GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 171938
auto-hide panel jumping across the screen
Last modified: 2006-08-08 01:36:20 UTC
I have an autohide panel at the bottom of the screen - gconf dump attached, done right this time - and it sometimes, when I make it show up, jumps at the top of the screen. Waving the mouse at it again, it may decide to come down. This is undeterministic behavior, which is bad. It may have to do with my having set the auto-hide size to 0, to avoid wasting 6 pixels of screen. I haven't reproduced it since when I just set auto_hide_size to 1. If auto_hide_size really can't be 0, there should be some checking on gconf values to stay sure they are within bounds. This appearead about 1 month ago during 2.9 .
Created attachment 39370 [details] gconf dump
Could you do the dump with this command: gconftool-2 --dump /apps/panel > /tmp/panel.conf, and then attach the file here? It'll be easier for me :-)
Created attachment 39441 [details] gconf dump Sure, I guess I had attached an empty panel. I have still lots to learn about making gconf dumps against panel bugs. Also, the 1-pixel workaround does work, but it's not the best solution.
> This is undeterministic behavior, which is bad. Thanks for the dump. I can not reproduce here. Does it happen often or once a day? > If auto_hide_size really can't be 0, there should be some checking on gconf > values to stay sure they are within bounds. If you set auto_hide_size to 0, then the panel will use 1 instead of 0.
You're right, I can't revert to 0 pixel. Beats me. You may close it.
Gabriel: okay, I'm closing. Please reopen if you can see this again, though. This is really weird.
OK, I see. You have to enable panel animation for this. The size of the panel doesn't matter, it also works with a 6-pix panel.
Hrm... What setting is "panel animation"? Is it /apps/panel/toplevels/panel_0/enable_animations? It's enabled by default, afaik. Is it always reproducable with this setting? New gconf dump please :-)
Yes, just set enable_animations. I had a look at the code, and the path is completely different. gdb traces are slightly complicated so I didn't get further. To repro, you just have to use it for a while.
Created attachment 39594 [details] dump, again for reference
Created attachment 55395 [details] gconf dump I'm experiencing the same behavior on two different computers, one running gnome 2.10 and the other 2.12. This dump is from the 2.12 one. It seems to mee that the jump appears usually when there's heavy load on the graphics like loading a heavy web page with firefox.
*** Bug 323420 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This problem seems to happen in gnome 2.14. When I make a bottom panel unexpand, it jumps to top. Once it occurs, i cannot fix it at properties of panel. Only changing in gconf fixs the problem, but that is just a workaound.
I'm also having still the same problem under version 2.14.0 (using Ubuntu Dapper). Happens maybe once in 2 days or so. I can change it back to bottom straight from the properties of panel.
Created attachment 62566 [details] another gconf dump
Created attachment 67204 [details] My configuration I have to say that this bug is a major pain. I managed to reproduce it someway: if I move the pointer *very* fast in and out and repeat that for a bunch of seconds. I can't reproduce this with enable_animation = FALSE (my auto_hide_size is 1, btw)
The bug didn't show up when enable_animation were FALSE but, now that I have got a new computer (a Celeron D @ ~3 GHz) I can't reproduce this at all. You need a 700-800MHz CPU or less in order to trigger it (or a heavily loaded CPU, I guess).
*** Bug 348723 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Occurs frequently and nondetirministically here in regular usage. Best way to reliably reproduce it (from my other bug I just marked as duplicate): - Run brightside in desktop-switch mode - Position an auto-hide panel vertically on the right side of the screen - quickly & repeatedly switch back and forth between workspaces, making the mouse pass back and forth "across" the auto-hide panel. I'm also on a relatively slow machine (duron 850). Perhaps people who are having trouble replicating it should run some cpu-intensive tasks in the background while attempting it? I can duplicate this reliably this way under Metacity and Openbox. I've seen it happen without running brightside, although I can't duplicate it reliably.
Ubuntu bug about that: https://launchpad.net/products/gnome-panel/+bug/48226
Created attachment 70293 [details] [review] A fix to the "jumping panel" problem. Here's a patch for the gnome-panel that solves the eternal "Jumping Panel" feature. Original code fails to reset the "animating" field to FALSE alongside the animation end coordinates (which are set to -1), thus leading the panel into thinking that it should actually end up at -1, -1.
The patch is simple but it works because the patched piece of code only executes under special circumstances (review code for details), after which the panel continues animating itself to the opposite side of the screen and the orientation gets automatically adjusted. This occurs only with panels whose origin x and y are non-zero, i.e. bottom and right panels.
Thanks for the patch! Running on a slow CPU is really key to reproduce (or using 3D without accelerated drivers ;-)).