two Chromebooks, one won't display old x11 apps properly

latticeguy · 10-14-2023, 03:35 PM

Hi,
I have two fairly recent Chromebooks both running crostini. Both are still in auto update stage. Almost everything works great on my HP a couple years old. The other is an Asus with a touchscreen. Both seem quite the same in ChromeOS. The problem is that the touchscreen model messes up widget fonts on many older x11 apps, including gv, xman, xgc. I tried disabling the touchscreen with flags, but that didn't change the issue. I prefer the simplicity of gv for postscript display, although evince and okular do work OK. But it is annoying since the Asus is so compact and puzzling since both machines seem quite identical in all other ways. Any thoughts?
Mike

fatmac · 10-15-2023, 08:33 AM

I expect that your 2 machines use different graphics sub systems, which would explain the different characteristics.

goumba · 10-18-2023, 05:25 PM

Could you give more detail on "messes up fonts"?

Touchscreen has nothing to do with it, so no need to disable it.

Are they both running the same version of ChromeOS? (Settings/About)

Auto updates are for ChromeOS itself and will do nothing for the crostini containers. Those you have to maintain yourself. Is the problematic container all up to date?

IIRC ChromeOS itself is Wayland based, so XWayland is used for those older X applications. Is one using a newer version of XWayland?

latticeguy · 10-18-2023, 07:21 PM

With gv, the main display on the asus is fine, but all the surrounding x widgets are totally scrambled, most letters are random blots. In presentation mode it is usable, although the
page widget is unreadable. Both machines are up to date as far as apt and google know.

Somallier is version 0.20 on each. Apt is version 2.2.4 (amd64) on the HP and
2.2.4 (arm64) on the asus; so there is a slight difference here.
On the chromebook side both machines behave identically.
Emacs works fine on both, but it doesn't use x widgets.
Xdvi is a disaster on the asus.

I can live fine with the older chromebook
and it is not to hard avoid the bad apps on the asus.
But this is all very perplexing and would like to understand what is happening.
What else should I check?