[Simon]

So under Tiger my X11 Applications menu was full of stuff like
[codex]xterm -geometry 100x37+50+50 -sb -sl 10000 -e ssh someServer.com[/codex]

Now under Leopard the Applications menu seems to be broken. An enrty such as
[codex]xterm[/codex]
will work, but as soon as you give it an argument like
[codex]xterm -e ls[/codex]
nothing will happen, IOW the menu is broken. The console log then shows an entry like:
[codex]04.11.07 15:07:13 org.x.X11[6589] login: xterm -geometry 100x37+50+50 -sb -sl 10000: No such file or directory[/codex]

Anybody else experience this behavior? Any ideas how to work around it? I hope we won't have to wait too long for the bugfix.

[Simon]

I've also noticed that xterm windows that I open from the xterm entry in the Applications menu are labeled "-xterm" as if they had been invoked as an argument of some other command. I see a lot of lines from "login" in my console, so my guess is it's something like
login -xterm.

I guess this has something to do with Apple's switch from XFree86 to X.org for their X11.

Can anybody confirm that this is a bug Apple's working on?

[MarkLT1]

Originally Posted by Simon 

Anybody else experience this behavior? Any ideas how to work around it? I hope we won't have to wait too long for the bugfix.

Yup. Definitely broken. I have found a (inconvenient) workaround- put your execution line in a shell script, and place the script in /usr/X11/bin . For example, place the following code in a new file: /usr/X11/bin/testLaunch

#!/bin/sh
/usr/X11/bin/xterm -geometry 100x37+50+50 -sb -sl 10000 -e ssh user@server.com

Then:
sudo chmod 755 /usr/X11/bin/testLaunch

Now, in your application menu, add the command "testLaunch". This should spawn an xterm window sshing server.com.

[Simon]

Yeah I did almost exactly that as a workaround once I noticed the bug. Still it's a royal pain to have to hack it together that way when all they obviously forgot to do was correctly handle white space in the Applications menu command.

I seriously hope a bugfix for this will be part of the 10.5.1 updater.

[MarkLT1]

It looks like one of the Apple Dev's has released an "alpha" update to X11.app. It appears to fix this issue. See here: Domain of the Bored » Blog Archive » How to make X11 work better on Leopard

[Simon]

Great link. Thanks!

[Simon]

I find it pretty disappointing that the 10.5.1 update didn't fix the X11 bugs. Even more so since patches are already available. Watcha waitin for, Apple?