
+
+ If the bottom few lines of the output don't include the functions
+ `main_loop()' and `main()', then something went wrong, and the
+ core file is bogus. If the lines it prints out contain only
+ question marks, then the core file is bogus. Are you sure the
+ core file came from that program? Did you compile with -g, as
+ explained above? If you don't compile with -g, the core file
+ won't have any information in it.
+
+ Never ever ever mail me (or anyone) a core file. They are huge,
+ and are only meaningful on the machine that generated them, with
+ the exact executable that generated them, neither of which anyone
+ but you has access to. Don't mail me a core file unless you're
+ also planning on mailing me your computer.
+
+ * If it gets an X error, where did it come from? Run
+ xscreensaver with the `-sync' command-line option. When `-sync'
+ is used, X errors will cause xscreensaver to dump a core file.
+ Look at the core file with a debugger and show me the stack trace,
+ as above: I need to know where in xscreensaver that X error came
+ from.
If the problem is with the xscreensaver process itself, or if you
can't figure out which demo is causing the problem, or if you can't
* Start `xscreensaver' with the command-line arguments
- -verbose -xrm '*captureStderr:false' -xrm '*captureStdout:false'
+ -verbose -no-capture
+
+ This will cause it to write a lot of debugging info to the stderr
+ of the xscreensaver process (the `-verbose' option turns on the
+ diagnostics; the `-no-capture' option prevents the data from being
+ displayed on the screensaver window as well.)
- This will cause it to write a lot of debugging info to the
- stdout and stderr of the xscreensaver process (the -verbose
- argument turns on the diagnostics; the remaining arguments
- prevent the data from being displayed on the screensaver
- window as well.
+ You also might want to use the `-timestamp' option, which will
+ cause the xscreensaver messages to include the time at which
+ they were printed.
* If the problem is intermittent, you might want to capture the
- log information to a file and examine it later.
+ log information to a file and examine it later. For example,
+ you could start it from your login script like this (csh syntax):
+
+ ( cd ~/src/xscreensaver/ ; \
+ xscreensaver -sync -verbose -timestamp -no-capture \
+ >>&LOG & )
* Hackers only: If you're feeling adventurous enough to run gdb
on the xscreensaver driver process itself, make sure you've
read the commentary at the top of xscreensaver.c.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
- http://people.netscape.com/jwz/xscreensaver/
- Jamie Zawinski <jwz@netscape.com>
+ http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/
+ Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
projects / xscreensaver / blobdiff