Fullscreen Flash with WindowMaker.
 

Guys, when I use firefox and play a flash video in fullscreen mode on sites such as youtube, instead of getting a fullscreen window, I get a 2 inch square clipping.

I have this problem with WindowMaker, TWM and FVWM window managers. The more modern WMs, Fluxbox, kwin, xfce all work fine and it appears to be something specific to these older window managers.

I'm running Slack 12.1 now (though the same happened in 12.0) with flash 9.0.124 and stock 12.1 firefox and WindowMaker. The problem persists regardless of which X driver I use, nv, nvidia, or svga,

Has anyone else had this issue with flash/Windowmaker and found a workaround? I really like WindowMaker, and I'd hate to have to change to a new WM, but as WindowMaker has long since seen any development activity, I fear its going to fall behind the times.

Any advice gratefully received. Thanks.

I'm using Fvwm 2.5.26 and can't reproduce your problem. Everything (fullscreen video window with dual monitor) works fine here.

I don't normally use windowmaker but just for fun I tried it out just now and had the same issue:

http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g2...l/wmscreen.jpg

In Xfce the same vid plays fullscreen quite nicely.

Can't offer a solution but at least the issue has been reproduced.

Dig

Yep, that's exactly what I get Dig. In fvwm I get the same thing (except that the area that pops up does get window decorations, unlike with WindowMaker).

It's interesting to see that msantinho doesn't have this issue in fvwm. I'm wondering if there's a xorg.conf option that may be relevant?

BTW, I've tried turning off hardware acceleration within the flashplayer itself and that had no effect at all.

I've tried this on my box with wmaker and don't get that -but do you mean putting the browser in View --> Full Screen? Or is there some other setting for the full screen flash?

Nope, I mean clicking the little square in the bottom right corner of the flash player to go fullscreen. If you look at the screeny Dig posted you'll see it.

Now, I've been playing around a little more and found some new stuff....

It seems that if I try and fullscreen it from a basic X environment with no window manager running I get this same little square in the top left hand corner. I've tried this both with my native X ('nv' driver) and with Xnest running ontop of my normal X.

Now, the really weird thing is I've just fired Ubuntu up and installed Window Maker on that to test things. If I run basic X with no window manager on Ubuntu I get exactly the same as the tests I did above, i.e. little box in the top left corner of the screen that shows a clipped portion of the video. However, if I install the debian Wmaker from the ubuntu repos, fullscreen flash works just fine.

The question now I guess, is have debian buggered about with Wmaker to make it work, or is it something enviromental, such as a lib version difference.

I found the ubuntu patch for wmaker and it does have a section that deals with fullscreen that may be the key to the problem. Since I use wmaker myself and maintain a build which already uses several patches, I'll work on integrating this one and see if that fixes the problem.
On my box, clicking the fullscreen button on the youtube player just barely increases the size of the player.

Thanks Gnashley, please let me know if you get it working. I've not done any coding at the Xlib level so attempting this myself is a little daunting. I really need to get myself a good book on the subject.

Just to let you know that there's no problem here with WindowMaker (Screenshot) on my Slackware 12.1 box with an ATI Radeon 9200 SE (no proprietary drivers).

While looking around today for any updates to wmaker, I came across some good news! A fellow has been in contact with the original author and has unoffcically taken over development of wmaker. I'm in the process of catching up with the last official updates to cvs, plus a couple of patches that he and other contribs have sent in. I'll also be looking at the applicability of some of the debian changes (which usually provide valuable fixes for other arches, gcc4 and 64bit among other bug-fixes). And then I'll make sure the extra-feature patches that I use can still be applied cleanly and don't clash with any new code.

Gilbert,

The Window Maker web page is down. I wonder if that's a symptom of Window Maker's overall status, or just a coincidence.

Do you have any more information on who is maintaining WM and what happened to the previous maintainer?

Thanks,

-Drew

The guys name is Carlos R. Mafra. Alfredo Kojima, the original author of Window Maker, provided him with the complete wmaker archives and documentation. Mafra has set up a git repository with all the sources here:

http://repo.or.cz/w/wmaker-crm.git

He seems to be receiving and processing some patches from others. I think he is a Mandriva user as his patches are being used by them.

