I've just installed the latest AntiX on a Samsung laptop. It runs icewm as its desktop and the desktop menu is using geany as its default editor. When I click on it, a window flashes up and immediately disappears. There's nothing wrong with geany as such: you can run it from a terminal. Other menu options such as "Default browser" work normally.

The menu runs a bash script called desktop-defaults-run. I studied this and found that the operative command is: gksu -u `whoami` geany. When I typed this in a terminal, it crashed in the same way. Yet "gksu -u hazel geany" ran normally.

It gets odder. "gksu -u `whoami` geany &" works. And once I had run the command in this form, "gksu -u `whoami` geany" also worked. But when I ran it from the menu, it crashed again and no longer worked from a terminal either. In other words, the crashing behaviour can be switched on and off.

I can only assume that there is some kind of weird interaction between whoami, geany and bash's job control system.

is there any output of the script in terminal?

Can you post the script of "start geany" here?

wrt: "flashing", Any clipboard helpers installed?
Have you tried a new user profile and tested as the new user?

I didn't think of running the entire script from the terminal. I did that just now (desktop-defaults-run -te) and it worked. It output the word "Geany" and then launched the application successfully. And then I triggered it from the menu and that worked too! Curiouser and curiouser.

So I logged out, logged in again and then tried from the menu. Still works. So now I have an unreproducible bug.

Keruskerfuerst, I don't know what you mean by "start geany". I've never heard of a "start" command. I certainly don't have one.

If you want the actual script that the menu runs, here it is.

Just out of interest: when a shell script is run from a menu, where do standard input, output and error go?

Attached Files

desktop-defaults-run.txt (2.8 KB, 16 views)