Celestia Forums

I guess Daniel J woke me up from a long sleep.
viewtopic.php?p=125699#p125699

Too make a long story short, I got a better tax refund then I thought I was getting. So I got a cheap laptop. That Pentium II I was using was driving me nuts. 5 minutes for a window to open. The specs will be updated in my signature.

Anyhow, I installed MS VS 2008 C++, QT4.7.1 and QT creator 2.1. At first I built Celestia 5136 without QT creator and when I tried to run it, my system became unresponsive. The mouse/touchpad will move the cursor but clicking did not work anything. No mouse clicks would do anything. Anyhow, after rebuilding with the QT creator I thought that fixed it but then I noticed that this behavior starts when I try to move the window. Celestia has started in a smaller than the screen window and part of it was below the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. When I try to position the cursor on the top of the window and try to move it up, the cursor and mouse become unresponsive.

It took a good 2 minutes before cntl, alt del would work to bring up the task manager. But after the task manager started (window changed), the system became responsive again. I'm not sure if this bug has something to do with Celestia, QT4 or C++. This may also have something to do with the graphics drivers on this laptop. But something is wrong here. This doesn't happen with any other app I used so far so............ But this is the only app I built on this machine.

cartrite

I think I should add that I also installed Celestia 1.6.0 and I have no problems with that. I also built 5136 with just MS VS C++ 2008 and I don't have problems with that either.
Every time I start those programs, It starts with a small window and I can move it all around.

QT4 always starts with a small window and the bottom of the window is beneath the taskbar. Whenever I try to move the window, it will not move and freezes the system. If I maximize the window before I try to move it, everything works fine. It seems like the minimized window is stuck in place and if one tries to move it, all hell breaks loose.

When I built the QT4 version of Celestia, I used the VS C++ compiler. I couldn't get the MinGW compiler that comes with QT4 to work. So I uninstalled it.

cartrite

Steve,

your findings sound somewhat surprising, since I am building the latest SVN regularly with Qt=2.7.2, Qt-Creator=2.1 under VS 2010 Express (64bit, Windows 7 Enterprise) without any bad effects showing up. Also under 32bit OpenSuse 11.1, 11.2 and 11.3 everything builds fine with the same Qt and Qt-creator versions. I never used the MinGW compiler.

But if you build the Qt version without Qt creator, you may have to set various Qt environment variables.

Another effect I know from my old desktop graphics card (FX5900Ultra/256 MB) under Linux is that Celestia becomes unresponsive if I switch to fullscreen while Celestia is running. I have that effect since many years. Everything is fine if I start Celestia with fullscreen option.

Congrats to your new computer!

Fridger

t00fri wrote:Steve,

your findings sound somewhat surprising, since I am building the latest SVN regularly with Qt=2.7.2, Qt-Creator=2.1 under VS 2010 Express (64bit, Windows 7 Enterprise) without any bad effects showing up. Also under 32bit OpenSuse 11.1, 11.2 and 11.3 everything builds fine with the same Qt and Qt-creator versions. I never used the MinGW compiler.

Hey Fridger,
It's been so long I feel like a newbie again. Surprising how much one forgets. More surprising how much one remembers.

Seems to be a bug with QT. I just built svn 5036 and got the same results. I'm going to see if I can get an earlier version to build but I had trouble with building 1.5.1. There were many changes since that time.

t00fri wrote:But if you build the Qt version without Qt creator, you may have to set various Qt environment variables.

The QT command console seems to set up the environment every time it opens. But I did add QT to the environment variables because Celestia need to find the QT dll's at run time. The console only sets the vars temporarily.
I like the QT creator though. A little easier. It wouldn't work with version 5036 though. It likes to build / create that desktop folder in the top directory. 5036 wasn't set up for that.

t00fri wrote:
Another effect I know from my old desktop graphics card (FX5900Ultra/256 MB) under Linux is that Celestia becomes unresponsive if I switch to fullscreen while Celestia is running. I have that effect since many years. Everything is fine if I start Celestia with fullscreen option.

Congrats to your new computer!

Fridger

Thanks. This computer isn't much but a lot better than that Pentium II. Celestia runs pretty good. Haven't added any addons but I get 40 to 60 fps with the standard stuff.
I may look into getting more ram for it. Haven't tried any graphics yet. Still, I need to build a new desktop PC. I miss Linux.

