Dear Rich and Curage; First,
...Dear Rich
Thank you for the reply and suggestion I load JWM instead of FLWM_TOPSIDE.
I tried that and still get the BIG X, but on your suggestion I will tinker today and see if I can find a boot error somewhere in the system. Is there something besides DMESG that shows what's going on when 8x loads?
As for the "CLAIM" it "FEELS LIKE A "CHEAP GOCART"; since it doesn't have the "crash-splatter" behavior of FLWM_TOPSIDE because somehow I got it to work without it, 3x does not. It's something in the fonts and colors - that light blue borders - and the consistent behavior of a crash with an open terminal window, notepad, gnumeric, firefox etc. that leaves a FLWM_TOPSIDE window all blue and unable to hear keystrokes, mouse, even the top right corner X stops working, that makes it feel "cheap" or more accurately, "unable to be used for any production environment or God forbid, a home user unable to grapple with a splatter who would thus just walk away. It's not you. It's not TC which I adore.
Side note: A client had a medical software product she had sold to hospitals for several decades that was so good XEROX had a "nice guy" apply to be her CEO promising lots of new customers. She bit and that rat stole her software, fed it to XEROX who opened a competing firm, she found out about a year later, sued, which rattled in courts for 10 years, she finally won and retired with a $3M settlement.
Right before she did she asked me if I could "package up" her formula into an EXE instead of the nightmare XLS macros she had, and refine her process, which basically calculates the value of UNCOLLECTED DEBT a hospital has on their books; often $100M or more.
Her process ran 5 hours to process 2 weeks of debt for 1 hospital.
My first version, created with TCC (Tiny C) compiled on a WINE EMULATOR on TCE 3x so she could run it on her Windows Laptop was able to process 6 months of data for 2 Hospitals in the same 5 hours. So that's 26 weeks or 13X times her XLS macro speed times 2 hospitals or 26 times faster than her macros. It took me about 90 days to make that little EXE to run on Windows.
She was impressed so I asked her if she wanted to pay to make it go even faster. She liked that idea and I built a TCC version on TCE 3X - no Wine Emulator/Windows - just a TCE3X USB boot stick, and I did refine some of the program processes in that version, and even added some calcs I "invented" which improved her product.
It processed 6 months of data for 2 hospitals or 26 times more data than her macros processed, and it ran in 72 seconds...not 5 hours.
So when I say I love TCE, especially lil old 3x, for its' small, tight, reliable, super-fast performance, it's not a "CLAIM"; it's a cherished fact. It is thanks to your work and Curaga and others that I was able to dump Windows back in 2010, build a nice little package that does all my office, video/audio editing, manage 200 domains spanning 30000 pages etc. and if I had to go back to Windows I'd just die.
The only "nasty" I see in TCE that I haven't cured is the FONTS - some kind of resolution thing I don't know how to cure, and this FLWM TOPSIDE issue which makes it extremely unreliable, crashing several times a day, and which TCE 3X does not suffer from.
I will try your suggestion and tinker with the JWM on TCE 8X and let you know, although frankly I doubt 8X would process her data as quickly as 3X did.
Dear Curaga,
I ALWAYS use the onboot.lst that comes with each DISTRO, then tinker ONE LINE AT A TIME and reboot to see if any changes I make affect some other package.
I paid for college with a job debugging software...and have written code since 1979 - enough to fill several 40 foot sea containers to the roof with greenbar binders - so I'm kinda careful about "NOT BREAKING" what you folks made.
I hate systems programming. You folks love it and I love the fine art you make...so I always enjoy the dish as it came out of your oven before I plaster it with peanut butter, garlic and jalapeno sauce.