Re: What's wrong with X forwarding / remote X logins?

["Christian Pernegger" <pernegger@gmail.com>]

> I'm doing remote X over ssh all the day without your described problems, so
> something seems to be broken with your setup/applications.

Ok, so something is broken. I half feared someone would come forward
and say gnome or wine apps can't be forwarded by design.

> [Why testing?]

My personal box runs unstable and I wanted something with a little
less hassle. :) I try to use testing or unstable on non-critical
machines so I can stay current and generate useful bugreports. Usually
both are stable enough for my needs.

> [Configuration]

"butters" is the new machine, where the apps run. xorg.conf is stock
from a recent install of i386-testing, with driver changed from vesa
to nv. Shouldn't matter because it's not $DISPLAY. Desktop environment
is GNOME.

Target machines are "kenny-unstable" (amd64-unstable), "kenny-win32"
(same box, Windows XP + Cygwin-X) and "sparky" (OS X Tiger + Apple
X11). I could provide an xorg.conf for kenny-unstable but the symptoms
are the same on the other xservers and they can't be configured much.

That pretty much leaves the apps on butters as the culprit, be it
setup error or bug.

I've done a little more testing:

- gnome definitely does not like multiple logins by the same user, be
it via two local X servers, a virtual one spawned by vncserver or a
remote X login. I consider that a grave bug but maybe that's just me.
:(

- if I do a remote X login from kenny-unstable on butters and chose
gnome as my session in GDM I get a black screen as soon as I start a
wine app. When I blindly click outside of the offending app's window
the desktop returns and only the inside of the particular window stays
black. Other apps are fine (as long as the same user isn't logged in
another time.)

- if I do the same but choose a "simpler" session, i. e. fluxbox,
everything works fine, including wine apps.

- ssh X forward from butters to sparky or kenny-win32:

cinepaint crashes with:

Gdk-ERROR **: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)
  serial 7783 error_code 3 request_code 38 minor_code 0
Gdk-ERROR **: BadAccess (attempt to access private resource denied)
  serial 7784 error_code 10 request_code 102 minor_code 0

wine apps crash with:

X Error of failed request:  BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)
  Major opcode of failed request:  38 (X_QueryPointer)
  Resource id in failed request:  0x3a
  Serial number of failed request:  563
  Current serial number in output stream:  563

xsane says:

The error was 'BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)'.
  (Details: serial 127 error_code 3 request_code 38 minor_code 0)
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

I get similar stuff with a lot of other software. Interestingly the
gnome panels and things like eog work.

- ssh X forward from butters to kenny-unstable: wine apps blackscreen,
everything else works.

Sounds like multiple issues:

- an incompatibility between unstable's xorg and Cygwin-X / Apple X11.
Is this even possible?

- gnome brokenness re multiple logins and possibly glitches in X forwarding.

The only thing I can't figure out is why wine only works when the
whole session is forwarded and gnome out of the picture.

So, who can I bug (pun intended) about this?

Thanks,

C.