[Cuis] Warning: Linux users -- you may not be running the VM you think you are

[Casey Ransberger]

Ugh! Enough already! 

This irked me when I was writing the miserable thing. There should be a general facility that can inform a morph about the dimensions of the screen, which can tell that morph that the screen's dimensions have changed, without using stepping. Ideally, or I think, by asking the VM more or less directly and not having to worry about the World (I say this because if we can use a prim, I bet we can get rid of that nasty delay after changing the window size where the taskbar seems to need to catch up with the eye as a consequence of waiting on #stepTime.)

Can anyone think of anything? The main reason the taskbar has to do this stupid dance is when the user changes the size of the window, if it doesn't poll the VM for window size, it won't stick to the bottom of the window, or be the proper width. 

There has got to be a better way to do this. Halp? Ideas? Even Juan was like (paraphrasing here) "well, I wouldn't have thought of doing it this way, but okay."

Mainly because -- at the time -- it fixed a problem with some behavior he'd removed. If you clicked the minimize button you'd get a DNU. So I wrote a hacky taskbar to give it a better behavior than that. End result was the minimize button actually still worked. But the use of stepping to size the bloody thing has always bothered me. There's got to be a better way to do it. 

Grump grump grump, dumb dumb dumb, me me me. 

Seriously halp, mah peoples. 

On Oct 30, 2013, at 9:56 AM, Ken Dickey <Ken.Dickey at whidbey.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 30 Oct 2013 04:11:45 -0700
> Casey Ransberger <casey.obrien.r at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Ken, curious about a couple of things, stuff to say about something else. 
>> 
>> What distro and version are you using Linux-wise?
> 
> Puppy Linux [Precise].  It is a small distro that runs in RAM.  I use OpenBSD for financial stuff and bigger Linux distros for various tests and tools.
> 
>> When you talk about losing the taskbar, are you talking about the Cuis taskbar (which I'm mostly guilty for) or the one in your X11 environment?
> 
> The Cuis taskbar.
> 
> The short story here is that, running multiple distros, I keep the HW clock on UTC, not local (GMT-7) time.  The old VM was not picking this up, so the Taskbar stepTime was way in the future.  
> 
> No steps meant that the taskbar came up off-screen and never refreshed to a location according with my screen size.  I could send "Taskbar reset; initialize" or start stepping the existing Taskbar but it did not appear on my screen and I had to use the World Menu > Windows > Find Window facility to restore minimized windows.
> 
> Big pain and I learned a lot by finding out where and how the Taskbar works.  It took me forever to discover that the location was reset in the Step method.  But I did learn a lot!
> 
> -KenD
> 
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