| Re: .0
Is it really the menu bars that are lost, or the title bars? It sounds
like the window manager crashed for some reason, but in that case it's the
title bars that would disappear.
The kill -9 dxterm commands probably failed because dxterm is setuid'ed to
the root, so you'll have to su before killing them.
-- Bob
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| As Bob stated in .1, your window manager seems to have crashed.
The first thing to do, if you simply want to get going again,
is to restart the window manager via the command "dxwm".
If you cannot get input focus on your dxterm windows,
here are 2 ways to do it anyway:
1. log in over your network to the system, make sure that
your log in session has (or gets) the display variable
set to your workstation (typically, for a csh user,
use the command "setenv DISPLAY hostname:0" where
hostname is the name of your workstation),
then run the dxwm command.
2. cut and paste the letters "dxwm" into a dxterm window
that is logged in on your worksystem. This will work
even when you can't get focus on a dxterm window (or
an xterm window, for that matter) via clicking your
mouse button or whatever it is that your favorite
window manager does to let you control the screen.
Use a Help file from one of the dxterms to obtain a
source of letters you can cut if you can't find any
in the dxterms themselves.
This all sounds like weird
science, but I used this method recently to survive 2 days of
showing UWS software (in front of many people at
a very big trade show) with the Motif window manager
when the window manager would crash often. I was not
about to restart the system every time some little
problem like that came up!!
Bob is also correct regarding dxterms. Just because you started them
as a normal user does not mean that you can kill them from the command line.
Look at their permissions: "ls -l /usr/bin/dxterm" -- you'll see
something like
-rwsr-sr-x 5 root 1973248 Oct 22 20:02 /usr/bin/dxterm
The key is the "s" in the "rws" portion of the permissions. This means
setuid, which dxterm needs in order to grab the tty that it uses.
In other words, for this particular purpose, dxterm is given root
(superuser) privileges even when started by a mere mortal.
Crashes of the window manager, incidentally, occur in most cases as a result of
insufficient swap space when running "vanilla" DECwindows. Ask your
customer to run the command "/etc/pstat -s" when the normal load
of windows & applications is running, and see if the value just
before "free" (given in kilobytes) is less than around 2000.
If it is, especially on a DS2100, then they're on the ragged edge.
The solution is to run more of the applications from some other system
or to obtain more swap space.
Hope all this was helpful, or at least entertaining.
John Hoffman
UWS V4.0 Project Leader
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