[squeak-dev] full-screen mode - Linux

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Wed Jul 6 02:30:29 UTC 2011


On Tue, Jul 05, 2011 at 09:07:46PM -0500, Chris Muller wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 5:41 PM, Tom Rushworth <tom.b.rushworth at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It's been a while since I used Linux, but it should still have multiple
> > console support (alt+Fn or alt+ctrl+Fn or something like that to go to
> > screen n). ?You should be able to get multiple Xservers/window managers
> > up on the different consoles, and then leave one in squeak full screen
> > and another in the regular desktop. ?I've never tried the multiple
> > X-server part, but unless the first console is somehow very special
> > (e.g. it's the only one with graphics) you shouldn't have too much trouble.
> 
> Ah, thanks for reminding me about that!  That would certainly be
> useful to be able to get to a terminal to kill the squeak process.

Yes, this is the most straightforward way to get access to a good
old-fashioned terminal if the GUI gets hosed for some reason.

> Launching squeak under X from one of the other terminals is an
> interesting idea but would still suffer from the same modality problem
> - e.g., I'm in "Squeak mode" or I'm not, and drag-and-drop interaction
> from other OS windows (e.g., file-manager) wouldn't be possible.

This also will work (multiple X displays assigned to multiple virtual
terminals). But it is not very useful in this case, because just
opening an text terminal <ctl><alt><F2> gives you all the access
you need to kill the offending Squeak VM process, and <ctl><alt><F7>
will take you back to the virtual terminal that is running X11.

But it sounds like the underlying issue is that we may be having
trouble interrupting the image reliably, especially when running
under Cog. My guess is that this is not a Cog issue; it's more likely
to be an issue with responsiveness of the user interrupt handler
that gets aggrivated when running under a faster VM. This is only
speculation, but I suspect that our time might be better spent on
making user interrupt handling behave more reliably, as opposed
to finding ways to work around the problem in the X11 window manager. 

Dave




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