Newsbin in wine stops downloading - workaround

[DThor]

Hopefully this is just a local issue, but I've noticed in recent betas(B6+) Newsbin will start to download, then after a few chunks simply stop. There are no errors, either in Newsbin or wine, and the connections tab just shows "finished". Newsbin isn't locked out, I can quit it and it successfully saves the current download list. I've managed to track it down to the Download tab and painting. If that tab isn't displayed, this problem never happens. No need to disable it - simply have another tab visible over it during download instead. So if you happen to come across this behaviour, that's the workaround for now.

This happened way back in the earliest days of testing NB5 alphas, but went away before v5 ever made it to beta. I'm keeping an eye on it.

DT

[Quade]

Finally got a decent wine install under Ubuntu. Plenty of stuff doesn't run under it. Got the development tools almost working but, the dialogs are all scrunched up. Ideally, I could get the devel tools working then actually debug it under wine.

Any thoughts on the scrunched dialogs? I've jerked with native DLL's some.

[DThor]

Not offhand, but I had found this somewhat related post last month about someone toying with the notion of using VC under wine as an IDE:

http://www.winehq.org/hypermail/wine-de ... /0047.html

some informative responses.

DT

[EDIT]actually, a little poking around found that for some reason ubuntu tends to run somewhat old versions of wine(not sure if that comment is up-to-date tho'). I forget which VC you run(I know it wasn't the .NET thing, anyway), but according to

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?appId=53

it runs well under 20050419, and I didn't see any odd visuals with the dialogs in their screen shots.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I can confirm I have had the problem with Newsbin going to sleep as well. It mostly seems to recover if I move the mouse (forces a window update?) though I think at least once I had to close a reopen Newsbin.

The only other real problem (other than it being slow of course) is if I leave it running long enough it will stop decoding the posts and they will build up showing "paused" as their status. Again a simple close/reload of Newsbin gets the decoder going again.

Its worth noting that I ALWAYS leave Newsbin open on the download tab so I will try leaving it on a different tab to see if it helps. Its just somewhat annoying when I leave it overnight to download and realise it had stopped downloading 10 minutes after I had turned the monitor off - lol.

Overall though im just glad it runs on Linux at all, it enables me to run it on my Linux server which runs 24/7 instead of having to leave an XP machine on overnight too when I want to download something. At least with Linux I only need to close Newsbin when things get awry, XP left for a few days HAS to be rebooted to recover its performance.

[Quade]

My XP's at least as reliable as my Ubuntu server. I ended up killing X because it was crashing my server. Now I'm just command line.

I'd look in the status messages when it stops assembling. There were some versions where the assembly thread would drop dead. Hasn't happened recently.

[richy99]

XP left for a few days HAS to be rebooted to recover its performance.

no it doesnt, mine hasn't been rebooted in about 3 weeks and ther eis no difference in performance

[Infidelus]

Agreed. I usually only reboot my XP box after patch Tuesday, so once a month.

[DThor]

Alex - that original post of mine was pretty old and I'm quite certain referred to a different(long gone) problem. However yup, there's no question that depending on the phases of the moon, if I flip to a different desktop sometimes NB will stop working until I focus back. Even things like loading a spool - I'll sometimes need to wave the mouse to get it to take. It's so incredibly sporadic, I've given up trying to track it down(most of the time this doesn't happen - some sessions it doesn't stop).

I'm reasonably certain this is a wine issue, however.

As far as the reboot-XP thing - I think people tend to jump on that comment a lot, understandably. From my experience, the NT-descendant windows versions are definitely as stable as your average Linux distribution. However, I think the reality is that most Linux boxes will stay up much longer stretches of time simply because of the concentration of virii, trojans worms on Windows. The registry doesn't help and the fact that many Windows patches require reboots. On Linux the only time you need to reboot is when you replace the kernel.

DT

[Alex Atkin UK]

I didnt notice the date, its just it matches problems I have had recently.

Well everyone uses their PC differently but I DEFINATELY find that XP drifts into less and less reliability the longer you have it running. Not as bad as 98 but its there. Its not so much an XP problem but simply that I use and abuse XP a lot more than Linux so naturally the more junk on your system the less reliable it is, and memory leaks im sure are partly the problem. Linux has its issues but I have always found it FAR better memory management than XP, it doesnt use 1.5GB of virtual memory "just for the hell of it" like XP seems to do. But again, I give my XP machine some seriously heavy multitasking, the kind of stuff I would struggle to do on Linux because its not as user friendly or the software simply doesnt exist.

The main point though, I have DEFINATELY seen XP network performance drop so it can no longer handle my full ADSL speed after it has been running for a few days. Perhaps, like my Linux box, if you hardly ever multitask, open and close apps it remains solid. I dont use XP like thatm I run a million things at once all necessary mind you, im not one of those system tray junkies that have a million pieces of spyware running.