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
+ steps, 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:
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.
+ SunOS 4.x and some early releases of Solaris. For Linux and other
+ free Unixes systems, a Motif clone is available from
+ http://www.lesstif.org/.
RUNNING:
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?
* If the problem is in the driver, was the driver built using
- Motif, or Athena? Which version?
+ Motif, Lesstif, or Athena? Which version?
* If the problem is in one (or more) of the hacks, which ones?
If you're not sure, try
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.
program under a debugger, and show me the stack trace.
(If you don't know how to do that, that's ok.)
- * 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.
+ * If it gets an X error, where did it come from? Run
+ xscreensaver with the `-sync' command-line option; if -sync
+ is used, then X errors will cause xscreensaver to dump a core
+ file. Look at the core file with a debugger and show me the
+ stack trace: were in xscreensaver did that X error come 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
prevent the data from being displayed on the screensaver
window as well.
- You also might want to set the "*timestamp" resource to True, which
- will cause the xscreensaver messages to include the time at which
+ 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 \
+ -xrm '*captureStderr:false' -xrm '*captureStdout:false' \
+ >>&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