Window titles missing + appearance prefs crashes

[Phil Bayfield]

After upgrade to Lucid beta 2 I no longer have window titles when logging in.
I can restore the window titles by turning effects on in appearance preferences, however after clicking 'keep settings' both dialogs freeze.
Effects are not properly enabled, after logout/login or reboot I am back to no window titles and have to repeat the process.

[Phil Bayfield (philio)]

Managed to get titles back doing the following:

In Appearance Prefs click to enable effects, when prompted choose keep existing settings.
Appearance prefs again freezes, logout, login, window titles are back.

Desktop effects do not work whatsoever as attempting to enable them causes prefs to freeze (and reverts back to the missing titles after logout/reboot/etc)

[Phil Bayfield (philio)]

After clean install of 10.04 beta 2 netbook edition, the effects tab is completely grayed out with no options available at all!

[Phil Bayfield (philio)]

Ok previous comment is incorrect, effects were disabled because compiz wasn't installed by default.
After installing Compiz, it worked as expected but appearance dialogue continued to freeze as before.
With upgrade version there is a conflict with compiz/metacity stopping compiz working.

Hence, this is in fact 2 separate issues:

1. Compiz conflicts with metacity following upgrade and doesn't work at all.
2. Appearance dialogue crashes when trying to change effects.

[Oxben (oxben)]

Since I upgraded my Lucid beta 1 installation to beta 2 a couple of days ago (Saturday 10th), I face
the same two issues as the reporter:

1. Compiz doesn't work anymore on my MSI Wind netbook (Intel 945GM chipset)

2. Appearance dialog crashes when trying to enable Desktop effects.

Compiz was running very well on the same system since I installed Lucid alpha 2 a couple of weeks ago.

My system is a MSI Wind netbook
* CPU: Intel Atom 1.6GHz
* 1GB RAM
* Graphic chipset: Intel 945GSE

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Could you please run from a command line: apport-collect 559056 .It will attach the required information to the report, for more detailed Debugging instructions please look at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingCompiz. Thanks in advance.

[Orange (orange)]

This sounds similar to the problems that I am having.

Two months ago, I upgraded my Acer laptop to Lucid 10.04, and things haven't been right since.
The screen was badly messed up after the upgrade. I had to find a workaround to even see anything
on the screen. Alas, at this moment I cannot find the kernel setting modeswitch that I did.

The current problem is:
The title bars at the top of windows disappear and workspace switching does not work after
I try to change the number of virtual workspaces. Trying to change the number of workspaces
again produces a flashing window that doesn't set things correctly.
It blows the user interface so bad that I have
to log in with a different identity, and destroy my original account, and then recreate it to
get something usable.

I just reinstalled xwindows, and that didn't fix it either. But it did improve things. Now I can enable "normal" effects in "Appearances", where before I could not. Yesterday, I was getting the error message of
"No rendering method in use -- AIGLX, Xgl, or Nvidia.

Now I have one, and compiz seems sort of happy.

terry2@carmen:~$ compiz-check

Gathering information about your system...

 Distribution: Ubuntu 10.04
 Desktop environment: GNOME
 Graphics chip: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
 Driver in use: intel
 Rendering method: AIGLX

Checking if it's possible to run Compiz on your system...

 Checking for texture_from_pixmap... [ OK ]
 Checking for non power of two support... [ OK ]
 Checking for composite extension... [ OK ]
 Checking for FBConfig... [ OK ]
 Checking for hardware/setup problems... [ OK ]

glxinfo happily reports a whole lot of stuff that says that glx is running, apparently properly.

But still, I cannot change the number of workspaces without destroying things.

I used this script today (run as root) to get rid of old stuff that should have been wiped during the upgrade:

#!/bin/bash
apt-get purge nvidia*
apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-video-intel libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
update-alternatives --remove gl_conf /usr/lib/nvidia-current/ld.so.conf

Now, I have "system/appearance/visual effects" at "normal", and that is working, so that is progress.
But still, I don't dare touch the number of workspaces. In fact, If I even try to set worspace/preferences,
I get crashes:

"Window List" has quit unexpectedly.
"Workspace Switcher" has quit unexpectedly.
"Show Desktop" has quit unexpectly.
I click on "reload" and they come back, but things still don't work right.

And when I try to move a window to another workspace by right-clicking on the X in the upper left-hand corner, nothing happens.

I have an Acer Travelmate 2300 with 512MB ram. It only allocated 32MB to video ram. I have read somewhere that that can cause problems.
The video is Intel. lspci says:
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)

[Orange (orange)]

Okay, I learned much more. compizconfig-settings-manager was not installed. The upgrade defaulted to installing compiz, but without the necessary utilities.

So I see several bugs here:
1.)
The video was basically destroyed after the upgrade. I kept getting error messages about missing drivers
or non-existent drivers, and then the screen would go black, and the system was useless.
It was necessary to do a modeswitch setting to even get the windowing system to work at all:
(this was done by booting into the previous kernel. Hold down shift key while booting. Tapping it does not work.
---------------
echo options i915 modeset=1 | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915-kms.conf
sudo update-initramfs -u
---------------

2.)
previous garbage caused misfonfiguration of the video system. It was necessary to purge and
reinstall things. Run, as root, this script:
-----------------
#!/bin/bash
apt-get purge nvidia*
apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-video-intel libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
update-alternatives --remove gl_conf /usr/lib/nvidia-current/ld.so.conf
-----------------

3.)
Install compizconfig-settings-manager. I used dselect, and chose every compiz thing that looked
relevant. I suppose apt-get would also work.

4.) Trying to change number of workspaces by right-clicking the workspace array in the lower right-hand corner and trying to change preferences produced disastrous results.
I haven't tried it again now, after installing compizconfig-settings-manager. I have a working system
at the moment, and am not eager to destroy it again today.
Maybe next month.

Have a good day.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for compiz (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]