I also found an http/ftp area where the files are located:
http://www.ift.unesp.br/users/crmafra/

I've already written to him(no answer yet). I hope that he is interested enough to keep the project alive and address bugs that come up -even though they are few and far between. I'll probably submit some stuff that I have collected -I have a whole bunch of DockApps which I have modernized for the latest version of wmaker and also quite a few patches which add features which have been around for man years.

The other guy who has always taken a lot of interest in wmaker is Alexey Voinov who is the author of the wdm display manager. He is a contributor to ALT Linux and maintains the wmaker package for the ALT (and sisyphus) distros. Most of the patches I have were taken from his pages -though they were mostly contributed by others. They have been around for a long time, but never incorportaed into the main code -Alfredo preferred to keep most new features as an option.
Alexey's personal site is here: http://voins.program.ru/wdm/
but the wmaker patches were found elsewhere.

Window Maker is one of my pet projects -I have hardly used anything else for years now. I also use the wdm display manager and have created a pretty nice configuration system for wdm which is both easy and flexible.

Great information, Gilbert. Thanks!

I use WM, so I've got an interest there, but I'm also thinking of writing an article about it. :D

Regards,

-Drew

Maybe I'll write you some rough notes about how to run wmaker a little differently - I run it with no Dock, no Clip and no mini-windows. DockApps can still be run though, but there are no duplicate icons on the desktop. I use ROX-Filer or some other app to manage desktop icons and run a separate panel to handle minimized windows.
Here's an interesting (and funny) screenshot which shows how my desktop looks:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/..._screams-1.png

I have various wmaker goodies here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...s/WindowMaker/
and about 60 DockApps here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...load/DockApps/

Gilbert,

That's funny, I like the dock, clip, and mini windows. :D

Still, your help was valuable in the past when I was setting up WM the first time. I hope you won't mind if I tap your experience again.

Regards,

-Drew

Same here. I really like the dock and its big chunky icon blocks. The mini windows I don't care for, but as I never minimise and use 'hide' instead its not so much of a problem. The clip I haven't made my mind up about yet, but its usualy behind one of my windows, so I seldom see it.

I do hope WMaker manages to keep going. I suppose I could make a WindowMaker themed fluxbox if I really had to, but it wouldn't be quite as good as the real thing.

Gilbert,

The resolution.sh script you gave me a while back doesn't work now that I've upgraded to Slackware 12.1. :(

For reference, here's your post from a while back.

I get the heading in the menu, but no items under it.

Any suggestions?

EDIT and a quick note: Your previous suggestion of adding the xrandr command to the autostart script works just fine.

Thanks,

-Drew

Finally got around to looking at the probelm with resolution.sh. Version 1.2 of xrandr prints output with a different format from earlier versions.

This should work for you:

GazL, sorry to keep you still waiting, I've been preetty sick, but I am working on getting all the patches working cleanly after contacting Carlos Mafra. I'll gladly upload a package with the changes when ready -but it would be good to know -Which version of Slackware are you running?

That's no problem gnashley, and thank you for helping. You're doing far more than I expected anyone to do, so feel free to take as long as you like, it was just an annoyance, its in no way urgent.

Oh, and I'm running 12.1 now.

Was Carlos receptive to your bug reports/patches?

Gilbert,

I hope you're feeling better soon.

Thanks for the updated script. I figured the problem was with the updated version of xrandr, but I hadn't figured out how to address it.

I'm also curious if you've gotten any response on the state of Window Maker.

I'm trying to build the latest WMDrawer (using src2pkg, naturally :) ), but I need to track down the libraries it depends on.

Regards,

-Drew

Carlos Mafra was very nice and was interested in the patches I have for wmaker. He mostly seems interested in bugfixes and not adding 'bloaty' new features or making fundamental changes to wmaker. I may try contacting Alfredp Kojima myself to find out what intentions he has for the future. The cvs archive that Carlos Mafra got from him has not been used by other distros, as far as I can see. The windowmaker website has been so undependable for so long. But some of the changes are 'upstreamed' from debian patches.

Now, about wmdrawer -I just checked the deps on the copy I have. You'l need to install the old gdk-pixbuf package which was removed from the Slackware distro since 12.0. No big deal -you should be able to use the package from 11.0 without problems. That package was a commonly-used companion to GTK-1.2 -I have hundreds of packages on my site which use gdk-pixbuf. It won't interfere with any other installed libs (newer pixbuf features are integral part of GTK-2).

