[conspire] Dapper & Easyubuntu

[Mark S Bilk]

On Sun, Dec 03, 2006 at 11:12:25PM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
>Quoting Daniel Gimpelevich (daniel at gimpelevich.san-francisco.ca.us):
>
>> I was referring to the fact that the xterm would immediately start filling
>> up with reams of never-ending garbage.
>
>Aha.  ;->
>
>If I'm going to start potentially talky applications that way, I'd
>normally do it from the xterm designated for talky applications to
>mutter in -- or, y'know, throw stderr somewhere else.

I started a GUI application, the newsreader Pan, in the background 
in an xterm (konsole), and had it halt after running a while -- 
its window stopped updating -- until I brought it to the foreground 
in the xterm, whereupon it printed out hundreds of error messages 
about bad article headers and resumed operating.

So I thought an app in the background couldn't write to its console,
but I just tried it (with a script that increments a number and 
prints it once a second), and found I could have any number of apps 
running in the background, all printing to the console.

So I wonder what was stopping Pan?

Also, on the topic of manually starting GUI programs, my old version
of Gimp sent some signal to the KDE kicker program (the thing that 
makes the menu of desktops, windows, etc., usually at the bottom 
of the screen), which killed it (Gimp kept on running).  I didn't 
want to kill and restart KDE, because I had lots of programs running
in lots of desktops.  So I started another konsole and ran kicker 
in it (in the foreground) and it came up and KDE has been fine 
ever since (about 3 days ago).

I routinely start up all sorts of GUI programs in xterms -- xmms,
ethereal, yast (the SuSE admin program), realplay(er), audacity, 
etc., and they all work fine.  And when you want to kill them, 
instead of searching through their menus, just go to the xterm 
and ctrl-C.  With some programs, e.g., audacity, it's even better
than starting them from a menu, because the program uses the 
xterm's current working directory as its default directory for 
finding files, so if you go to the directory you want in the 
xterm before starting the app, you don't have to browse to the
right directory in the app each time.