[Xastir] Cigar problem

[Tony Hunt]

Some more on the Cigar problem. Ive listed my findings below. After reading
other recent postings on this one one can see some of the relavant issues.
Particularly the presence of the restricted drivers for video.

The problem in short is the appearance of a small cigar shaped object in
place only some of the proper menus when trying to acess certain menus.The
Interfaces menu is an example of this and is probably the most annoying one.
The cigar object is completely useless and all you can do is close it.

Here is my setup. Athlon 1800XP CPU with 1.2 Gigs of ram running Ubuntu 7.10
with a Nvidia FX5500 video card with 256Megs of ram on board. Xastir is
v1.93 LSB Binary version.

Here are the results of the different situations/configurations.

Gnome desktop with restricted drivers- You get the Cigar object in place of
the selected menu.
Gnome desktop with restricted drivers disabled- All works fine.
KDE desktop with or without restricted drivers- All works fine.
XFCE desktop with or without restricted drivers- All works fine.

So the problem relates to restricted video drivers under Gnome only. To me
this is a minor hassle because Gnome is just not my favorite desktop. Is it
the restricted drivers or is it Gnome or is it Xastir that is at fault here
? It is certainly curious that xastir can get most of the other Menus to
work correctly. Whats so special and different about the interfaces menu for
example ? Is this problem unique to Ubuntu ?

Some work arounds involve configuring Xastir with the restricted drivers
disabled (which requires a reboot every time) or just editing the
xastir.conf file manually. Perhaps if you dont want to install KDE and
configure it there then think about installing the Xfce desktop which is
relatively light weight even compared to Gnome and configure Xastir from
there.

Here are some relavant URLs that I found handy.
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/kde installing KDE
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/xubuntu installing Xfce

Once xastir is configured as you want it you can by and large use it with no
real issues under Gnome with the restricted video driver. Access to most of
the menus works fine for me.

Although Ive focused on the Interfaces menu there may be other menus
affected also. When I disabled the restricted video driver and eventually
reenabled , it went off and downloaded the drivers again off the Internet.
Presumably the latest version. Briefly after this it all seemed to work fine
under Gnome but has since resumed with the Cigars.

Tony Hunt VK5AH