I'm still trying to figure this out. I wish I had an optical mouse to see if this is an issue with the laptops touch pad and buttons.

cartrite

A few more things to add. Went shopping for a driver update for the graphics and it was up to date. Built svn 4900 and still get the same results. I just ran it a few minutes ago and did not try to move the screen. I instead hit the view/fullscreen tab and closed it. Then when I restarted it started in full screen but when I exit fullscreen the window appears at the bottom with about 1/4 of the screen off the grid at the bottom. It will not move and will freeze up when I try to move it.

Also, I tried the video capture screen. That did not fully populate and it also caused a system freeze.

On one occasion, I tried to move the window with the window that appears when the cursor is positioned at the top left of the window and clicked. This window has the items restore, move, size, minimize, maximize, and close. This also caused a freeze. Whats interesting is that a blank box remained on my desktop after Celestia was shut down with the task manager. It did not disappear until after I logged off.

cartrite

t00fri wrote:Steve,

your findings sound somewhat surprising, since I am building the latest SVN regularly with Qt=2.7.2, Qt-Creator=2.1 under VS 2010 Express (64bit, Windows 7 Enterprise) without any bad effects showing up.

Which version of qt is this? The only one I could find is QT 4.7.1 and QT creator 2.0.1.
This is what I installed.
qt-win-opensource-4.7.1-vs2008
qt-creator-win-opensource-2.0.1

Maybe they work differently with VS 2010 Express?

I couldn't find any links to previous versions.

cartrite

Hallo Cartrite, welcome back again.
Yes, also myself has found the Celestia QT windows' behaviours you speaks a couple of months ago. I get such "bug" with GForce 6100 and GT 220 latest drivers update.

cartrite wrote:

t00fri wrote:Steve,

your findings sound somewhat surprising, since I am building the latest SVN regularly with Qt=2.7.2, Qt-Creator=2.1 under VS 2010 Express (64bit, Windows 7 Enterprise) without any bad effects showing up.

Which version of qt is this? The only one I could find is QT 4.7.1 and QT creator 2.0.1.
This is what I installed.
qt-win-opensource-4.7.1-vs2008
qt-creator-win-opensource-2.0.1

Maybe they work differently with VS 2010 Express?

I couldn't find any links to previous versions.

cartrite

Steve,

here are the OpenSuSE 11.1,11.2,11.3 repository references for Qt-4.7.2 that I am using for Linux

http://download.opensuse.org/repositori ... SUSE_11.1/
http://download.opensuse.org/repositori ... SUSE_11.2/
http://download.opensuse.org/repositori ... SUSE_11.3/

The corresponding Qt-creator is "almost" version 2.1 (2.0.94)
These are beta versions. I don't have any problems with them.

However, for windows 7 64bit I suppose I actually have version 4.7.1 installed. Sorry for not checking explicitly, since I was in a hurry.

Fridger

So Linux has a 4.7.2 version. OK. Since I built svn version 4900 and still got the same results, I'm thinking it's a problem with QT4. I'll try to build QT from source later today and see what happens. Then I'll report this to Nokia.
cartrite

Steve,

since the dev activity was low in the celestia/trunk branch during the last months, I had not rebuilt celestia.SVN-qt most recently under Windows 7. Today, I did it. The installed versions on my Windows 7 64bit installation are (now checked explicitly)

1) VS 2010 express
2) QT-4.7.0 built with VS 2008
3) Qt-creator 2.0.1

Throughout, I built the latest SVN version r.5136 in 32bit mode.

Since my default settings were on fullscreen display for celestia-qt4, I had previously not noticed any problems! But after switching to a window that is smaller than my laptop screen (like you did), I can now fully reproduce your above-noted problems:

The celestia window slides to the bottom of the screen such that only a small part of the window remains visible. The cursor remains movable but the mouse commands do not react. I cannot move the celestia window anymore!

After restarting celestia-qt4 with this smaller windows size, things looked again fine at first, but soon the display and window movability froze again for some minutes.

So there's definitely a bug in this Qt-configuration.

Next, I rebuilt celestia-qt under Linux to find out whether this may be a bug associated with Windows 7 in some way.

The used versions (openSuSE 11.2) were

gcc-4.4.1
qt-4.7.2 (beta)
qt-creator 2.094

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Here I cannot see any problems when switching between fullscreen and windowed mode!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Since I am mostly using this Desktop machine with Linux for my Celestia.Sci development work, this was another reason for not noticing the above bug under Windows 7.

Finally, I rebuilt celestia-qt under openSuSE 11.3 (32bit) on the same machine (Dell laptop), where the bug occured under Windows 7. This is to check whether there might be an issue with the graphics card/driver.

