This chapter contains notes about issues and known problems with the windowing software and, whenever possible, provides solutions or workarounds to those problems. The following topics are discussed in this chapter:
The following notes apply to graphics hardware restrictions.
Different versions of Qvision graphics boards demonstrate
fillsolid
drawing problems, leaving a line at the bottom of the screen, which
is evident when running CDE blank lock screen. The line
varies in color and intensity depending on the version
of the Qvision board.
The following notes apply to X servers.
CDE provides limited support for X servers with more than one screen. While a multiscreen environment is possible, a number of inconsistencies are noticeable. For example, colors in secondary screens may not be correct, icons may not display properly, and applications may not appear on the screen where they are invoked.
The final revision of the X Keyboard Extension, XKB Version 1.0, will be
different from XKB Version 0.65, shipping with this release. The format
of
/usr/lib/X11/xkb/keymaps.dir
will change. Do not modify this file as it will not be preserved with future
updates of the operating system.
To force the server to use a specific XKB keymap, add the
-xkbmap
option to the server options line in
/usr/lib/X11/Xserver.conf.
Refer to the
Xdec(1X)
reference page on for more information.
The following notes apply to X clients.
Color rich applications, such as Netscape, exhaust a large number of
colormap resources. This results in problems with other graphical
applications.
For example, you may notice that icons normally displayed by the CDE
Application Manager are not displayed when a color rich application is
currently running on the system.
Graphics applications and online help volumes may also be affected.
The icon editor,
dticon,
may not be able to open a pixmap that contains a large number of colors.
In most cases this is a visual problem, and it may not be necessary to take any corrective actions. You can use the CDE icon labels in the same way as the icon for user actions such as drag-and-drop, and single and double click.
The simplest solution is to exit the color rich application. There are several alternate actions:
maxImageColors
resource to limit the
number of colors that Netscape uses. A suggested
limit is 96. You can do this by placing the following
line in the
$HOME/.Xdefaults
file:
Netscape*maxImageColors: 96
-install
flag, which specifies
that Netscape should install its own colormap. Although
this is supported, there are side affects such as:
If the XDM graphical login environment is selected instead of the
default CDE environment, you may need to install the
OSFOLDX11440
subset to regain the expected user environment. If this subset is
missing, the default X session will consist of a single
xterm
window and the
twm
window manager instead of the XDM session manager.
The following notes apply to CDE clients.
When running CDE with 640 x 480 graphics resolution, the OK, Apply,
Cancel, and Help buttons of some application dialogs may be
inaccessible. If this happens, you can correct it by
setting the
DXmfitToScreenPolicy
resource to
as_needed
in the application's defaults file or, for systemwide problems,
in the
/usr/dt/config/$LANG/sys.resources
file.
When the screen on a DPMS-capable monitor is switched to standby, suspend, or off mode, the X server continues to run the screen saver. In CDE, where there are a number of active screen savers, this may defeat the CPU slowdown features for power management on certain Energy Star-compliant platforms. To minimize power consumption, you should stop using active screen savers by doing any of the following steps:
xset s off
from a terminal client window.
File Manager, Application Manager, and Trash Manager
are different views supported by the
dtfile
application.
Avoid invoking
dtfile
from a remote system with the
DISPLAY
environment variable set appropriately. This restriction is
necessary because of the client-server model used by the
dtfile
application and its close interaction with the tooltalk messaging
system.
In the event of an unexpected behaviour from any of these
utilities, close down all windows associated
with the File Manager, Application Manager, and Trash Manager.
Then kill all processes associated with
dtfile.
You can get the
pid
for each process by using the following command:
#
ps -aef | grep dtfile
The following notes apply to the
dtmail
application.
The
dtmail
application does not honor the user configurable mail-locking environment
variable,
MAILLOCKING.
If you are using NFS, you must have NFS
locking enabled on both client and server systems.
The
dtmail
application disables tooltalk locking by default. To enable it,
select the following option from the Mail Options->Advance dialog box:
Use network aware mail file locking
Alternatively, set the following option in your
$HOME/.mailrc
file:
cdenotooltalklock='f'
If tooltalk locking is enabled, and
the
rpc.ttdbserverd
daemon is not running, you
will get the following message:
Mailer is unable to obtain exclusive access to this mailbox because the system is not responding.
