compiz gives me black windows

[David Prieto]

Binary package hint: compiz

I'm using the latest compiz in Gutsy. It usually works fine, but sometimes when I open a window it is all black, except for the decoration. From that moment, every new window I open is black too until I kill and restart compiz, which seems to fix the problem.

[Travis Watkins (amaranth)]

This is a problem with the nvidia driver. If you close some windows the problem will go away. It's running out of video memory.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

David:
Can you post the output of
lspci
?

If you are using an NVIDIA this is most likely a duplicate of Bug #96473 ...

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Setting to incomplete pending reply from David.

[David Prieto (frandavid100-gmail)]

Here's the result of lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM/GMS/910GML Express Processor to DRAM Controller (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 04)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 04)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 04)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 04)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev d4)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 04)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) SATA Controller (rev 04)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 04)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce Go 6200 TurboCache (rev a1)
02:02.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCIxx21/x515 Cardbus Controller
02:02.2 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
02:02.3 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments PCIxx21 Integrated FlashMedia Controller
02:02.4 Generic system peripheral [0805]: Texas Instruments PCI6411/6421/6611/6621/7411/7421/7611/7621 Secure Digital Controller
02:04.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
02:05.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection (rev 05)

My card is an Nvidia alright.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Setting back to new. Almost certainly Bug #96473 though...

[wstok (wstok84)]

first sorry for my english ^^
i have gutsy with nvdia 6200 go and compiz works well without problem but after the upgrade of the compiz packets three days ago i have the same problem of black windows

[Mlt (mlt)]

This is something a bit odd as up until yesterday with Gutsy this didn´t happen although it had previously in Feisty.

Something changed as now it happens with only 2 or 3 windows open so making the whole compiz desktop experience pointless.

I would suggest that a recent change is eating video memory, meaning we are running out so much quicker than before.

[Rodrigo Pinheiro (ametade)]

I'm having the same problem with gutsy too. I have a NVIdia GeForce Go 7200 (128Mb) card.

[Matthew Gregg (mcg)]

Have this problem in Gutsy as well. Nvidia+ twinview. It was working until recently.

[Mlt (mlt)]

As this bug seems to be considered unimportant can I explain further?

I realise that there is the general black window problem because of Nvidia,, etc. However, this has recently got worse. For example, I was able to watch tv from my myth backend, have a number of windows open and everything was fine,

Know, I cannot have my Konqueror maximised because I four tabs open in Firefox. I have nothing else open.

There is something going on with the memory use that happened at about the time of my first report.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

(Marking as duplicate because people are saying this bug has no visibility. Combining duplicates into one should help increase visibility and improve communication)

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug #96473, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can add, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.

[Christian Schürer-Waldheim (quincunx)]

I can confirm this bug - when I tried compiz on my gutsy system about one month ago, I was happy not having the black windows any more. I could open more than 20 konqueror windows without any problems. Now, after the recent updates in gutsy, the problem is back again. I tested compiz yesterday, and had black windows already after opening just 3 windows. In bug #139325, 256MB of video RAM are recommended - but my laptops graphics card, an NVIDIA quadro NVS 110M _has_ 256MB of video RAM.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Christian:
It would have to be 256Mbytes of dedicated memory - not main memory (e.g. card's that uses turbo cache typically utilise main memory for some amount of their RAM). I don't know whether your card is using turbo cache or not though.

[moma (osmoma)]

I have installed several new Ubuntu 7.10 desktops with Compiz (cube-plugin) and all of them have this "black screen" failure.

Graphics card:
$ lspci | grep -i vga
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV40.2 [GeForce 6800 LE] (rev a1)