[winswitch] First time install of xpra: black screen in all windows.

[Antoine Martin]

On 11/09/2021 15:13, G.W. Haywood via shifter-users wrote:
> Hello again,
> 
> On Fri, 10 Sep 2021, G.W. Haywood wrote:
> 
>> ...
>> I can start an xpra server on the laptop e.g. with DISPLAY=:101, then
>> start an xterm for that instance, then attach a local xpra client to
>> display 101 on the laptop and everything is fine.  However if I attach
>> to the same server from a client on the Pi, I see a window but there's
>> no content displayed in it - it's completely black.  Apart from that
>> it's a functioning connection.  I can run commands in the black window
>> (blindfold), and they are executed and saved in the command history.
> 
> More information.  I forgot to mention that the window manager on the
> laptop is fvwm2, which is not negotiable. 
I hope that you're talking about the window manager you're using with
the laptop's desktop environment, and not that you expect to be able to
run a window manager with xpra's seamless mode.

You cannot run another window manager in an xpra seamless session as
xpra is the window manager.

If you want to run a window manager on the server side, then you will
need to use desktop mode ("xpra start-desktop") instead of the seamless
mode ("xpra start").

> On the Pi3B+ it is normally
> Fluxbox.  I tried with fvwm on the Pi with exactly the same results.
> 
I haven't tried it lately on a PI, I've got a 2 and a 3B gathering dust
somewhere. This used to work fine but it is possible that something
broke in later versions without anyone noticing.

The other possibility is that since you've compiled it yourself, you
haven't enabled enough picture codecs for it to work properly.
The most important one is python pillow, without this library a lot of
features just don't work well or not at all.

Also, you may want to run the client with --opengl=no (or try forcing it
on with 'yes') as I can't remember the state of the client opengl
acceleration on PIs, also it may have improved since.

If the window is completely blank, I would expect to see some errors in
the server log.

Cheers,
Antoine