solved: gnome-terminal in disposable VMs closes prematurely

[Andrew Clausen]

Hi all,

In Qubes 3.2 the obvious way to start a gnome-terminal in its own disposable virtual machine is:

qvm-run '$dispvm' gnome-terminal

However, this doesn't work!  The gnome-terminal process exits immediately (it spawns gnome-terminal-server in the background to do the real work), and the VM shuts down prematurely.  Qubes 4.0 has the same problem, but with different notation above.  I suspect this is the reason that an xterm is on the DispVM menu instead of gnome-terminal.

Anyway, I think I have a solution, based on systemd:

qvm-run '$dispvm' "gnome-terminal; systemctl --user start gnome-terminal-server --wait"

I haven't yet tested the analogous command on Qubes 4.0, but I expect this approach should work there too.

Kind regards,

Andrew

[Tom Zander]

On Thursday, 18 January 2018 01:47:45 CET Andrew Clausen wrote:
> However, this doesn't work! The gnome-terminal process exits immediately
> (it spawns gnome-terminal-server in the background to do the real work),

> I suspect this is the reason that an xterm
> is on the DispVM menu instead of gnome-terminal.

Thats rather unfortunate, I would suggest trying Konsole as an alternative,
it certainly looks much better than xterm. It also doesn't have the
described problem.

--
Tom Zander
Blog: https://zander.github.io
Vlog: https://vimeo.com/channels/tomscryptochannel

[Holger Levsen]

On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 02:58:14PM +0100, 'Tom Zander' via qubes-devel wrote:
> Thats rather unfortunate, I would suggest trying Konsole as an alternative,

I found "sakura" to be much more lightweight and still supporting
font-resizing with ctrl+(plus|minus) by default. It's also available on
Fedora, Debian & whonix.


--
cheers,
Holger

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

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Let me try (on f26):

$ sakura
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

:(

Looks like I'm not the only one:
https://pastebin.com/PMHDPkSb (looks like the same bug)
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1349250

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
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[Holger Levsen]

On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 03:16:26PM +0100, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki wrote:
> Let me try (on f26):
> $ sakura

hmpf. I've only tried in on f25… (IOW: still using xterm in dom0 as less
is more there.)


--
cheers,
Holger

[Andrew Clausen]

Hi again,

On 18 January 2018 at 00:47, Andrew Clausen <andrew.p...@gmail.com> wrote:

Anyway, I think I have a solution, based on systemd:

qvm-run '$dispvm' "gnome-terminal; systemctl --user start gnome-terminal-server --wait"

I haven't yet tested the analogous command on Qubes 4.0, but I expect this approach should work there too.

I have just tested it.  I can confirm that the corresponding work-around for Qubes 4.0 works properly:

qvm-run-vm --dispvm "gnome-terminal; systemctl start --wait gnome-terminal-server"

Kind regards,

Andrew