If only for kicks, you both should try out the wmaker desktop sound packages.
You just need the SoundServerpackage from here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...dServer-0.4.0/

And maybe, the SoundPrefs package from here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...ndPrefs-1.1.1/

The above will give you desktop sounds for certain events like when the desktop starts up, atarting applications, etc. My favorite is when you kill the sound server itself by clicking the small 'x' on the DockApp Icon...
I'm quite proud of getting that to compile and work as it seems nobody has had that working since 5-6 years ago -it took quite a lot of hacking/patching of the sources to get it working -there used to be another sound system which used libwmfun which is now completely obsolete.

To sum, does that mean that the flash fullscreen in WM bug can't be fixed as yet? I get the same symptom here, using stock Slackware 12.1 and WM.

While I was waiting on any news from gnashley, I decided I'd have a go at adding parts of the debian patchset (i.e. just the ones that fixed stuff, rather than all the debian environmental patches they do) to the slackware 12.1 slackbuild for windowmaker. To my surprise, I found that even before changing anything, the Slackware 12.1 slackbuild is broken.

What I get is this;
Now, interestingly the debian patchset also contains some stuff to fix inline assembly in this module for gcc 4 compatibility. However, the stuff I've downloaded from debian seems to be a patch for a debian patch, so I'm not sure I can directly apply it to the stock sources. I'm going to have to do a little more digging on this as I'm not really familiar with debian and their overly complicated ways.

Anyway, ignoring the debian patches for a moment. Clearly the slackbuild is broken, so the windowmaker packages obviously wasn't built from this on 12.1. To my further surprise, I found that the actual datestamp on the 12.1 package for Windowmaker is 2005! It's clear that the official slackware Windowmaker package hasn't been maintained/rebuilt in quite a while.


This was all a bit of a eye opener to me, as I was under the impression that Pat rebuilt all the packages for each release even if there were no changes to the actual application itself. I'd have thought there must be some merit in recompiling it all with the compiler, development tools and header files that the release actually ships with? Anyway, it appears that this was an assumption on my part and that's not what actually happens.

Building on this point, then, I guess it's possible to download the latest stuff from the repository links in Gilbert's post (above, page 1) and then rebuild Window Maker in 12.1. It's probably worth giving that a try first, and then seeing if any patches are needed.

Regards,

-Drew

WooT!!! I've got it running. And fullscreen works!

Pat's slackbuild seems to have an 'exit 0' slapped in the middle of it too so that didn't help either.

For some reason when I tried to run ./configure it threw up error messages about aclocal. It seemed to insist on Version 1.4 and slackware 12.1 has V1.9. I just added a run of aclocal and autoconf to the slackbuild and that seems to allow it to configure, though it throws up some warning messages about unquoted values and the makefiles ignoring -datarootdir. Which may or may not be a problem

All this autoconf stuff is new to me and there appears to be a hell of a lot of reading to learn it properly, so I sort of winged it this afternoon just to get something working. If I've done something wrong here, please let me know. I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to copy acinclude.m4 across from /usr/share/libtool/libltdl/acinclude.m4 or do anything to any of the other files or not.

Anyway, as you said drew, it might be worth getting the latest version from the repository, but first I'll have to learn git to do that. Also I'm not sure how many of the debian patches would have been included in that repos.

I'm going to check it out now and see whether everything is working ok. If anyone wants my modifications to the slackbuild I'll be happy to put it up somewhere for people to grab. I just want to check that its not broken anything, or doing anything else stupid first.

I'm still hoping gnashley will come up with something as I get the feeling he knows what he's doing slightly more than I do. :)

Sorry to keep you all waiting, I've still been working on this a little at a time. But, I have uploaded what I have going so far.

First this:"I was under the impression that Pat rebuilt all the packages for each release" -this is a very common misconception -there have been many cases where you could not do a complete re-compile of a Slackware release or current. Pat only rebuilds packages when necessary.

I have uploaded a nice package, sources and patches here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...aker-20060427/

The *.tgz package includes quite a few patches -you can see the *.src2pkg build script for the exact list of which ones.
In the directory there is also a tarball of the last official wmaker CVS revision which includes both the fullscreen and gcc4 fixes. If you want to build your owbn package without extar patches, just use that tarball and build with src2pkg or with an adjusted SlackBuild script.