The used versions were:
gcc-4.5.0
qt-4.7.2 (beta)
qt-creator 2.0.94

Also in this case, NO problem! The celestia-qt window may be moved with the cursor and the display is fast and reactive.

I'll display my findings also in the dev list, since Chris has written his last post in shatters.net on Oct.1st 2010, i.e. 4 1/2 months ago. I am thus not sure whether he's reading continuously what's going on here.


Fridger

Cartrite, Fridger: the bug is present also on Xp (my system) not only on Windows 7. FYI, at least on Xp, when the windows frozen, I must press ctrl+alt+del and then simply do close the taskswitch after its pop-up, without to close Celestia, for having it operative yet (unless I try to move the windows once again).

Fenerit wrote:Cartrite, Fridger: the bug is present also on Xp (my system) not only on Windows 7. FYI, at least on Xp, when the windows frozen, I must press ctrl+alt+del and then simply do close the taskswitch after its pop-up, without to close Celestia, for having it operative yet (unless I try to move the windows once again).

Thanks for pointing this out!

Fridger

Thanks guys. I was about to build qt yesterday but got busy with something. Beer!
After reading these posts, it seems that it wouldn't have made a difference anyway.

I skimmed through some of the docs at Nokia and found a couple of things interesting.
1. It seems that Microsoft compilers are not fully supported in the open source versions of QT4. Only the commercial version supports Visual Studio compilers.
2. QT4 uses a different way of using signals. The signal slot method. This method seems different than the way most window systems work.

Apparently, the signals to the mouse/touchpad clicks are not getting though. It may also have something to do with x y coordinates since a small window is being pinned at the bottom of the display and is partly off the grid. Seems like a signal is causing an endless loop when trying to move the window.

I'm going to post something in Nokia's bug tracker. But they may answer with a "Microsoft compilers are not supported in the open source version". I'll try and see.
cartrite

--- edit ---

Hey John,
I was able to build all the object files with MinGW, but it failed to link. For some reason, it wanted to find a file called "\nodefaultlib-libcmt.lib". Now there is a file libcmt.lib on my system but not nodefaultlib-libcmt.lib. The MinGW has a file libcmt.a. I may try it again if there is no response to the bug report I submitted.
http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTBUG-17416
But for now I'm going to see what happens there.
cartrite

Steve,

As I wrote in the devs list, I couldn't reproduce the bug you've described on either my desktop
(XP Pro SP3 32bits, NVidia GeForce 8600GT) or my laptop (XP Pro SP3 32bits, NVidia GeForce 9200m GS).

I compile Celestia-qt4 with:
- MSVC++ 2008 Express Edition
- Qt4.7.2 (just upgraded from 4.6.2 to 4.7.2)
- qmake celestia.pro

cartrite wrote:I was able to build all the object files with MinGW, but it failed to link. For some reason, it wanted to find a file called "\nodefaultlib-libcmt.lib". Now there is a file libcmt.lib on my system but not nodefaultlib-libcmt.lib.

Hi, Cartrite. Where you able to solve this? I am having the same error when linking from QtCreator. It says: :: error: /nodefaultlib:libcmt.lib: No such file or directory (notice a slight difference from the one you quote).

I have:
QtCreator 2.0.1
Qt 4.7.0
VS 2008 Express
Windows 7 Home Premium x64

Guillermo

--- edit ---

abramson wrote:

cartrite wrote:I was able to build all the object files with MinGW, but it failed to link. For some reason, it wanted to find a file called "\nodefaultlib-libcmt.lib". Now there is a file libcmt.lib on my system but not nodefaultlib-libcmt.lib.

Hi, Cartrite. Where you able to solve this? I am having the same error when linking from QtCreator. It says: :: error: /nodefaultlib:libcmt.lib: No such file or directory (notice a slight difference from the one you quote).

I have:
QtCreator 2.0.1
Qt 4.7.0
VS 2008 Express
Windows 7 Home Premium x64

Guillermo

Hi Abramson,

Actually, I think I got the same error as you, I was paraphrasing a bit. I think John may have given you the solution, not sure? I went with the VS 2008 C++ Express compiler after MinGW gave me trouble.

My main concern here was the system lockup I experienced after building QT versions with this laptop. It seems to only affect 64 bit systems though.

I was contacted by Nokia about the bug report I submitted. They need more info though. They would like the app built then attached to an email that reproduces this problem. I think the celestia-qt4.exe file would be small enough to attach but not all the support files it needs to run. So I haven't responded yet. I'm not even sure if the qt version has reach the point in development where it can be used by a user who has not built it.

Cartrite

--- edit ---