Window managers keep crashing?

[Jeff Siddall]

Some months ago something got automatically updated on my SL6 LTSP
server that began causing kwin to crash as soon as it started. It
simply will not stay running even when started manually.

The KDE developers, being pessimistic enough to predict this might
happen, coded a dialog on initial login stating kwin has crashed a few
times and offers to start metacity instead. OK, not great but functional.

More recently metacity has also begun crashing after running for a
while. The "while" had been days to weeks but today I had a few clients
that logged in in the morning, started metacity, and by afternoon
metacity had stopped too, leaving no window manager. It's near
impossible to use a GUI desktop without a window manager so the users
are understandably unhappy about this.

Anyone know what has changed recently that would cause the window
managers to become so flaky? I confirmed that my system is up to date
with all the standard repositories.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Barry Cisna]

Jeff,

Are you using KDE as default desktop?
Have you tried changing to Gnome to see if you get same results?

We have 5 SL6/LTSP servers of various update scenarios,,,,and no window
manager crashing.

This is a standard 32-bit spin of SL6?

Barry

[Jeff Siddall]

Post by Barry Cisna
Jeff,
Are you using KDE as default desktop?

Yes

Post by Barry Cisna
Have you tried changing to Gnome to see if you get same results?

No, not recently. Last time I tried it it worked fine, but I did not
run it for any length of time so I can't be sure metacity was stable.
If I had to guess I would think metacity would be more stable in gnome
than KDE but there is no particular reason it should be.

Post by Barry Cisna
We have 5 SL6/LTSP servers of various update scenarios,,,,and no window
manager crashing.
This is a standard 32-bit spin of SL6?

No, X86_64 server with 32 bit clients. I tried reverting the client
image to an old version and the behavior didn't change -- which makes
sense since the window manager runs on the server.

Are the servers you are running also 32 bit?

Also, somewhat related, is it possible to run the window manager on the
client? I have never really understood how X ties together the various
things running on the server and the client.

Jeff