[winswitch] xpra shadow works, but start-desktop just shows a black screen

[Ben Sferrazza]

On Mon, 2019-04-15 at 22:21 +0000, Ben Sferrazza wrote:
> FYI: whatever email client you are using, it is messing up the inline
> quoting.
> 
> I believe this has something to do with my company filtering emails
> that originate from an external source and processing them with added
> text.

Actually seems to be the fact that I was using the Outlook Web App in 
Linux. Now using Evolution.

> 
> On 12/04/2019 21:33, Ben Sferrazza via shifter-users wrote:
> > On 12/04/2019 05:47, Ben Sferrazza via shifter-users wrote:
> > > > I'm running Xpra 2.5 from the Xpra repo on Ubuntu 18.10. The
> > > > client is Xpra 3.0 on Windows 10. Using 'xpra shadow' works
> > > > well, but I can't get 'xpra start-desktop' to work. It merely
> > > > shows a black screen.
> > > xpra start-desktop on its own will only start an empty full-
> > > window
> > > session, you need to start a window manager or some other
> > > application to
> > > interact with, ie for testing:
> > > xpra start-desktop --start=xterm
> > > Then you can start a window manager or something else from the
> > > xterm
> > I'm sorry, I should have mentioned I used --start=gnome-session.
> Well, there is your problem.
> Try a different window manager, or as per above just an xterm, and
> you
> will find that things work just fine.
> gnome is known to be problematic and may not work without an
> accelerated
> X11 server.
> 
> OK, ideally wouldn't want to change window managers, but am willing
> to give that a try. FYI, I use NIS for login with an NFS mounted
> /home directory. I had setup Xpra (successfully) on our Linux servers
> that run an old version of CentOS. Now I am attempting to get Xpra to
> work on my work PC where I just installed Ubuntu 18.10. There must be
> some stale data/configs that could cause issues, as I'm still using
> the same /home directory as before. I say that, because after trying
> to unsuccessfully get Xpra to work with this Ubuntu install, I went
> back just to see how things were working with the setup I had on the
> CentOS Linux servers and it was no longer working. Do you have any
> suggestions on files/directories to remove to start fresh? ~/.xpra
> being an obvious one I suppose.

removing ~/.xpra, ~/.local/xpra, and ~/.local/run/xpra seemed to do the
trick. At least I can start a gnome-session and have a visible desktop
(no more black screen). However, nothing happens on keyboard input and
mouse input seems limited. I'll keep debugging.

> 
> > > > Similarly, trying to just launch a window such as 'xpra
> > > > start=gnome-terminal' shows nothing. 'xpra start=xterm' does
> > > > bring up xterm, but trying to launch something like gnome-
> > > > terminal from that xterm shows nothing. Verbose logs don't seem
> > > > to indicate anything is amiss.
> > > > Any advice on things I can try?
> > > That's odd. I've just tried it and it worked fine.
> > > Please create a ticket as per:
> > > https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__xpra.org_trac_wiki_ReportingBugs&d=DwICAg&c=VYRDWu-sKuQrybEAJ2u-dYX_FK6X1lTrDf-PKXUa2P4&r=KUvBUvwZ3xYCa05A5NCXRUdX-yDQhrA_pjQ6in6O-IFVY81yykI4UK_bEOyPBhCw&m=1ry-QExQgmmOByMBK9tpR2G3ZKgDb6cFzeCl0ABhIZQ&s=H_oJFXMfp3dShpPBsIt50P_P-XOlWG2VTdPmK-O66JY&e=
> > > Make sure to include "xpra info".
> > > And please try connecting from another client (ie: from the
> > > Ubuntu
> > > system itself) to figure out if the problem is server side or
> > > client side.
> > 
> > OK I'll go ahead and do that. I also forgot to mention that I tried
> > connecting from the Ubuntu localhost and it also just shows a black
> > screen. So it would seem to indicate there's something up with the
> > server.
> Or with gnome-terminal.
> 
> Cheers,
> Antoine