Slackware Current: WindowMaker/X11 woes with Steam and MPV
 

Hello, I've recently been having the most awful experience with WindowMaker and X11 on current, and curious if anyone else has been having these issues as well. I don't remember when it started, but I'm fairly certain it was related to when I updated Xorg not too long ago from the current repo.

Basically, what happens is opening a file with my media player (MPV) tends to cause WindowMaker to freak out and restart. Sometimes, it will even kill Xorg altogether. The same thing happens with Steam's VGUI bringing up windows half the time. I tend to find the freak out less destructive when I don't have compton running, WindowMaker just restarts at the worst.

At first, I thought it was related to nouveau drivers being buggy, so I got the latest stable nVidia drivers (352.63), but the same awful thing happens.

What's even stranger is, the original MPlayer (which MPV was forked from) plays just fine and causes no WM or X11 freak outs. Worst of all, no information related to the event seems to be printed out from Steam or MPV. I'm not sure if this is entirely related to the crash, but I found this in the Xorg logs under /var/log: http://pastebin.com/ZrB5DQtr

Also not sure if this is related to the above issues, but lately as well, I can't get anything to play in Steam but TF2. Every other game just crashes and takes Steam with it. Even when I quit TF2, Steam dies with it. This is incredibly frustrating.

I have not tried another WM or DE, nor do I desire to.

Some specs:

64-bit Kernel 4.1.13
Xorg 1.18
nVidia driver 352.63 on a GTX 770
WindowMaker 0.95.7

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Sounds like some sort of opengl issue. If I remember rightly mplayer defauts to 'xv' output, which may explain why it's not affected. BTW, there were a lot of opengl/egl related changes in mpv 0.12 and 0.13, I had to revert back to 0.11 as the more recent versions wouldn't work on my admittedly old hardware. There's a lot of activity in mpv git master at the moment related to opengl so I'll try again when 0.14 is released.

I've seen no instability using mpv 0.11 under dwm on nouveau in slackware current, though I don't use compton.

BTW, probably wise to rebuild compton and mpv if you haven't since the updates.

Thanks for the reply, I did rebuild mpv recently, but I decided to rebuild it again along with compton just be to sure. Sadly, the same issue persisted. I decided to take a look at the latest git, since it had a lot of changes as you mentioned. It too sufferers the same problem. Interestingly enough, doing "mpv --vo=xv" still causes WindowMaker to restart. I might grab the SlackBuild for WM off slackware's repo and recompile just to rule it out, but I'm not really convinced that's the source of the issue.

Edit:

Something else I forgot to mention, Mumble's overlay stopped working for me too, so probably not related to WM at all. Just wish I could figure out why all these GL based programs were suffering.

Could your video card be overheating or otherwise having hardware errors?

Anything notable in "dmesg" or "glxinfo"?

And while it doesn't sound like this is the problem, be aware that OpenGL 3, which most software these days use, is not backward compatible with OpenGL 2. Not all old hardware supports OpenGL 3.

Steam will run with Window Maker, I have it working just fine. I tend to run it on a separate work space. Window Maker will not be in control of the Steam window though. See: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/ste...ux/issues/1040

Steam will open mostly filling up the screen, but it will not maximize or minimize. You will be able to use big picture mode though. Games may or may not open in a window controlled by Window Maker though. I haven't tested on Fluxbox, Blackbox, FVWM, or TWM. I imagine the problem is worse with TWM, haha. The solution for me was to use Xfce when I am playing games.

Sounds like it could be related to the issues I reported in this thread:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-a-4175560157/

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one having issues. I found another thread that might be similar to the situation, but they said upgrading the nVidia driver fixed it for them: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...-x-4175560634/

It sounds like it might be a problem with newer Xorg after all, is there a way to downgrade back to 1.17?

I suppose my card could be having problems, but a lot of things seem to work well which is odd (for example, TF2 and Wine stuff plays fine). dmesg is sadly filled with a bunch of stupid stuff related to some problem I was having with xscreensaver, it's fixed now but I'll have to cause the Xorg crash and check dmesg next time I reboot. Here's my output of glxinfo: http://pastebin.com/z8CMnQGf

I should also update you guys with everything I've noticed that's affected:

Steam - Windows it creates tend to cause WM/X11 freak out. Every other game but TF2 seems to cause Steam to die, and quitting TF2 seems to take Steam with it.
MPV - Initial play of a video file causes freak out.
Mumble - Overlay library no longer works, no errors or anything about why.
XScreenSaver - Restarting the daemon in the GUI causes freak out.

I actually have a way to control Steam through WM, I simply did the following in the WMWindowAttributes file:

Not the prettiest solution, but at least you can control Steam's dumb VGUI. My actual problem however, seems to be a GL related problem in current, as Steam and several other programs are affected.

Unfortunately this problem was never solved for me. I simply decided to try out other window managers. Someday I may return to the awesome Window Maker.