I figured out the compositing problem with the headless VMs on Linux.

SDL, by default, requests that the window manager disable compositing. This behavior can be overridden starting with SDL 2.0.8. For more information, see https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/issues/8220.

For anyone else seeing this problem in KDE, there is a workaround. System Settings / Display and Monitor / Compositor contains an item "Allow applications to block compositing." This is on by default. When turned off, Pharo works better.

Thanks,
-Martin

On 12/27/20 9:49 PM, Martin McClure wrote:

Thanks, Esteban

That method does get me a working Pharo, which I was having trouble with before (though I *thought* I'd tried exactly that...).

However, it also somehow disables the compositor on my entire display, making it very hard to see where one (non-Pharo) window ends and another begins.
Compositing comes back when I quit Pharo. The old VM doesn't exhibit this odd side-effect.

Thanks,
-Martin

On 12/27/20 12:52 AM, Esteban Lorenzano wrote:

Hi Martin,

I just did :

wget -O- get.pharo.org/64/90+vmHeadlessLatest | bash

./pharo-ui Pharo.image

And I had no problem at all (except a libgit2 version that will be fixed soon).

I am using a Manjaro, but I do not see why it should not work on others.

Esteban

On Dec 27 2020, at 12:07 am, Martin McClure <martin@hand2mouse.com> wrote:

If anyone can get recent (within the last week or so) 64-bit Pharo9

images to work on Linux, please let me know how you did that! I've tried

everything I can think of and no luck.

For the purposes of this query, "working'' means that you can open a

playground, type into the it, then backspace over what you've typed.

If you can do that on Linux, this information would be much appreciated:

* What build are you running?

* What VM are you running and where did you get it?

* How do you launch it? If from the command-line, what arguments?

Thanks,

-Martin