windows completely disappear when "minimize" button clicked

[Paul Johnson]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 2:11 PM, Leonard Chatagnier
<lenc5570 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>

>>
>> They are wasting your time telling you to remove the compiz
>> package.
>> Compiz is the window manager that gives desktop effects,
>> but I doubt
>> you are running it if you have never heard of it.  Further,
>>  It has
>> NOTHING to do with the problem you see.  The windows are
>> there, you
>> just need to find them.  Use Alt-TAB.  If you start the
>> window list
>> applet in the gnome panel, you can find the minimized ones.
>> PJ
>>
> Yes, Paul, what you say is true in general. But, wasn't the OP asking why his windows disappeared and why there were no entries in the panel. Believe it or not compiz caused me similar problems. Windows shouldn't disappear from the panel unless you closed it out or some other program is fiddling with it. I don't use Intrepid yet but would like to also know why the window disappeared and did not show on the panel.  Can you explain?
> Leonard Chatagnier
> lenc5570 at sbcglobal.net
>

I think I said in the first post, you need to check if the program had
actually died or been sent a kill signal or if it is just floating in
window manager land.  For that, there are many techniques, but i run

ps aux

to list everything that's running and I grep for specifics, like

ps aux | grep firefox

If you don't want to bother with that, you might just hit Alt-TAB a
bunch of times to cycle through all open windows.

Now, if a program is running and you see it in ps output, it is not
"disappeared", it is just lost to the gnome panel.   Sometimes my
students say "the program disappeared" and I've never found one that
was actually gone.  As I also said in the first post to answer this
OP, the panel's program listing applet may die and so it will appear
to you as though programs are 'gone', but they are not.  Or the
program listing applet may only show programs on the current
workspace, but the window was somehow inadvertently moved to a
different workspace.

<old_timer_rant>
Sometimes I think Gnome is a bad thing for Linux users.  Unless people
go through the old-fashioned experience of starting X11 without a
pimpy/automagical desktop, they seem to not understand some pretty
important, basic things.  There is a program called the "window
manager" that controls window placement and, if it supports
minimization or "window shading", then it will have procedures to
retrieve windows from that state.  The Gnome experience has made
people so dependent on the all-powerful panel as a replacement for
basic window management skills that I shutter to go into the computer
lab and see the weird things students do.  If you administer your own
system, you might see about installing a true window manager like
Window Maker and studying up on that.  You can run "gnome-panel"
inside there if you want to.  If you go really old school, uninstall
the graphical log in altogether and run startx to bring up the X
server.  You don't learn anything until you break something.

But, then again, you gotta take my advice with caution.  I also think
that cars that actually start on the first time are bad because nobody
can change a starter motor or spark plugs anymore.
</old_timer_rant>

pj

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas