compiz does not start

[Miguel Martinez]

On an up-to-date Hardy (25-1-2008), desktop effects won't start via the appearance menu. If one invokes compiz via the console, the output is:

$ compiz --replace
Checking for Xgl: not present.
Detected PCI ID for VGA: 01:00.0 0300: 1002:4e50 (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
 Flags: bus master, VGA palette snoop, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 11
Checking for texture_from_pixmap: not present.
Trying again with indirect rendering:
Checking for texture_from_pixmap: present.
Checking for non power of two support: present.
Checking for Composite extension: present.
Comparing resolution (1280x800) to maximum 3D texture size (2048): Passed.
Checking for nVidia: not present.
Checking for FBConfig: present.
Checking for Xgl: not present.
/usr/bin/compiz: 400: /usr/local/bin/compiz: not found

I haven't touched the /usr/bin/compiz script at all, but it references (as shown in the message error) /usr/local/bin/compiz.real and looks for plugins in /usr/local/lib/compiz.

[Miguel Martinez (el-quark)]

I attach here a patch that will substitute /usr/local with /usr in the compiz script, which should make things working again.

I should also mention that I unpacked the latest compiz-core deb and the /usr/bin/compiz script contained there does point to /usr/local/bin.

[Travis Watkins (amaranth)]

You seem to have removed your /etc/xdg/compiz/compiz-manager file. This file is included in the compiz-core package and sets up the correct paths. Reinstall the compiz-core package to get it back.

[Miguel Martinez (el-quark)]

I see, I'm sorry to have reported it. Thanks for your comment.

Anyway, neither aptitude reinstall compiz-core nor apt-get (via
synaptic) put a file in /etc/xdg/compiz/compiz-manager, even though
that file is indeed inside the compiz-core deb. Do you have any clue
why my system doesn't put the file where it belongs? I fear some stuff
might be misconfigured such as xdg-*

Thanks again and good luck with those nasty bugs

[Chris Halse Rogers (raof)]

You're probably seeing dpkg's config file handling: /etc/xdg/compiz/compiz-manager, being under /etc/, is a config file and policy is that any changes the user has made to a config file should be preserved on package upgrades. Since you've deleted that file, dpkg assumes you've done that deliberately and won't overwrite your config change.

You can get around this by either purging the compiz-core package (which will reset dpkg's conf file handling), or extract the file from the deb and put it in the right place yourself.