Comment 13 for bug 833729

Revision history for this message
Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt) wrote :

Confirmed from Jason Warner that the cause of the problem is:
 compiz (composite) - Error: Screen 0 on display ":0" already has a compositing manager; try using the --replace option to replace the current compositing manager.
 error CompositeScreen::CompositeScreen - line 278

The unusual thing is that for some people running precise, the composite plugin can't load because some other compositing manager is running. But we can't see one running yet! Looks like the atom/selection used to indicate that one is running is being leaked somewhere.

This is an unusual failure. The fact that it caused crashes is probably not unusual -- most plugins have probably not been written well enough to handle the case where composite fails. So we can fix the plugins, but that's a different issue.

The root cause of the problem is that something is leaking the atom "_NET_WM_CM_S0", which should not be possible if no compositing manager is running.