Window manager / misbehavior in Linux

I have just ditched the last of my Sun boxes
and now use Linux machines as my graphics heads.
The window behavior (Sawfish / GNOME) is erratic
and awkward. Specifically, the dialog windows that
pop "up" for property list editing, instance place,
modal commands in general are prone to "pop under"
instead. Then I have to rotate-to-bottom all of the
windows until I find the little bugger. The main
window also seems to raise over the dialog windows
with every select (for example, when I have an open
property-edit window and am serially single-selecting
objects the property edit window keeps going back
under the schematic / layout window whether or not
raise-on-focus is enabled in the Sawfish settings).

So a couple of questions are

1) Is GNOME and/or Sawfish the "right" Linux window
manager? Is there one that Cadence prefers or developed
to?

2) Is there a set of X-window-manager settings that
act more like the Sun-normal behavior with particular
regard to popups / dialogs? Either Cadence-recommended
or personally discovered?

 

What distribution & version are you running?

I'm using Redhat enterprise WS 3.0 and have had success
running cadence with Gnome/Metacity, KDE and Icewm. I believe
we have also tried (to a limited extent) MWM and blackbox.

I've run cadence on Redhat 7.2 and 8.0 and don't recall any
problems like you describe. We did see some funky behavior
in the waveform viewer, perhaps linked to a crappy video
driver.

Tim

 

I'm pretty sure this is controllable via window manager settings that are,
unfortunately, obscure and hard to find. I found it before when some of our
engineers were first working with Linux -- it has something to do with
settings like "allow primary windows on top" or "force transient windows to
top" or something like that. Unfortunately, I can't find my notes (this was
2 years ago or more), so I can't tell you exactly what the setting was. I do
remember it took me about 20 minutes to figure it out.

-Pete Zakel
()

Glubbule (glub' yule) n. The eerie announcement, appearance, and
ascension of the bubble in a water cooler.

 

I'm finishing transitioning from Solaris/CDE to
RHEL3/KDE3, (with IC5033) and have similar *very*
annoying problems in that environment.

This is all with focus-follows-mouse (doesn't matter
if it's sloppy or strict) and click-to-raise.

1) In CDE, click-to-raise means CLICK ON THE
TITLEBAR/FRAME, PERIOD. You can type in
lowered-but-active window and click on buttons
and menus, and it does not raise. This is
correct behavior.

2) In KDE, click-to-raise means CLICK ANYWHERE IN
THE DAMN WINDOW. This is wrong and bad behavior.
Very nasty when you're reading cellnames or
property values off the top window and trying
to open a new cell in a partially-buried library
browser, or paste values in a partially buried
property window. Gag.

An additional related Linux/Virtuoso annoyance is warning
popups; these normally warp the mouse to themselves (and
then warp the mouse back when OK'ed or canceled. On CDE,
this works great. On KDE, the mouse *looks* warped, but
when you click, the click lands on the original location,
because of 2) the popup gets buried. Yuck. I've trained
myself to do a little shake&bake with the mouse on these
warning popups; this makes the mouse remember where it
really is, I drag the mouse back over to the popup, *then*
dismiss it. I run into this on the Assura "Overwrite
Existing Data?" popup 10 times a day, and it drives me nuts.

I've looked hard and found no configuration change for KDE;
I was going to try Gnome (even though I dislike it) for
a while to see if I had more luck there, but I guess I
needn't bother now!

-Jay-

 

Hi,
Check out fvwm95.
http://fvwm95.sourceforge.net/

Regards,
Suresh

 

Or just the plain fvwm ... it works great.
All this fancy overload of kde/gnome is not
needed for EDA work ...

cheers
Ralf

 

fvwm and fvwm95 do not have the "click-to-raise-
anywhere-in-the-window" bug, so that's nice.

However, they both exhibit the "false-mouse-warp" bug,
just the same as KDE.

RHEL3, ic5033, fvwm95-2.0.43e, fvwm-2.2.3.

Mind you, I don't know whether the warping problem is a
Cadence bug, an XFree86 bug, a window manager bug,
or ???. Guess I should get off my ass and submit
a service request to Cadence.

-Jay-

 

I don't know what you mean with "false-mouse-warp", but
I have just good experience using fvwm and cadence DFII Tools ...
And keep in mind, that it is possible to configure fvwm a lot,
maybe your .fvwmrc is "wrong" at this place ...

Cheers
Ralf

 

What do you mean by "false-mouse-warp"? Note that DFII has an option to warp
the cursor. That can be turned off by adding the line:

hiGetCIWindow()->warpPointer = nil

to your .cdsinit file. Personally, I think warping the cursor is evil...

-Pete Zakel
()

"The marvels of today's modern technology include the development of a
soda can, when discarded will last forever...and a $7,000 car which
when properly cared for will rust out in two or three years."

 

I'd recommend the olvwm. Works great with cadence and doesn't has this
fvwm95 overhead. There are still some people used to it (it is the old
"Sun" window manager). Get the lib olgx and olvwm (Still available)
It runs fine fine on RH 7.2, 8.0 and RHEL 3.0 (rpms available)
Some colleagues had the kde, but now some are going for the olvwm. It
runs stable forever without slowing down or grabbing memory. If one
needs just a window-manager, this is still one of the best.
Regards, Harald

 

As I said earlier in the thread:

-Jay-

 

As I said earlier...

This happens with icfb/assura on every Linux/window manager
combination I've tried.

evil...

Properly done, it saves me mouse movement, and that's pretty
much always a good thing (for me).

-Jay-

 

Thanks, I must have missed it the first time.

I've seen that problem before, but since I normally don't work on Linux I
don't know how prevalent it is (and since I turn off mouse warping whenever
I can, I'm unlikely to see it).

-Pete Zakel
()

"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm doing door-to-door collecting for
static cling."

 

Jay,

Sorry to jump into the thread so late, I haven't checked the newsgroup for a
little while.

I'm using KDE3.3.0, and the behaviour you are looking for does exist. The KDE
control centre is almost certainly different on the version you're using (it's
different every time I see it, especially on different distros), but I'll try
to explain how to set this up:

Desktop/Window Behaviour/Focus

This is the tab which sets up the focus policy, such as focus-follows-mouse.
There *is* an option here called "click raise active window", but this is NOT
what you are looking for, since this means that a click anywhere will raise the
window. Make sure that's unchecked.

Desktop/Window Behaviour/Actions

This defines what happens when you click on a window (either the titlebar and
frame, or the window contents). To have it behave as you describe, make sure
that in the "Titlebar & Frame" groupbox, the left button in active window
binding is set to "Raise". Also make sure that, in the "Inactive inner window"
groupbox, the left button binding is set to "Activate and Pass Click".

Hopefully, if these options exist in the version of KDE you're using, this
should give you the behaviour you're looking for...

Regards,
Graeme.