However, I think you'll find the patched version works without problems and includes some nice extra features -the main feature that I have always added is the 'adialog' üatch which adds a history list to thr 'Run Program'
dialog. I have also added in the recent additional patches which Carlos Mafra is using -one of them is pretty useful for cutting down on the CPU cycle used by wmaker.

I am still working on integrating some other patches which add features or fix minor inconsistencies in wmaker, so you may wish to check my wmaker-cvs area from time to time. Some of the fixes and added features have been around for many years and just never made into the official release(the fullscreen patch from debian was originally for wmaker0.60.0)

My latest build wmaker-20060427-i486-7.tgz includes a couple of helper scripts I whipped up last week for generating menu items on-the-fly. You can also just grab them from the patches directory if you are building your own. They should be placed in /usr/bin

1. 'wm-gen-desktop-menus' builds a directory/subdirectory structure in your ~/GNUstep directory which contains copies of all the *.desktop files on your system. Running the command once will create the directories and copies of the files. If you want to leave out certain applications from the menus you can delete whichever *.desktop files you dont want. You can also edit them if needed to change the commands executed. You can re-run this command anytime to update the database -like after installing new software.

2. 'wm-gen-desktop-menu' After building the desktop file database with the above command, you can use this command to show the menu items in the wmaker desktop menu. This command should be inserted into your menu as a 'Generated Submenu' item.

Open the above file with a text editor and you'll find more complete notes on how to use them.

If you are using my package with the patched version, you'll probably want to enable the Run-box history function -this is the only thing I ever really.really missed in wmaker. To enable it, run the WPrefs application(Menut item: Appearance --> Preferences Application) and choose the icon for Applications Menu Definition(6th from right). This opens your wmaker desktop menu in editable mode. choose the item called 'Run...'. In the main window of the WPrefs application yopu'll see this in the Command Box:
%a(Run,Type command to run:)
Simply change the small 'a' to a Capital 'A' to enable the history function. Choose 'Save' and then 'Close' the WPrefs application. Then run a couple of your favorite apps using the Run-box. Afterwards, you can use the cursor arrows to
scroll through the history list of apps which have been run.

Hope these things help you all to enjoy wmaker even more -I have no plans of changing window manager, so you can count on me to keep things pretty up-to-date. I also use the WDM display manager (which uses wmaker's WINGs libs) for a nicely integrated look and feel. I have also done extensive mods to the startup scripts which wdm uses to cerate a very versatile and spiffy desktop startup. So, you may wish to have a go at that as well. You can browse the WDM materials here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/.../wdm/wdm-1.28/

Note that you need to be using my patched version of wmaker for wdm to compile or run. This is because since wmaker-0.91.0, the Makefiles were changes so that the WINGs libraries are compiled statically. One of the patches I use fixes them so that (once again) WINGs gets compiled as a shared library. You can find the individual patch with the others -it is written by Alexy Voinov, the author of WDM and maintainer of several of the patches I use.

All the patches, modified conf files and extra scripts I use are included in the wmaker-patches.tar.bz2 archive -there are also extra patches which are not currently included in the build. If you want to rebuild the whole thing yourself you can just download the src2pkg build script, the wmaker-cvs-20060427.tar.bz2 tarball and the wm-patches.tar.bz2 tarball. If you want to build using a SlackBuild, you can still use the src2pkg build script as a reference for the essentials.

Long Live Window Maker!!

D'oh!... I should have sat on my hands a little longer. ;)
Ah well, it was a good learning experience.

Thanks gnashley. You all well again now, I hope?

I'll try out your supa-dupa packages in a mo. I've been thinking of trying WDM out for a while too so I'll have to give that a go aswell.

Hmm. Now all I needs a nice nextish GTK theme to go with all this. :)

Gilbert,

This is great stuff! I'll be giving it a try, but it's going to take me a while to figure out what you've done because I have to figure out how things are in the default installation first. :-D

By the way, my editor wasn't too keen on an article on Window Maker right now because its official maintainer isn't doing anything new. That's no reflection on Window Maker or Linux.com, just a reflection on what makes news. So, my interest in Window Maker at this point is as a user.

