I am trying to set the background to my fresh awesome window manager running on a raspberry pi V2. I followed carefully the begginers guide on https://awesomewm.org/apidoc/documentation/07-my-first-awesome.md.html# but when I restart X, the background is not set. Google is already sick of me... :-| trying to find out why...
I've noticed thie following info in the console after killing xorg:
W: awesome: xerror:881: X error: request=PutImage (major 72, minor 0), error=BadLength (16)
Note: it is not only a problem of not being able to change background, but even the default background picture is not even showed
This is a bug in some software. I would prematurely blame cairo, but I am not sure.
PutImage is used to upload image data to the X11 server. This request fails in your case with a BadLength error. This means that there was not as much data provided as the server expects. For example, an image of size 10x10 with 8bpp would need 800 bytes, but there could also be padding invovled etc.
It is quite likely that this is a PutImage request that should upload the wallpaper. I guess you either get a random wallpaper or a garbled one displaying "random noise"?
Could you open a bug report at https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/issues/new and include the output of
xdpyinfo.Also, could you set a wallpaper with some other tool (for example
feh --bg-scale image.jpg) and then try setting a wallpaper through awesome viaecho 'require("gears.wallpaper").maximized("/path/to/image.jpg")' | awesome-client? (The code path is slightly different when a wallpaper is already set, thus this might actually make a difference).Oh and: What's your cairo version?