Hi all,

In OS2008, I used the Debian Xephyr nested X-Server to display a second desktop on top of Maemo. This was somewhat useful for people who wished to have a secondary, more desktop-like environment without rebooting or shutting down Maemo.

Now with Maemo 5 and the new Matchbox WM, many desktop apps just don't display properly at all. Dialogs are the worst offenders; it is almost guaranteed that a desktop app's dialog will be useless in Maemo 5.

Xephyr is needed more than ever! But! It, too, is useless inside the current Maemo 5 window manager! The display inside Xephyr ( :1 ) doesn't receive any keyboard input events at all.

According to this (now infamous) Maemo qt patch, the Maemo 5 WM is "broken" because all apps must make an explicit XSetInputFocus() call.

I'm not sure, but I think qwerty12's patch to xev does the same thing.

So, I'm hoping someone could patch the Debian Xephyr package to do this for me. If this gives me a keyboard in Xephyr, then I'll commence begging the developer to push it into Fremantle Extras-Devel.

Thanks in advance. This community rocks.

...bump?

Don't make me lose my faith in the maemo.org community!

Bump?

Also, I think the default Ctrl+Shift keyboard combo to grab mouse and keyboard should be switched to something else on the N900... ?

But now I am losing hope...

No promises, but I'll take a "quick" crack at it. I don't have a n900 so I don't know how well it will work; but I can see if I can make it work in scratchbox.

Nathan

Do you have a link to the Xephyr you ran on your OS2008? I checked the repositories and didn't see it in either Chinook or Diablo. I'm not really sure "which" options I should use; as XServer appears to support a bazillion. ;-) I'll try "defaults" and see what happens; but if I can see what someone else did (that worked) I can probably port it faster.

Nathan

Nathan: Thank you for taking a look. I didn't port it, I used the Debian Xephyr from the chroot, and it worked fine in Diablo. But the "vanilla" Xephyr no longer works properly in Maemo 5.

My temporary solution, so that I can keep working on Easy Debian, is to use run LXDE in a vncserver on :1 and view it in Maemo vncviewer via "localhost:1". It isn't a great solution, but at least I have a keyboard in my secondary WM.

Ah, so you downloaded the arm?/armel? version of xephyr from the lenny debian repositories? Any specific version, arm or armel? Or did you get it from somewhere else?


I started working on it -- but I need to figure out a dependancy (x86dirproto) is required, but not sure yet what provides it.

Nathan

I tried to build it from the Xorg source tarball corresponding to the Xorg as shipped with the N900, but I still don't understand enough about autotools to get Xephyr built from it... (tried ./configure --enable-xephyr , which seems to... do nothing; after a full make still no Xephyr binary anywhere to be seen).

"Fixing" the wm hints seems to be easy, though.

I haven't had much luck either ... I haven't given up yet; but I am rather busy at the moment....

Nathan

Thanks all, the code that qobi posted in this thread seems to do the trick to fix the stock Xephyr app. I'll just use wmctrl and the hint-fixer to work around the problem for now.