I use XFCE for about a week. Last Sunday, the mouse pointer disappeared. The only way I could get it back was to reboot. That happened twice. It seemed to be related to turning off the display.
Remembering back to when this computer was new, I had problems with the mouse freezing. I fixed that by using “nolapic” as a kernel param. So I tried that again. And things went well until today, when the mouse pointer disappeared again.
A little while before today’s mishap, I had changed the screen saver settings, and that might be related. I had noticed that after the monitor had been idle, it went blank and then almost immediately went to low power mode. My change was an attempt to delay the low power mode for another 10 minutes after it blanked.
Note 1: By “mouse pointer disappeared”, I mean that there was no visible mouse pointer on the screen. I could still move the mouse, and the highlighting of some items indicated that the windows manager knew where the mouse pointer was supposed to be. But I couldn’t tell. It looked to me as if some display control thread was not being woken up properly.
Note 2: I never saw this happen in 11.3/KDE 4.4 (used from last summer to March), nor in 11.4/KDE 4.6.0 from March 15 till late last week.
Note 3: Remembering back to last summer, I tried XFCE then with 11.3. And I had power manager/screen saver problems. Sometimes the screen would go black after 10 minutes of idle time (that was fine), but at other times it would never go black until a reboot. That’s pretty much why I tried KDE at that time.
I’m posting this just for information - I’m not looking for a fix. I quite like KDE and, apart from the problems reported, I like XFCE. But if the latter is going to be unreliable, then I’ll stick with KDE.
I’ve seen this already. I don’t exactly remember on which system (meaning which Linux or which of the BSDs ) and in which situation, but it wasn’t related to XFCE… It is more likely related to one of the nvidia, nouveau, fglrx or radeonhd driver, and I cannot remember how I solved it (and neither if I did)
XFCE is not the lightweight desktop environment anymore it intended to be anyway. When it comes to serious things, I prefer icewm or LXDE.
totaly agree. i’m running openSuse 11.4 with LXDE on an old laptop with only 512MB ram. tried KDE but it was too heavy. LXDE is wonderful (even though missing some features i would like to see). light, fast and responsive.
I did use Ctrl-Alt-Bksp (twice) to forcibly restart X. And that did not cure the problem. So it is likely that whatever went wrong happened in either the kernel or video driver. However, somehow XFCE seems to trigger the bug, while KDE doesn’t.
My desktop, where this happened, is using the nouveau driver. I have an older computer at work. I don’t know what driver it uses, but I doubt that it is nouveau. On Friday, the display was on low power. I moved the mouse to wake it up (successfully) but I didn’t do anything else. Then I was interrupted. It went to low power display mode again after a while, and I could not wake it. The system seemed to be frozen. I had to power off and restart. That’s the same sequence of wake/go back to sleep that caused the problem on my home system. On the work system, the behavior was different. But I suspect there is a common bug somewhere that affected both.
Yes, I agree with you on “lightweight”. I’ve already found that icewm is very usable, and fine for most of what I do. What I like about XFCE, is that it reminds me of earlier versions of gnome. It is probably a good alternative for gnome users who don’t like the direction gnome is taking.
> XFCE is not the lightweight desktop environment anymore it intended to
> be anyway. When it comes to serious things, I prefer icewm or LXDE.
[off-topic: ] i just fell in love with enlightenment DR16, the older
version. i needed some peace & quiet for my CPUs running two or three
virtual machines, and found that DR17 seems still a bit rough around the
edges, but DR16 can be customized, and stays customized, just as i like
it…
> On Sat, 30 Apr 2011 12:06:01 +0530, please try again
> <please_try_again@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
>
>> XFCE is not the lightweight desktop environment anymore it intended to
>> be anyway. When it comes to serious things, I prefer icewm or LXDE.
>
>
> [off-topic: ] i just fell in love with enlightenment DR16, the older
> version. i needed some peace & quiet for my CPUs running two or three
> virtual machines, and found that DR17 seems still a bit rough around the
> edges, but DR16 can be customized, and stays customized, just as i like
> it…
>
…using mostly KDE4 applications of course, keeping clear of anything
that’d trigger akonadi/nepomuk.
I haven’t installed enlightenment DR16 for years and I probably never won’t anymore. It’s just too old now. But I admit that it was funny (but time consuming) to customize. Here’s a snapshot of the old enlightenment (probably running on NetBSD):
Notice that the small buttons at the bottom were actually buttons which started applications. This wm was indeed crazy. DR17 never worked with the themes I designed.
I never considered enlightenment as a lightweight desktop though.
> I haven’t installed enlightenment DR16 for years and I probably never
> won’t anymore. It’s just too old now. But I admit that it was funny (but
> time consuming) to customize. Here’s a snapshot of the old enlightenment
> (probably running on NetBSD):
> ‘[image: http://unixversal.com/images/thumbs/wm-enlightenment.jpg]’
> (http://unixversal.com/images/snapshots/en/wm-enlightenment.jpg).
> Notice that the small buttons at the bottom were actually buttons
> which started applications. This wm was indeed crazy. DR17 never worked
> with the themes I designed.
> I never considered enlightenment as a lightweight desktop though.
compared to KDE4 it is lightweight, using only 2.6 MB of RAM and no CPU
cycles i could detect. but the main resource i’m trying to save is time. i
didn’t (and won’t) get around designing my own themes; looks just isn’t
that important to me. i downloaded a few readymade ones, some of which
even work with my version, and spent less than one hour customizing menus
& keyboard shortcuts.
when i’m using KDE4, i end up customizing this & that, one time using
different activities with only a few desktops, then again lots of desktops
with only one activity, etc. but sooner or later, after an update or power
failure, i have to do it all over again. and then there is no easy way to
avoid nepomuk/strigi, at least not without crippling the rest. here i’m
using thunderbird for mail, so i’m not tempted to start nepomuk for kmail.
the whole thing has survived a couple power failures my UPS didn’t catch
already, and i’m not missing anything. let’s see how long it takes until
i’m getting bored & want to fiddle with KDE4 again…
