skins crash mini menu [solved ish]


dan3008

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Sep 20, 2013
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Does anyone know why some (most it seems) skins crash mini menu? I've made a copy of a working skin, edited the background image, and its causing a crash :/


any ideas anyone? or even a hint on where to find the crash log (if there is one?)?


thanks


dan
 
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I believe the skins stopped working quite a few years ago, not sure the exact reason but if you delete the skin's folder off the sd card it's SUPPOSED to stop it from continuing to crash...


Skeezix would be the best one to ask about this, sorry I don't have any further information on getting them working for ya...
 
To the best of my knowledge, there's no crash log that is accessible from minimenu, just that mysterious crash.  Skeezix would know for sure though, and also perhaps a reason why your edited skin might crash it, but he's a busy guy.  If he doesn't pick up on this thread in the next few days, I'd suggest PMing him to direct him when he has time to check his PMs.
 
oh, one simple thing to check would be to make sure you're edited text is all using the same line ends (use dos2unix on the file) if you open it up in mousepad on the pandora and it brings up a box saying the file is not a standard format blah blah whatever then you might have that (or other) issues


You could try and check in /tmp for any kinda log... I know notaz made changes so any pnd puts it's log there, but I'm unsure about minimenu...
 
Thanks guys. The wierd thing is that the pipboy 3000 skin works, and a skin I made from the pipboy 3000 works.  but no others seem to :/
 
If I get it to happen again I will. I deleted the whole skin and started again to try and fix it. I'll let you know


--edit--


I've kind of solved this now. It seems to be 3 different things can cause skins to make mini menu crash...

  1. a bad config file, either just totally wrong, or using the windows new line instead of the nix newline. To solve this, I copy a working one, and only edit with notepad++ which can use the correct new line
  2. Missing images. All images seem to be required, and must be referenced in the conf. (the defaults seem to have been removed?)
  3. too big images. I mean file size, not dimensions. I've not found the limit yet, but if the total file size goes over a certain amount, it seems to cause an out of memory error. (I managed to get a dump from the command line over ssh to see the error)
 
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Please attach an example for each of these 3 problems. I cannot promise to do it soon, but if nobody beats me to it, I'll try to take a look and post fixes (then we only have to find someone to integrate them:)
 
yeah, theres a number of things that can cause mmenu to blow up during the skin process; it was supposed to have an auto-backout solution (if it tries to load a few times in a row, in very quick succession, assume a crash and go back to no-skin mode), but I  forget if that ever got checked in. I coded it, but I think it fell through the cracks.


Its been too long, I forget now.. missing artwork was supposed to fall back to default known-artwork and such, but certainly, so outright bad configs could cause crashes. I used to run mmenu by hand (from xfce and shell say), to witness the log of issues before it blew up. But just changing a skin, and rebooting the pandora, is a sure way to frustration.. need to (ironically?) fire up mmenu from non-mmenu in the skin development process.


Ultimately, skinning wasn't too flexible -- it was mostly to let you sub in different artwork and tweak positions a little; it was never super flexible (all the oddities fall out of the afact, that mmenu was born due to Craig asking 'hey, can you make a new menu since the other one isn't coming together in time, and we need it in a week'.. so mmenu was written I think in 3 days after work. That shows, a lot :(


jeff
 
Wow, I'm impressed that you could put anything together in that time which is so good. All in all I really like mini menu, and would love to use something similar in a few of my embedder projects :)  (with the raspberry pi)


But that aside. I now have a reasonable collection of working skins(Some my own work, some ones i've got working from openhandhelds.org), so within the week (by wednesday) I'll be releasing my skin manager into the wild, so that people can install the skins on their own pandora :)  


Hopefully, when the pyra come out (and i can persuade my wife to let me get one), I'll be able to do something similar, assuming that the pyra will have a similar system?
 
There is nothing preventing mmenu from being brought over to the Pyra, but that firmware is still wildly up in the air I think. mmenu works with standards (or should ;)


jeff
 
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