Misregistered desktop image

The majority of RPi users don't seem the know about Usenet and don't come here, so I suggest you take a look at the main bug reporting site,

You can search it without having the log in: somewhat counter- intuitively, you click on 'Report a bug' to get access to the bug search tool.

However, a search on 'GL desktop' found only one bug and that wasn't relevant to your problem, so I suggest you set up and account and report your problem as a bug. FWIW they seem to be using Ubuntu's bug database under some sort of guest arrangement and this isn't the usual Bugzilla tool I'd expected to see.

HTH

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Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

Indeed, that's well-hidden 8-) I looked around a little and, like you, found nothing.

Playing more with the Pi, the problem seems a little more strange yet. On power up the desktop background fills the entire 1920 by 1080 screen. When I log in, the inch or so to the left edge clears to pale grey, matching the menu bar. It's almost as if a blank frame has been drawn over the edge of the screen. If I bring the menu bar to the foreground by clicking in it, the icons (raspberry & browser) show through. If I drag a window to the left edge it overlies the blank area.

Going back to the default desktop changes nothing substantive, so it's not a fault of the "experimental GL" desktop.

I'll wait a bit before making a noise there; the issue is both harmless and obvious, folks most probably know of its existence and will deal with it when opportune. I thought it was a configuration error.

Thanks for pointing out the bug reporting site, I didn't know it existed.

bob prohaska

Most operating systems and popular software packages have them. The sort of website a package calls home often lets you work out whether it has bug reporting facilities and, if so, what sort of support to expect.

Packages with a dedicated website or that are on SourceForge, Git, etc probably have a bug reporting system: Bugzilla is one of the common ones. Its not all that easy to use but at least all bugzilla installs work the same way.

Others may just have a user forum which, IMO anyway, isn't nearly as good as a dedicated bug reporting system because its less easy to search and likely to be cluttered with chat and newbie advice. Some clueless developers think a forum is a good substitute for a maintaining a user manual and writing well documented code: it is not.

Finally, you get to less widely used stuff, which may just be distributed and supported from a more generic personal website. Support there is probably by by e-mail, but you should still get a response unless the package has become abandonware. This sort of support can be very good, especially for special purpose software used by smaller interest groups.

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Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

Make sure nothing is being run automatically at login by the window manager.

I had a problem with qtCreator which would startup and then draw an immovable window over everthing, including once automatically at start up. (I fixed it by killing it from a different console, then setting some start up option not to display the start up banner).

I also had Kubuntu x86 VM upgrade itself to the Plasma desktop, and hide everything behind the backdrop, never did get to the bottom of that one.

---druck

Where should I look to see what the window manager is starting on login? It's a default Raspbian setup, I've not customized the UI.

Thanks for posting!

bob prohaska

Most window managers have a setting to restore the apps which were running in the previous session.

---druck

Trawl through the invisible directories in your login looking for names that relate to the desktop manager you're running.

I don't do anything with a GUI desktop on my RPi, but do use XFCE on my other computers, which all run Fedora. It seems to put the files it needs in .local (in your login directory) and /etc/xdg/xfce4 with a heap more stuff in /usr/share/xcfe4 and /usr/share/doc/xfce4 so its likely that other desktop managers do something similar.

Probably the best bet is to discover which desktop you're using and then go find documentation for it on the 'net if its not in /usr/local/share/doc

My RPi isn't running at present and its late s I'm not motivated to g oand look it up. Besides, I've only seen its GUI desktop about once, at which point I shuddered and have always accessed it via a terminal-type SSH login - yeah, I *LIKE* command lines and do virtually all my C, Java and SQL development that way on my Fedora systems: the best thing about GUI desktops is that they support more than one terminal session with every system I happen to be using at the time and the best thing about XFCE is that it can handle multiple desktops at once.

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Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

I'm using whatever Stretch uses by default. Oddly enough, it's not obvious what desktop that might be. I thought it would be lxde, but ls -a in the home directory finds hidden directories for .gnome, .gnome2 and .gnome2-private, all of which are empty.

Top reports lxpanel and lxterminal running, which I think _are_ lxde programs, but there's no other obvious hint.

Thanks for reading, any clues appreciated!

bob prohaska

That seems like a reasonable starting point, so go and look at LXDE docs. If they match what you find, fine. If not, try something else, like looking at stuff on

and asking them if its unclear - if nobody tells them there's missing information they're unlikely to rectify that.

This is exactly the same reason why I suggest that folks get a login to the RPi bug reporting system and make bug reports: its very easy to have blind spots about faults in stuff you write or maintain and if nobody points them out they'll never get fixed. Typically this will be because you've found a reasonable use case that the author didn't think of and so has never tested.

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Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

The latest Pi uses the Pixel desktop which i believe is simply a tweaked LXDE desktop

the reason for the gnome directories is IIRC LXDE uses the GTK toolkit

--
Facts are the enemy of truth. 
		-- Don Quixote

Thank you, I vaguely remember something about Pixel which I since forgot. That gives me a starting point..

bob prohaska