Cannot spawn windows in Awesome window manager

[Andrew Clough]

Binary package hint: awesome

I'm running a brand new default install of Jaunty on my T61 with integrated intel graphics. After completing my installation and updating my packages, I installed the awesome package from the ubuntu repo. I logged out and appeared to be able to create an Awesome session successfully, but when I used Mod4+return to try to spawn an xterm there was no visible response.

Without knowing of any other method to start spawning other windows, I wasn't able to test out many of the commands in the man page, however I was able to test out some of them.

Mod4+Space did indeed change what was displayed on the layout icon on the status bar, as did using the mouse to click on it.

Mod4+b toggled the status bar.

Mod4+esc, Mod4+Left, and Mod4+Right change which tag icon on the status bar is highlighted.

Mod4+shift+q quits awesome.

My version of Awesome, as given by 'awesome --version' at the command line is:

awesome (awesome) 2.3.4 (Morning Trouble)
compiled at Nov 10 2008 22:34:30 for i486-pc-linux-gnu by gcc version 4.3.3 (buildd@rothera)

and 'apt-cache policy awesome' gives:

  Installed: 2.3.4-1
  Candidate: 2.3.4-1
  Version table:
 *** 2.3.4-1 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty/universe Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
Package: awesome 2.3.4-1
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: awesome
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-13-generic i686

[Everthon Valadão (valadao)]

Same here... it's quite disappointing! Without a console or a menu it's useless...

[daniel.zollinger (daniel-zollinger)]

I note that wmii seems to have the same spawn issue in my recently upgraded 9.04 install.

Also of note:
The awesomewm v3 in 9.10 has had what looks like a related upstream update:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/awesome/3.3~rc1-1
" + New spawn code based on glib (Closes: #501291)" that relates to the debian bug:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=501291

Not sure if this is related, but... It'd be really good to have an awesomewm version that works.