[fpc-devel] fp without X

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

waldo kitty wrote:
> On 3/17/2014 6:46 AM, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>> waldo kitty wrote:
>>> i'm not sure this is the proper area for this... if it is not, please 
>>> point me
>>> to the proper list...
>>>
>>> i've a ubuntu system that i'm trying to run fp on... X does *not* start
>>> automatically... i'm working from the virtual console(s) 99% of the 
>>> time...
>>> what i'm seeing and trying to solve is the frames in fp are showing 
>>> up as
>>> diamond characters... after i got the help stuff loading properly, i 
>>> noted
>>> that when i switched away from the editor frame, it showed the single 
>>> line
>>> frame characters and the help frame was all diamonds... closing the 
>>> help and
>>> returning to the editor switched the editor frame back to diamonds...
>>
>> There might be something related to the  locale  command relevant to 
>> this. As a
>> quick test I've just fired up fp on a Debian (non-x86) console and 
>> framing etc.
>> was OK, I see LANG set to en_GB.UTF-8
> 
> yeah, i'm in the US... i did post the two settings i saw from the 
> environment that i thought were important... what other environment 
> settings may affect this?

Frankly, I don't know. I do a lot of shell stuff, but it's almost always 
within Konsole (on KDE, Xfce etc.) and often over ssh since this 
combination gives me cut-and-paste etc.

>> I'm uneasy about things like console and X codepages, and the 
>> corresponding
>> keyboard mappings. One problem is that when they're changed they tend 
>> to be
>> system-wide, another is that things like available founts and 
>> codepages can
>> depend on how much of X11 has been installed. Put another way, your 
>> console
>> might be broken /because/ X isn't installed, not /despite/ it.
> 
> actually, X is installed but not running... i'm on tty1 - tty6... if i 
> type "startx" then X starts up but the machine only has 512M RAM and 
> cannot handle any more... i had 768M in it and on boot it says that 512M 
> is the max so i pulled the other 256M and put it to use elsewhere... 
> with only 512M of RAM, it is slower than molasses in mid-winter :(  so, 
> i use the plain non-GUI local console for most work i do on it...

Try using Xfce or another "lightweight" desktop, and try using a 
non-composting UI (the poor performance might be because your 3D 
acceleration isn't working).

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]