I was able to get a hold of Carlos, and I'm planning on dropping Alfredo a quick note, so maybe there's still a story there.

A quick question on WMDrawer and other apps that rely on the gdk-pixbuf package: is is possible to compile them to use the latest GDK library? I realize it's not a big deal to install the old library, but it would be neat if the dockapps would use the latest ones.

Thanks,

-Drew

Drew, you probably should just use the old gdk-pixbuf libs since Slackware still includes GTK-1.2. The alternative is to try using gtk1-compat:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...1-compat-0.10/

But, I would only try that if you remove GTK-1.2 from your installation as it will overwrite files from GTK-1.2. Really the gsk-pixbuff-0.22.0 is only 3260K uncompressed. Pat just removed it because no programs included in Slackware are using it anymore. Having it installed opens up the compatibility with a few hundred programs!

Please e-mail me the e-mail address of Alfredo. I haven't heard more from Carlos (or if he wrote me it didn't get through my spam radar).

Gilbert,

Thanks for the advice. I'll install it and get some of the dockapps I like working again.

I'll send you an e-mail when I get home with Alfredo's info.

Thanks again,

-Drew

GazL, could you please post your slackbuild, and/or tell us step-by-step what you did to get it working fullscreen?

I tried compiling the stock WM 0.92.0 source against 12.1, but it failed with an error about GEN_REGISTER or something. http://translate.google.ca/translate...%3Den%26sa%3DG This patch fixed that. However, full screen still does not work :-(

lopid, if you look about 5 posts back gnashley put up the latest sources that he got from Carlos' source repository. Apparently those include the fullscreen and gcc4 patches already, so if you're happy to run those then it should be fairly easy to build. Gnashley also put up a heavily modified package that also includes some other patches he likes in the same place along with the sources he used to create it.


Hope that helps.



edit: removed link to my downloads as they're no longer necessary.

If you don't want extra features, you can just use the plain wmaker tarball:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...060427.tar.bz2

This tarball is a snapshot of the last official update to wmaker cvs and already includes the fullscreen and gcc4 patches which were from the debian source distribution. No need to patch or anything.

Yep, I suggested he take a look at your post for that reason.

The reason I added my stuff was in case he really wanted to stick with the 0.92 source to keep as true to Slackware shipped as possible, rather than go with the cvs sources. There were 6 patches I took from debian. I've not had time to look at the cvs source to see how many of those 6 got in there or what else has changed since 0.92, or whether Pat's slackware specific patches for 0.92 still apply cleanly to them. I suspect they will as I don't imagine much has changed since 0.92, but as I wasn't certain I thought it wouldn't hurt to give him the extra option.

I'm planning to take a look at the CVS source and some of the other patches soon for my own use. Just haven't got around to it.

edit:

Forgot to ask.... did you hear anything back from Alfredo?

If I remember rightly, only some of the debian changes are included in the cvs changes, but the fullscreen and gcc4 patches are definitely in there. Not all the debian stuff is included though, but they are only minor changes anyway, mostly dealing with debian specific stuff or for building on other arches. The changes in the cvs tarball are noted in the ChangeLog so it's pretty easy to tell which changes go with which patches.

I haven't tried to get ahold of Alfredo yet.

Thanks. I've tried the CVS snapshot. Can you confirm it works with the BBC's iplayer, because that doesn't go full screen for me? :-/

Just tried. iplayer fullscreen is fine on my box.

Ah, I see iplayer full screen works in Firefox with the latest flash. I was using the last-but-one flash because the latest flash doesn't work in Opera fullstop :/

I have just noticed that Flash player beta 10 full screen works in both Firefox 2.0.0.14 and Opera 9.50 with the stock Windowmaker from Slackware - no need to recompile!

That's interesting lopid. Thanks for that. I'll still stick with the patched version though from now on. Even if flash no longer hits the problem, I'm sure there are other programs out there that will have a similar issue. I know Skype's video call window didn't work in fullscreen when I tried it with windowmaker, but I've not tried it on the patched one yet. Besides, as the stock slackware package hasn't been rebuilt since 2005, its probably a good idea to have it compiled and linked against the newer libs.

Anyway, its good to know the new version of flash works a little better.