Dropline Gnome weirdness. No right-click menu, no desktop icons, nothing

[MDesigner]

At home, Dropline works perfectly. At work, on a machine that I believe is 400MHz, 64MB RAM, it doesn't work properly. When I startx, I get a blank desktop, no icons like I do at home. When I try to run Mozilla, it never even comes up. When I right click on the desktop, no menu comes up.

I have like 500MB of swap, so RAM shouldn't be a problem, right? Any ideas what might be causing this?

Update:
Checked .xsession-errors.. it's riddled with these:

*** attempt to put segment in horiz list twice

When I logged in this time, the desktop icons showed for a second.. then right as they vanished, I saw that error message (I was tail -f'ing the xsession error log)

I did a Google search for this & didn't see much.. also searched this forum and the Dropline forums. Nothing.

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by MDesigner
At work, on a machine that I believe is 400MHz, 64MB RAM, it doesn't work properly. When I startx, I get a blank desktop, no icons like I do at home. When I try to run Mozilla, it never even comes up. When I right click on the desktop, no menu comes up.

I have like 500MB of swap, so RAM shouldn't be a problem, right? Any ideas what might be causing this?

When I logged in this time, the desktop icons showed for a second.. then right as they vanished, I saw that error message (I was tail -f'ing the xsession error log)


What is the memory requirement for Dropline?

If you are missing desktop items or they disappear and programs do not start, I would say it's related to memory. 64mb of real memory is likely not enough for Dropline.

Can you at least temporarily add another 64mb just to test?

[JohnT]

:cool: http://www.dropline.net/forums/search.php?mode=results

[MDesigner]

Originally posted by JohnT
:cool: http://www.dropline.net/forums/search.php?mode=results

Gimme some credit! I already tried that.. this was the only relevant thread:

http://www.dropline.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2189&highlight=attempt+horiz

As far as the RAM goes.. I can't add more, it's a work machine and I probably shouldn't be opening it up. So the 500MB of swap doesn't matter then? Dropline wants real physical RAM? KDE 3.2 had no problems running, and I would think that's more of a memory hog.

[JohnT]

Originally posted by MDesigner
Gimme some credit! I already tried that.. this was the only relevant thread:

http://www.dropline.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2189&highlight=attempt+horiz

As far as the RAM goes.. I can't add more, it's a work machine and I probably shouldn't be opening it up. So the 500MB of swap doesn't matter then? Dropline wants real physical RAM? KDE 3.2 had no problems running, and I would think that's more of a memory hog. I did give you credit..:D ..when I advised against Dropline.:( .....How are you trying to start your session?

[MDesigner]

But Dropline rules, John..seriously it does :)

I'm starting it by setting my runlevel to 4, and using the graphical login. I'll try runlevel 3 and just using startx. KDE works fine, no probs.. so I can't believe that Dropline wouldn't work, as I'm pretty sure it's less machine intensive than KDE is.

[JohnT]

Try runlevel 3... starting from the commandline:gdm for startx you need a .xinitrc file.

[MDesigner]

OK, using "startx" to invoke Dropline works great.. it has no problems.

I changed my runlevel in inittab to 3. I'll see if that works.

Hmm... it works. I don't know what I did differently this time around, but it works flawlessly. Weird.

Incidentally, even though things work, I still see this a lot in my .xsession-errors file:

*** attempt to put segment in horiz list twice

I'll ask on the Dropline forums about that.