[Parti-discuss] xpra on Dapper, Hardy, and OS X

[Chris Pickel]

Hi,

Earlier this week I started using a virtualized machine as my main
workstation at work.  We use NX, but after some time with it I've been
vaguely unsatisfied, and I thought I'd have a go getting xpra to work
instead.

I had some mixed success; this email is mostly a dump of my experience.

At work, I got xpra to compile but not run; I believe it was
segfaulting in something related to the default display.  That machine
has a modified version of Dapper installed, and I suspect that
wimpiggy is dependent on a more recent version of GTK than provided
there.

(I don't have a stack trace of that at the moment, but I can get it
when I'm at work again.  If it's just version incompatibility, though,
it's probably not that interesting)

This evening, I experimented on my home workstation, durendal, on a
virtualized machine of my own (you have no idea how satisfying it was
to finally have a reason to be running Xen at home!).  This was done
on a clean image of Hardy.

Other than a few of my "essentials" (e.g. vim, zsh, nfs-common) the
only things I had were installed via the command given in the xpra
FAQ.  I also needed to install build-essential to compile, and
x11-xserver-utils for xmodmap at runtime, so those could stand to be
in the FAQ as well.

Once built, xpra started successfully, and attached on the other side [1].

[1] http://sfiera.net/~sfiera/xpra.png

As you can see, I'm using OS X as a client, and I had no trouble
getting xpra up and attaching using MacPorts.  Unfortunately, I
haven't gotten keyboard input to go through to the server.  Pressing,
for example, the return key gets me the following pair of stack traces
server-side with "-d all":

got ['key-action', 1, 'Return', 1, []]
current mask: set([]), wanted: set([])
now 1pressing key Return
Unhandled error while processing packet from peer
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "install/lib/python/xpra/protocol.py", line 121, in _consume_packet
    self._process_packet_cb(self, decoded)
  File "install/lib/python/xpra/server.py", line 584, in process_packet
    self._packet_handlers[packet_type](self, proto, packet)
  File "install/lib/python/xpra/server.py", line 535, in _process_key_action
    self._keycode(keyname), depressed)
  File "install/lib/python/xpra/server.py", line 374, in _keycode
    return self._keymap.get_entries_for_keyval(keyval)[0][0]
TypeError: 'NoneType' object is unsubscriptable
got ['key-action', 1, 'Return', 0, []]
current mask: set([]), wanted: set([])
now 0pressing key Return
Unhandled error while processing packet from peer
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "install/lib/python/xpra/protocol.py", line 121, in _consume_packet
    self._process_packet_cb(self, decoded)
  File "install/lib/python/xpra/server.py", line 584, in process_packet
    self._packet_handlers[packet_type](self, proto, packet)
  File "install/lib/python/xpra/server.py", line 535, in _process_key_action
    self._keycode(keyname), depressed)
  File "install/lib/python/xpra/server.py", line 374, in _keycode
    return self._keymap.get_entries_for_keyval(keyval)[0][0]
TypeError: 'NoneType' object is unsubscriptable

My suspicion is that the problem is server-side, perhaps related to
the fact that it's a clean install and may not have a fully-configured
X server.  I can install further software but I'm otherwise not quite
sure how to test that theory.


Regards,

Chris