SOLVED! Pidgin ignores DISPLAY variable.

[Kevin Stange]

Rogier Wolff wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 06:48:10PM -0600, Kevin Stange wrote:
>> Rogier Wolff wrote:
>> <snip>
>>> Pidgin however doesn't seem to support the first method (no -display
>>> option), and it more or less ignores the DISPLAY environment variable:
>>>
>>> it mumbles: 
>>>
>>> Xlib:  extension "RANDR" missing on display ":1.0".
>>>
>>> and then displays on :0.0
>> Pidgin has --display= and honors the DISPLAY environmental variable.
>>
>> When I try to use an alternate display Pidgin seems to work fine with
>> it.  I know it handles multiple displays properly as I've used it on
>> multi-user systems with multiple people running Pidgin and over X
>> forwarding.  I was able to successfully use it with Xnest.
> 
> I was actually trying to use it with Xvfb. 
> 
> % Xvfb :1 &
> % setenv DISPLAY :1.0
> % xterm &
> % sawfish &
> % pidgin --display :1.0 &
> % pidgin &
> 
> 
> I have a feeling pidgin contacts some sort of gnome-session manager,
> which tells it: "we are SUCH a happy familiy here on :0.0 come join
> us!!"
> 
> I just tested with Xnest. Same behaviour: 
> 
> % Xnest :2 &
> % setenv DISPLAY :2.0
> % xterm &
> % sawfish &
> % pidgin &
> % pidgin --display :2.0 &
> 
> OK Found it. 
> 
> It is not connecting to some gnome-thingy, it's contacting another
> pidgin. I apparently closed the pidgin window, but it was still
> running in the background.
> 
> killall pidgin fixes things. Sorry for the confusion. 
> 
> May I make a suggestion then? If I'm starting a pidign that determines
> anohter pidgin is running with a different display, it should print a
> warning....

It does print a warning for me:

(12:24:05) main: exiting because another libpurple client is already running

It is a bit buried in the output though.  It's possible I'm only seeing
it because of --enable-debug, which means you'd see if if you ran pidgin -d.

You can get around this by running pidgin -m (multi-instance) or -c (to
specify an alternate configuration file path).  It's generally not
advised to run two Pidgin (or other libpurple client) instances off the
same configuration directory as the last client to write configs will
win the race in terms of whose settings are remembered.

Kevin

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