[Xastir] Xastir crashing lxde desktop

[Tom Russo]

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 11:11:53AM -0800, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <kg7gcf at gmail.com> flavor, containing:
> Built xastir from the git hub source yesterday and every thing went smooth
> as glass, nice job devs!  All features including gdal indicated they were
> enabled.
> 
> I am running a pi3 with a udrcII, compass OS, and direwolf.  When I launch
> Xastir, the LXDE desktop environment crashes, and I am left in an OpenBox
> window manager session.
> 
> I am looking for any input that might help me determine what the heck is
> going on.  Is there something new in xastir that might account for this.
> It appears to be easily replicated by starting up xastir.

Can't help you with what might be wrong, but there shouldn't be anything
new in Xastir for the last few years that could account for this.  Almost
all of the work that has gone into Xastir for the last two public releases
has been unrelated to its GUI (either in scripting, network handling, or
internal decoding of APRS data).

Any messages in /var/log/syslog or /var/log/messages that might be
relevant?

Are you viewing your desktop over VNC, or on a screen attached directly to
the Pi3?  I think we saw some commentary recently about there being aa bug
in VNC where there were problems if VNC and SSH were both enabled on the
machine, but that was mostly something that showed up as panels going away on
the desktop.

If that's not the issue, if it were me I'd start by pulling everything off the 
Pi and just seeing if Xastir, not talking to any interfaces and not having any 
external hardware on the Pi, will still crash the desktop.

Other than that, I don't know what to guess at.

I've only used Raspbian on my pis (they're all running Stretch right now),
and only old-school TNCs with them (an OpenTracker 2 for one igate, an ancient
MFJ TNC for another igate, and an even older OpenTracker SMB running KISS 
firmware built into an HT's battery pack for playing around).  I've no 
experience with the UDRCII and direwolf.

I have run Xastir on my headless Pi B+, but not through the LXDE desktop --- I 
just used ssh -Y to the machine from my desktop machine and popped the window
back up on my desktop's X server.  It ran fine for hours, albeit with a 
little struggle on that poor overworked B+ (which is also running javAPRSSrvr, 
something of a resource pig).

I noticed some UI hangs, notably the little "data in/data out" arrows getting
stuck "on" on some interfaces when no data was flowing, and the "Show Incoming 
Data" window stopped updating even though axlisten showed that
data was coming in over the TNC all the time.  I'm thinking that was just the 
poor little Pi B+ not having enough "oomph" to handle everything I was asking 
of it.  It still updated the map and received packets as normal, even with that 
hiccupping.  The program didn't crash, but I have no idea what would have 
happened if I had tried to run LXDE on top of all that.

I did briefly play with Xastir on a Pi Zero W with the LXDE desktop displaying 
on a little 7" HDMI monitor just a few weeks ago with a USB-connected TNC.  
It, too, ran fine, and I saw no evidence of crashes.  That was just a toy 
setup though, and I didn't keep it running for very long, as what I was 
actually doing was rebuilding an SD card for one of my IGates, and using the 
Pi Zero temporarily to configure the new card --- and while I was at it I used 
Xastir to test out the AX25 networking set-up.

This is all a long-winded way of saying "I dunno why you're having this 
problem."  Sorry.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY
Tijeras, NM  

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