Default theme background texture scaled wrong

[over 5000]

Binary package hint: cairo-clock

cairo-clock in ubuntu hardy.

I made an entry in the gnome session manager to autostart cairo-clock on login.
The command is as follows:

cairo-clock -x 1000 -y 200 -w 127 -h 127 -s -t default -o -i -e

Running this from inside gnome-terminal displays the clock properly.

On session startup, though, the background texture is scaled to 200x200 and clipped to 127x127. The clock hands display just fine in the center of the 127x127 space. This seems to happen everytime.

(Attaching a screenshot of both a clock started from the terminal and one run by the gnome session manager.)

[Michael Rooney (mrooney)]

Hi kbit, thanks for using Ubuntu and thanks for taking the time to file this bug report! One thing that can sometimes cause differences between behavior at startup and otherwise is timing. However sometimes the terminal behaves differently as well. Let's figure out which it is:

First, try copy and pasting the same command into a run box such as Alt+F2. Does that behave the same as running from the terminal? If not, it doesn't have to do with startup. If it does behave the same, it might be a timing issue. Try putting something like "sleep 10 && cairo-clock -x 1000 -y 200 -w 127 -h 127 -s -t default -o -i -e" (without the quotes) into a cairoclock.sh file, chmod it a+x, put it in your home directory and run THAT instead of the command directly. This will wait 10 seconds for everything like compositing to start up, which might somehow cause an issue.

Let me know if either if these is a fix for you and we can figure out where the issue exists, thanks!

[over 5000 (over5000-deactivatedaccount)]

Hi Mike, thank you for your very nice reply!

1) Running the command from the Alt+F2-run-box works just fine. So it is a timing issue.

2) Using the shell script with sleep fixes the background texture problem.

BUT: It seems like the start scripts are not run parallel, but one after the other. I cannot tell for sure, but I had the strong impression that the "sleep 10" froze the whole panel startup.
I logged out and back in several times in a row. Most of the time, AWN had timing issues, which led to wrong icons appearing on the dock. (AWN is very buggy.) One time, AWN didn't start up after all.

I decided to discontinue using AWN, which was bugging me with its bugs, anyway. (I was using the daily repo. So I should expect bugs.)
Of course this is no fix for the clock issue, though, since not only awn was affected by the "sleep".
Therefore, sleeping is no proper workaround for the Cairo-clock's texture issue.

Please let me know if I can help you more.
I am using standard compositing on Hardy, with compiz, compiz-decorator and gtk-window-decorator showing up in the process list. The video driver is nvidia-glx-new.

[Michael Rooney (mrooney)]

Thanks kbit for trying that. I can definitely assure you the startup processes are not run purely sequentially; I use a similar startup script to ensure compiz has started before composite-requiring things just fine. However looking at my script, I did it differently which might somehow cause an issue for you. I had you use double ampersands and just one line, which might cause issues. Try making your file on two lines exactly as such:

"
sleep 10
cairo-clock -x 1000 -y 200 -w 127 -h 127 -s -t default -o -i -e &
"

and see if that does it any better.

Second, to go OT, I am a dev of AWN and we consider 0.2.6 to be quite stable, and even trunk is pretty stable as well. It is a great community; if you like we would love to have you stop by http://www.planetblur.org/hosted/awnforum/index.php?shard=forum&action=g_default and post a thread with your issues and see if we can't resolve them or point you to a different repo.

Let me know if that new script works any better.

[Amir Khosroshahi (amir-khosroshahi)]

I just wanted to confirm this bug for me.
And a suggestion: why not put a "Automatic start at login" option that takes cares of
everything (like timing, etc.) and is also more user-friendly than having to add a command line to the session manager.
Excuse me, I come from Windows and expect things to be Windowsish!

[Michael Rooney (mrooney)]

Thanks Amir for confirming. You are right, this is not good behavior, but that's why it is a bug ;). The timing script was to figure out if timing was the issue, and was meant to be a temporary workaround as well if needed. Keep in mind if Ubuntu were "Windowsish" you wouldn't even have the ability to use a different window manager/compositor, nor would third-party software like cairo-clock be supported by the OS company. Try telling Microsoft you found a bug in software like Firefox for example, and see if they care ;) We want things to be easy with Ubuntu, but certainly not Windows-like.

[Gilles Teisseire (gilles-teisseire1)]

hi

I can confirm it seems to be a timing issue.
I tried your workaround by writing a launch script for the clock, it works well.

Thanks!

[Alexey Osipov (lion-simba)]

Same here in Lucid.

[pfrenssen (pieter-frenssen)]

Still occurring in 10.10.

[Roberto Costa (braselectron)]

Installed the xenial version on my bionic and I confirm the same issue here.

When I start the cairo-clock form a terminal it startup correct. But from launcher or startup script it has the bug.