For this time only, you can choose to open this mailbox read-only, or to open it read-write without exclusive access (use only if no one else is using this mailbox).
You can either quit
dtmail
and then start
the
rpc.ttdbserverd
daemon, or click on read-write, which
allows you to continue without tooltalk locking.
If you are running the
automount
daemon, the
dtmail
application
may not be able to access your
new mail inbox and you will see a dialog box showing the following
message:
Unable to access an object required to complete the operation
If you see this message, copy the contents of your current mail inbox to a temporary file as a backup and perform the following steps:
.mailrc
file:
set cdenotooltalklock
.mailrc
file, edit the file to include it.
Alternatively, you can use the following method while in
dtmail:
dtmail
application. Check the contents of your current
mailbox and the backup mailbox to ensure that no mail was lost during
this
process.
Changing the values for rows and columns in the Mail Options->Message View
will not take effect immediately when you click on OK or APPLY.
Exit
dtmail
and restart it again from the control panel, command line, or
file manager.
If you compose a mail message by selecting one of the following from
the
dtmail
main window, attachments will not be included:
Include the attachments manually by using the drag and drop feature.
CDE has a static dependency on the state of the network configuration. For more information, see Section 4.4.4.
CDE users should remove any
xnlLanguage
resource settings from their
.Xdefaults
files. Those settings are typically left
over from one of the user's earlier DECwindows sessions, where
the user selected a language from the session manager's
language menu and then saved that setting.
The
xnlLanguage
settings should be removed because they
override whatever language you select from the language menu
in the CDE login window.
When logging in to the CDE desktop, some applications may not
restart. The X server process may not be able to handle all
of the requests for new open connections, causing some to fail in the
XOpenDisplay
call. Some applications, like
xterm,
log startup errors in the
dxconsole
window, such as the following error:
xterm error: can't open display :0
To avoid this problem, add the following resource to your
$HOME/.Xdefaults
file:
Dtsession*contManagement: 2
This resource enables a handshake protocol between the CDE session manager and window manager during the login phase to control the appearance of new windows. While it may marginally increase the time before the login completes, it better assures that all applications will be restarted.
This can be added to the
/usr/dt/app-defaults/C/Dtsession
file to make the change for all users automatically.
The following note applies to windows programming.
In the
Lucida-Typewriter-medium-R-normal
fonts, the glyphs for multiplication and division are reversed. The
multiplication symbol is where the division symbol should be, and vice
versa. If the representation of these glyphs is important to your
application, use a different font.
The following notes apply to restrictions on use of internationalization features in the windowing environments.
When running in single-user or console mode, Tru64 UNIX now supports two new Japanese keyboard types (JIS and ANSI) on AlphaStation and AlphaServer systems. (Japanese keyboard support is not available on TURBOchannel-based machines.)
To use JIS-type Japanese keyboards, like the PCXAJ-AA and LK411-JJ, you
must set the
language
console environment variable to 50, as in the
following example:
>>>
set language 50
To use ANSI-type Japanese keyboards, like the LK411-AJ, you
must set the
language
console environment variable to 52, as in the following example:
>>>
set language 52
When any user logs on to a system, the system-default
keyboard setting must be appropriate for the keys that
the user presses when entering characters in the username and
password fields. Otherwise, characters that are correct from the
user perspective, given the keyboard being used, might be
treated as invalid. In this case, the user cannot log on the
the system. This situation most often arises when a
keyboard is being used in one language and the system-default
keyboard setting is another language. You can change the system-default keyboard
setting at the console prompt or, if the required language is not available at
the console level, by editing the
Xserver.conf
file to change the keymap used by the X Server. See
keyboard(5)
for more detailed information about changing keyboard settings.
The
dxterm
application is not able to display Latin-2, Latin-4 and Latin-Cyrillic
Characters even when the locale is set correctly. Therefore,
dxterm
should not be used for displaying the following languages: Czech, Hungarian,
Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, and Slovene. The
dtterm
application should be used in this case.