Aura, Aura Shell and "foreign" windows

[TomTasche]

Hello,

I'm currently trying to figure out a way to do the few things I still
have to do locally (most importantly, Eclipse) on Chrome OS. One
approach was X-Forwarding, followed by installing the applications
natively (or in an Ubuntu chroot). Unfortunately, none of these
approaches helped me achieve a usable solution. The problem I'm facing
is that those "foreign" windows (so, windows spawned by applications
other than Chrome) aren't being handled by the window manager Aura
Shell and therefore are hardly to impossible to use.

I've taken a look at the Aura design documents and completely
understand that it's purpose is to *get rid of* dependencies like Gtk,
but I don't understand why this means the window manager kind of
"ignores" other windows.

Would anyone be so kind and shed some light on this for me?

Have a great day
Tom

[Micah Catlin]

As far as I can tell, there actually is no window manager involved at all when the Aura shell is active.  Chrome is the only X client and it takes up the whole screen.  You might have some luck with installing one of the older lightweight window managers (ion, twm, etc) if you want to hack around with X forwarding, and just run it from the VT2 console (with appropriate environment variables to find your X DISPLAY and .Xauthority).

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[David Reveman]

Hi Tom,

we've been experimenting with some limited support for handling X
windows in Aura and it's possible that this will be available in some
form in the future. This would only work on Chrome OS machines in
developer mode though.

David

[Thomas Taschauer]

Thanks for your blazingly fast responses, guys!

@Dave: Sounds great! Limiting such functionality to developers only sounds like a fair deal.

@Micah: Thanks for the tip, I might give this a try. However, I once started Unity on Chrome OS (just for fun) and it ended up in a mess... Unity didn't manage the windows spawned by Chrome OS and disappeared whenever you clicked something. I think I've played around with VT2 before, but I can't remember what I ended up with. I might give this a try!

...more information here.

[Thomas Taschauer]

Hello again,

Sorry to bump this topic up again, but I think this is still related to the original topic...

After fiddling with chroot and VNC, I figured that this isn't a solution to work with (it's too slow!). So I thought I'd try what Micah suggested: using tty2 to start things there. After starting another X session (startx -- :1) the screen flashes, turns brightness all the way up, I see the shell for a few more seconds and... it crashes. The startx command returns, by the way. What I end up with is the Chrome OS login screen again.

I'm wondering if this is on purpose done by Chrome OS, or if it's worth filing a bug for this.

Thanks

Tom

...more information here.