Recently (since I replaced two 19" monitors with 23" widescreen ones) my XMonad window manager fails to startup (and gnome fails as well) in an odd way that's almost indescribable (I sort-of get the desktop background images badly positioned with one of them showing the red border, and nothing else) -- and I noticed that the xmonad-x86_64-linux file in ~./xmonad is zero length. Also a syslogged message from gnome mentions problems :- daemon.log:Sep 1 06:34:33 roro gnome-session[1492]: WARNING: Application 'xmonad.desktop' failed to register before timeout It looks like most of the files in ~/.xmonad are created around login time, so I'm guessing something has gone wrong with compiling my xmonad.hs -- but not every time, just sometimes. Possibly related to when I've been using my laptop with the normal single screen, and then later start up (cold boot) connected to dual external monitors on my desk, but not all the time. The other possibility is that the DBus hook I have in there (not understood, just cargo-coded from the web) is causing issues ... jim@roro:~/ISOs$ ls -l /home/jim/.xmonad/ total 7140 -rw-r--r-- 1 jim jim 2290 2010-08-30 09:52 revxmonad.png -rw-r--r-- 1 jim jim 0 2010-09-01 06:37 xmonad.errors -rw-r--r-- 1 jim jim 3715 2010-09-01 06:37 xmonad.hi -rw-r--r-- 1 jim jim 6531 2010-08-30 09:51 xmonad.hs -rw-r--r-- 1 jim jim 115440 2010-09-01 06:37 xmonad.o -rwxr-xr-x 1 jim jim 7172303 2010-09-01 06:37 xmonad-x86_64-linux Now, I could work around this by deleting these generated files, say at system boot time ... but that seems a little wasteful. I'd rather fix whatever is causing the problem in the first place ... This is the Ubuntu 10.04 packaged version of Xmonad, and I'd rather stick with the packaged version than have manually compiled code on the machine ... jim@roro:~/.xmonad$ dpkg -l |grep xmonad ii libghc6-xmonad-contrib-dev 0.9.1-1 Extensions to xmonad ii libghc6-xmonad-contrib-doc 0.9.1-1 Extensions to xmonad; documentation ii libghc6-xmonad-dev 0.9.1-2 A lightweight X11 window manager ii libghc6-xmonad-doc 0.9.1-2 A lightweight X11 window manager; documentation ii xmonad 0.9.1-2 A lightweight X11 window manager Bits of xmonad.hs that might be relevant ... {-# LANGUAGE ScopedTypeVariables #-} -- required in order to say \(e::SomeException) in E.catch import XMonad hiding ((|||)) -- get this from LayoutCombinators instead -- For the DBus connectivity to xmonad-log-applet in the gnome-panel import System.IO import Control.Exception as E import Control.Monad import DBus import DBus.Connection import DBus.Message main :: IO () -- main = do main = withConnection Session $ \ dbus -> do spawn "notify-send -i /home/jim/.xmonad/revxmonad.png XMonad 'display manager reload'" getWellKnownName dbus xmonad $ gnomeConfig { modMask = mod4Mask -- Use the WindowsLogo key as the mod- key -- , terminal = "gnome-terminal" -- set by Config.Gnome -- , terminal = "xterm" , manageHook = manageDocks <+> manageHook gnomeConfig , layoutHook = showWName myLayout , XMonad.workspaces = myWorkspaces , logHook = dynamicLogWithPP $ defaultPP { ppOutput = myOutput dbus , ppOrder = \(ws:l:t:_) -> [l,ws,t] , ppTitle = pangoColor "#eeeeee" . shorten 54 . wrap "[" "</span>]"-- Title of the active window , ppCurrent = pangoColor "#eeeeee" . wrap "" "</span>" -- The currently active workspace , ppVisible = pangoColor "#cccccc" . wrap "" "</span>" -- Workspaces on other visible monitors , ppHidden = pangoColor "#aaaaaa" . wrap "" "" -- Workspaces currently not visible , ppUrgent = pangoColor "red" . wrap "!" "!" -- +ppHidden } } -- Set up the connection to DBus -- This retry is really awkward, but sometimes DBus won't let us get our -- name unless we retry a couple times. getWellKnownName :: Connection -> IO () getWellKnownName dbus = E.catch (tryGetName) (\(e::SomeException) -> getWellKnownName dbus) where tryGetName = do namereq <- newMethodCall serviceDBus pathDBus interfaceDBus "RequestName" addArgs namereq [String "org.xmonad.Log", Word32 5] sendWithReplyAndBlock dbus namereq 0 return () -- Output logger stuff into dbus myOutput dbus str = do let str' = " " ++ str ++ "</span>" str'' = sanitize str' msg <- newSignal "/org/xmonad/Log" "org.xmonad.Log" "Update" addArgs msg [String str''] E.catch (send dbus msg 0) (\(e::SomeException) -> do return 0) -- ignore send errors, it wasn't that important return ()