devilspie and startx error

[dapro1]

Hi guys, I've found a problem I can't resolve with extensive googling.

I am using a Lenovo ThinkPad X200, with Fedora 19 64-bit.

Previously, in my .bashrc I had a command

devilspie -a &

to start a pretty little transparent terminal that lives on my desktop beneath all my program windows. This worked just fine.

Recently I've started using command line a lot and wanted to login by default to just tty1, and then run

startx

to get gnome going if I so desired. I also managed this just fine.

The problem occurs as a result of these two being combined: When I login via tty, the .bashrc script gets run, but because no graphical windows are open devilspie complains and says:

GdK-WARNING **: cannot open display

. Fair enough. But now, if I want to run gnome via the startx command I can't find a way to run devilspie successfully.

I wonder if there is a script (like .xinitrc) that gnome runs automatically when it opens, so that I can simply add the line "devilspie -a &" to that file? Help appreciated.

[PabloTwo]

I do not run either F19 or Gnome3 ( I run F18 and Xfce).
For a program that requires an X server to be running, it seems to me that ~/.bashrc is the wrong place to launch it.
Every DE has a method of add entries to it's "autostart" programs that run immediately after login. That would seem the appropriate place to add your devilspie startup command.

For Gnome3, this link tells me how it's done.

[dapro1]

I tried that and it doesn't work. When I try that, running 'ps' shows that devilspie is running but I don't see the terminal appear on the desktop.

[PabloTwo]

I'm not really qualified to help you on this one. But since your borderless and transparent terminal was appearing on your Gnome3 desktop when booting directly to the GUI, I can only presume you have a configuration file already established for that to happen (~/.devilspie/somefile.ds). Here is an ArchWiki page detailing how to set that up in gnome, though that may be pre-gnome3 gnome?, in case you needed more guidance with that.

[Gareth Jones]

I tried that and it doesn't work. When I try that, running 'ps' shows that devilspie is running but I don't see the terminal appear on the desktop.

Are there errors in your session log? (“journalctl _UID=1000”; replace 1000 with your UID, as reported by the “id” command.)

[dapro1]

Pablo2, that's right, I even think the link you sent me is the one I used to make my .ds file. I'm not sure the problem is there though because I had devilspie working well previously.

Gareth, I get one error when I run the command 'devilspie -a &' simply from a terminal:

Sep 08 12:23:29 localhost.localdomain gnome-session[9907]: Window manager warning: Log level 16: Called enable_unredirect_for_screen while unredirection is enabled.

and when I startx:

Sep 07 18:20:02 localhost.localdomain gnome-session[965]: JS LOG: GNOME Shell started at Sat Sep 07 2013 18:20:02 GMT+0200 (CEST)
Sep 07 18:20:04 localhost.localdomain gnome-session[965]: Window manager warning: Got a request to focus the no_focus_window with a timestamp of 0.  This shouldn't happen!
Sep 07 18:20:04 localhost.localdomain gnome-session[965]: Window manager warning: CurrentTime used to choose focus window; focus window may not be correct.
Sep 07 18:20:03 localhost.localdomain gnome-session[965]: Window manager warning: Log level 16: STACK_OP_ADD: window 0x1400001 already in stack
Sep 07 18:20:03 localhost.localdomain gnome-session[965]: Window manager warning: Log level 16: STACK_OP_ADD: window 0x1400001 already in stack

. Thank you!

[george_toolan]

A warning is just a warning and not a (fatal) error ;-)

[dapro1]

Sure, thanks George. In which case there are no errors, but I believe those warnings to be relevant to my problem.

[ocratato]

Perhaps try something like the following in .bashrc

if [ x$DISPLAY != x ]
then
    devilspie
fi

$DISPLAY is set when X is running to something :0

[vallimar]

Something to keep in mind: the devilspie in the Fedora repo is a bit dated.
There is a 0.23 version out there that using libwnck3 for better gnome3 support.
There is also the fork named "devilspie2" which the author of devilspie encourages
people to use now instead.

Newer code and uses lua for config parsing instead.
http://www.gusnan.se/devilspie2/

[dapro1]

Managed to get this working, although I got close to giving up. I'm not really sure why it wasn't working before. I removed the devilspie command from my .bashrc and entered it into the aforementioned gnome-session-properties utility. I also ran terminator from this utility, with the option -T to specify a 'window title', so that the terminal gets picked up by devilspie.

I ended up using devilspie instead of devilspie2, although neither of them can remove terminator from mytask switcher, but that's only a very minor issue. Thank you all.