Top panels doesn't exist on any windows until I do 'metacity --replace'

[Thomas Novin]

I have a fresh install of Hardy Alpha 4. I have no top panels on any applications I open, for example Nautilus, Calculator etc.

If I do 'metacity --replace' the order is restored.

Visual effects is set to none.

Driver is fglrx (which is very badly configured, I only have 640x480). This is the xorg.conf that was produced for me after enabling the restricted driver though.

$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=hardy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu hardy (development branch)"
$ fglrxinfo
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Mobility Radeon X1600
OpenGL version string: 2.1.7276 Release

Update:

I have changed to my old xorg.conf since I gave up creating a good one without editing xorg.conf manually. The problem is back. The problem doesn't exist when I'm starting up with xorg.conf.failsafe.

[Thomas Novin (thomasn80)]

This was actually fixed by doing 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg'. The bug I should have opened was probably about the bad install of fglrx.

[Thomas Novin (thomasn80)]

Back to New because the problem is back.

[Thomas Novin (thomasn80)]

I have now found a solution to this issue. It seems that I have a hanging glxinfo process which seems to halt the startup of many programs, including metacity.

I have in my initial state 100% CPU usage which is consumed by Xorg and glxinfo. Just by chance I ran 'glxgears' to see if I had good 3D performance. It immediately made glxinfo quit and metacity etc. immediately started and everything was back to normal.

So by running glxgears I crashed/ended glxinfo which made the desktop start continue again.

[Thomas Novin (thomasn80)]

After digging some more in finding out why glxinfo is called I found out that it was compiz probing for needed gl features. I have not enabled desktop effects, nor can I since I have a ATI X1600 graphics card.

After blacklisting my PCI ID in /usr/bin/compiz this issue was solved for me (by setting T="1002:71c5").