XFCE Windowing Issue With Interactive Apps

[brad.traver]

I’m having issues with all of our interactive apps on our RHEL 8 compute nodes. The issue seems to have come about after updating OOD from version 2.0.28. I’ve tried updating to 2.0.31, 2.0.32 and 3.0.0 but the issue still persists. The issue I’m having is that the window title bar is gone. Windows can’t be moved or resized. The context menus usually don’t work. However, the interactive desktop works perfectly fine. Our web node is RHEL 7 and the compute nodes that have issue are RHEL 8 (tested both 8.3 and 8.6, same problems on both). Our RHEL 7 compute nodes don’t have any issues. All compute nodes are using XFCE4. Below is my before script on the particular app I’m testing:

echo "Starting before.sh..."
module load shared
module load cuda10.2/toolkit cudnn7.6-cuda10.2
#export XDG_CONFIG_DIRS="/etc/xdg/xfce4"
export XDG_CONFIG_HOME="$HOME/.config/xfce4"
export XDG_DATA_HOME="<%= session.staged_root.join("share") %>"
export XDG_CACHE_HOME="$(mktemp -d)"
export SEND_256_COLORS_TO_REMOTE=1
xfwm4 --compositor=off --sm-client-disable &
xsetroot -solid "#D9F6FF"
xfsettingsd --sm-client-disable --daemon
xfce4-panel --sm-client-disable &

Does anyone have any ideas on what the issue could be?

[jeff.ohrstrom]

There is some issue in the way we wrote our apps and RHEL/8. Your OOD version has no affect on this issue.

From the looks of your before.sh.erb you may have already seen these topics. I had to sprinkle in some sleep commands here and there. The last post on the MATLAB topic may be of interest too, it doesn’t have sleeps but also has eval $(dbus-launch --sh-syntax) which may be important in this context.

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[brad.traver]

Jeff,

The addition of the eval $(dbus-launch --sh-syntax) command seems to have fixed the issue. I also reformatted my script as shown below:

# Configure VNC and XFCE
(
  #export XDG_CONFIG_DIRS="/etc/xdg/xfce4"
  export XDG_CONFIG_HOME="$HOME/.config/xfce4"
  export XDG_DATA_HOME="<%= session.staged_root.join("share") %>"
  export XDG_CACHE_HOME="$(mktemp -d)"
  export SEND_256_COLORS_TO_REMOTE=1
  eval $(dbus-launch --sh-syntax)
  xfwm4 --compositor=off --sm-client-disable &
  xsetroot -solid "#D9F6FF"
  xfsettingsd --sm-client-disable --daemon
  xfce4-panel --sm-client-disable
) &

I added the parenthesis and moved the & to the end.