Blender problem with compiz

[frederyk]

There is a Blender-window problem in Hardy. It is impossible to start Blender windowed, it starts every time full screen. The next problem is, that it don't locks the screen, so quite often symbols from the back writes in the blender screen. So blender gets unusable. In expose mode or in the scale feature of compiz blender dissapears. please see the pics I added.

Hardware: (Intel eeepc)

Thanks for the good distribution. I think hardy will be the best ubuntu ever, even the beta is right now more stable than gutsy or feisty.

[Pietro Battiston (toobaz)]

I absolutely confirm the bug.

I'm using a 64 bit (final) Hardy, with an ATI Xpress200M drived by proprietary fglrx. I also use compiz, also see tshat Blender always starts fullscreen, and in my case the superposition of other windows on blender is far worse; basically, I nearly never see anything of Blender, (though it is the window focus is on) except, when I move the mouse over an animated button or click the mouse so a menu popups; in those cases I see for a very short lapse of time Blenders' GUI; then, it disappears again. To exit Blender (and regain usability of my computer) I must use "ALT-TAB" and then close it.

I'm attaching a screenshot of Blender active fullscreen and focused... but invisible.

Please feel free to contact me for any further testing.

[Jonathan Harris (ubuntu-marginal)]

Try unchecking "Legacy Fullscreen Support" under System->Preferences->Advanced Desktop Effects Settings

[Pietro Battiston (toobaz)]

Done; unfortunately it didn't solve the problem. Actually, nothing changed (except all the three times I tried, after closing Blender the Gnome panels got unresponsive for a couple of minutes - but this may be unrelated to this bug).

[Christoph Langner (chrissss)]

I can confirm this problem too.

$ dpkg -l blender
ii blender 2.45-4ubuntu1 Very fast and versatile 3D modeller/renderer

$ dpkg -l compiz
ii compiz 1:0.7.4-0ubuntu6 OpenGL window and compositing manager

[Branon Young (ecsa0014)]

I can also confirm this bug.

I am using 64-bit Hardy on an emachines M6810 laptop w/ an ATI mobility Radeon graphics chip. With compiz enabled, Blender will not start windowed and is totally unusable due to the constant flashing between the Blender GUI and the desktop. With compiz disabled, No problems.

[VirtualEntity (lafeyette-management)]

Confirmed on 64-bit hardy on a Gateway DX4200 with 6 GB RAM, quad-core AMD CPU and an ATI 3450 graphics adapter. Note that without Compiz enabled, graphics on this machine are reliable, but very slow.

Turning off the legacy fullscreen support does not resolve the problem.

[sevy72 (seby)]

It's possible to bypass this problem in this way:

specifiyng the initial size of the window, for example:

blender -w -p 0 0 700 700

:-)

[VirtualEntity (lafeyette-management)]

More detail of Sevy72's fix--I found this at: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=598971

HOWTO: Run Blender in Windowed Mode - Method 1--Blender-Specific
Command-Editing

When you install Blender it creates two menu items: one for fullscreen
mode and one for windowed mode. For some reason, windowed mode has never
worked for me - even with the latest version in Gutsy - it always opens
in full screen.

You can solve this by explicitly specifying the position and dimensions
of the window using the command-line option -p. From the blender help
(blender --help):

 Code:

 -p <sx> <sy> <w> <h> Open with lower left corner at <sx>, <sy>
    and width and height <w>, <h>

For example, I have a 1280x1024 desktop. I want Blender to open as a
1024x768 window in the top left corner of the desktop - with a little
padding. I found that the following options did what I needed:

 Code:

 blender -p 5 225 1024 768

What these options are saying:

    * I want the left edge of the blender window to be 5 pixels from
    the left edge of the screen.
    * I want the bottom edge of the blender window to be 225 pixels from
    the bottom edge of the screen.
    * The blender window will be 1024 pixels wide.
    * The blender window will be 768 pixels high.

You might need to play with these settings to get them right for your
tastes, which you can do from the terminal. Anyway, when it's open in
windowed mode - you can then simply move / resize the window as normal -
and even open multiple instances. Neat!

If you want to change your Gnome Applications menu entry for blender to
use these settings by default, simply:

   1. Go to System / Preferences / Main Menu (in Gnome, not blender)
   2. Navigate to Applications / Graphics
   3. Right-click on 'Blender 3D modeller (windowed)' and select
   properties, which opens up a window for you to edit that menu item. (It
   sometimes appears out of focus below my other windows for some reason,
   but you can select it from the task bar).
   4. Change command to be the blender command with your size / position
   options.
   5. Press Close and you're done.

- Jelly.

[ubby (kostas-sytske)]

Thank you.
But I think this is very difficult for a Ubuntu newbie.
The best solution is to solve the bug.

[VirtualEntity (lafeyette-management)]

ubby wrote:
> Thank you.
> But I think this is very difficult for a Ubuntu newbie.
> The best solution is to solve the bug.
>
>
Agreed. But it may not be so hard for us kind souls with a wee bit more
experience who might be willing to help our newbie friends.... Surely,
it's better than nothing, and people need to start learning somewhere! ;-)

A./

[Ahmet Öztürk (dmxe)]

unchecking "Legacy Fullscreen Support " in CompizConfig Settings Manager (which is under workarounds category) worked for me.

thanks.

blender: 2.48a
ubuntu: 8.10

[photomuse (photomuse)]

I too have an ATI graphics card and this problem manifest itself when I updated to the ATI drivers. However,
I discovered that the ATI install turned on desktop effects (which had previously been turned off), and when I turned these completely off, the problem went away:

Systems-->preferences-->appearance-->visual effects

Set this to none. It fixed it for me.

[Tomás Gutiérrez (tomas-gutierrez)]

All - The easiest solution for the time being is to disable Compiz. This can be easily done with the fusion-icon package. It lets you toggle between compiz and metacity with the click of a mouse.

Need to use Blender? Select metacity
Want pretty eye-candy? Revert to compiz

Hope this helps.

[Branon Young (ecsa0014)]

@togume
Way to bump a really old bug but I think most knew they could disable Compiz. We were looking for a fix to this problem, your suggestion is simply a workaround. It's been a while so this problem may be fixed by know.

[Travis Watkins (amaranth)]

Actually, yeah, this bug is fixed in karmic. Not sure how I missed this bug report, I was working with a duplicate.

[exactt (giesbert)]

running latest karmic amd64 with fglrx drivers and blender has problems with compiz(menu not usable etc.). disabling compiz made it work...
should i open a new report?