[Techtalk] trying to get xmon to work...

[Riccarda Cassini]

Hi all,

trying to debug some X cross-platform interoperability problem
(specifically between Linux and AIX), I thought it might be a good idea
to take a closer look at how the X client and server are talking to
each other.  Not sure whether that'll really help (if I'm doing it...),
but why not try.

I googled, and found "xmon", which appears to be exactly the tool I'm
looking for, as it claims to be able to intercept and transcribe X
protocol requests/events/etc. into human readable form.
However, it seems I need to debug xmon first ;-)   Or, maybe, someone
can tell me what I'm doing wrong...

According to the manpage, I did

$ xmonui | xmond

This brings up a GUI (where I can configure what exactly to intercept),
while xmond is meant to listen on ":1" (by default), where I'm expected
to point my X program to, by setting DISPLAY to the appropriate value.
The transcribed X messages are supposed to be written to stdout.

So, in another terminal, I setup

$ export DISPLAY=localhost:1.0

and tried to start various X programs. This does not work, however.
Problem is, I always get

XIO:  fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server "localhost:1.0"
      after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

And in the other terminal, where I ran "xmonui | xmond", the following
error message is written:

gethostbyname failed: No such file or directory
Can't open connection to Server

So, as you might guess, I'm a bit clueless what to do next... :-)
Any help much appreciated.

Riccarda


PS: I'm currently using xmon-1.5.6 on a Debian system, but the same
problem can be reproduced with self-compiled xmon tools on a SUSE
system, so it doesn't seem to be distro specific...