jalefkowit
April 28th, 2008, 10:25 AM
So I've been waiting eagerly for the release of Hardy so that I, a Kubuntu user, could finally enjoy the nifty Compiz desktop effects that Ubuntu users have been savoring for many months now.
Imagine my surprise, then, to do the upgrade and discover... nothing. No snazzy effects at all -- even after I go into the Desktop Effects tool and explicitly turn them on.
I do some Googling and discover that the effects won't work unless a package called "xserver-xgl" is installed. A quick apt-get later, it's installed, I reboot and... lo! Desktop effects.
Except now a whole raft of weird new behaviors has cropped up:
1) When I try to shut the machine down, the dialog that usually has the Shut Down button (along with others to lock session, etc.) now has only one button -- Log Out.
2) If I click that Log Out button, the dialog goes away but the logout process appears to hang. The system waits indefinitely on an empty screen.
3) