Animations' "Explode" and "Leaf Spread" sometimes crash Compiz

[Endre Stølsvik]

Binary package hint: compiz

I find the animations of Compiz very nice. For the Close animation, I particularly like the "Explode" effect of Animations Add-On.

However, *sometimes* when I do close the window and the explosion occurs, the animation suddenly freezes towards the end (while it is fading out) - and of those times, sometimes this takes down the entire compiz.

Observations:
The machine then hangs for several seconds (nearly up to a minute), until suddenly it responds again - and now all windows are on one screen, without decorations.

The mouse cursor still work (also during the freeze) and the windows are still working (after the freeze "thawes" again) - if I'm lucky and a terminal is active, I can simply get cracking again by writing "compiz-real" and hitting enter. I've used absurd schemes when this wasn't the case: I cut'n'pasted letter by letter into a terminal, finally pasting a line feed, thus getting things up again. All the windows are then on the same screen, so I have to lay them out onto the other desktops. Since the menus are still working, I've now set up some menu items to be able to start metacity or compiz from there.

I enabled the Crash handler via CompizConfig Settings Manager - so I thought it would save a crash dump in /tmp. I've never found such, though. I've enabled the "Start Other Window Manager", and set the command line to "metacity". This seems to have worked once or twice - but sometimes it doesn't, and I've had to use the mentioned menu item I created.

I tried the Animation "Leaf Spread" instead - since it is pretty similar to Explode. However, I just got the exact same thing happing with that too.

One observation which I have no idea whether is connected, is that in particular when Explode was active (but it has happened with Leaf Spread too), it sometimes looked like the animation didn't *quite* finish up - the last frame of the animation, where the pieces was on their biggest, and the fade-out on its most extreme, it just stopped - so that this final image was left - but compiz didn't crash afterall. If I then take hold of another window and moved that about, it would work as an eraser that wiped that left-over image away. (I find that this latter aspect is also described in bug 388716)

[Endre Stølsvik (stolsvik)]

(Note that I tried to submit this using the ubuntu-bug (apport?) - but the final submit apparently timed out (I got a screen telling me so, a HTML screen, not from the browser's side), which I really find very disturbing. Luckily I had the text in the cut buffer.)

[Endre Stølsvik (stolsvik)]

Sometimes, the mentioned "ghosting" also appears outside of the close animations, like here by just dragging a window (I have those wobbly windows) - see attachment. That ghost just stays there - but I can "erase" it (and create new ghosts!) by dragging the window across.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. However, your crash report is either missing or challenging to deal with as a ".crash" file. Please follow these instructions to have apport report a new bug about your crash that can be dealt with by the automatic retracer.

If you are running the Ubuntu Stable Release you might need to enable apport in /etc/default/apport and restart.

If you are using Ubuntu with the Gnome desktop environment - launch nautilus and navigate to your /var/crash directory and double click on the crash report you wish to submit.
If you are using Kubuntu or Xubuntu you can file the crash using /usr/share/apport/apport-qt --crash-file=/var/crash/_my_crash_report.crash in a terminal - where _my_crash_report.crash is the crash you would like to report.

I'm closing this bug report since the process outlined above will automatically open a new bug report which can then dealt with more efficiently. Thanks in advance for your cooperation and understanding.