GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 622254
left-clicking gnome clock applet displays calendar in wrong position with vertical panel
Last modified: 2011-01-30 08:24:00 UTC
I have my panel in Gnome oriented vertically on the left side of my screen. Starting about a month ago, I'm not sure with what updates, when I left click on the clock in the panel the calendar pops up at the top left of the screen, instead of at the bottom left next to where I've positioned the clock applet. The calendar part of the pop up window goes off the top on the screen and is not visible, with only my preset cities appearing on screen. Here's a screen capture to show what I'm talking about: http://imgur.com/4mTtI.png This problem occurs while I'm running compiz, but not with metacity. I'm using Arch Linux, but I see that the bug was reported in the Red Hat bugzilla (with the panel at the bottom of the screen) and they determined the problem is with gnome-panel, not compiz. See: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=588343 I've used Gnome with Compiz for years and not had this problem. As I said, it only cropped up about a month ago. I'm using Gnome 2.30, on Arch Linux, kernel 2.6.33, Compiz 0.8.6.
Created attachment 164191 [details] test I can confirm this in ubuntu 10.10 and gnome panel 2.30.0
I found that downgrading to Compiz 8.4, from 8.6, resolves this problem.
Yes, that's a bug in compiz. It might be fixed already since I talked to upstream about it, but best is to open a bug there to be sure.
Okay, I'll post a bug report there. But I'm confused. In the Redhat bug report, that I link to above, they say that they spoke to upstream and determined it's a gnome-panel bug (and explain the reason why in detail). Obviously, just because the newer version of Compiz brought about the problem (as the proximate cause), does not mean that the bug is in Compiz. It's going to be really annoying if this never get's fixed, because Compiz and Gnome developers can't agree who's bug it is or it's just do to some philosophical difference about how to code things.
I don't know when they spoke to upstream, but I did talk to the developer responsible of that part of the code a few weeks ago, and the conclusion (at least, my recollection of it) was that compiz was wrong and not respecting the ewmh spec.
Okay, thanks for the reply. I did file a bug at Compiz as you suggested, but have not heard anything yet. See: http://bugs.opencompositing.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1307 In the Redhat bug report it looks like they spoke with upstream right at the end of May, so about four weeks ago.
*** Bug 619069 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
In case it's useful to anyone, after months of being annoyed by this (still unsolved) bug, I realized I could use Compiz's "Place Windows" plugin as a work around. Under the "Fixed Window Placement" tab, in the plugin, create a new "Windows with fixed positions" rule. In the "positioned windows" blank in the popup dialogue, put: title=Calendar. Then you'll have to do some trial and error to get the right number of pixels for the x and y positions, depending on the size of your screen. Here's the Compiz wiki information on using this plugin: http://wiki.compiz.org/Plugins/Place http://wiki.compiz.org/WindowMatching So if Compiz really is the source of this bug, ironically it's features also allow it to be it's own solution. Hope that's helpful to others.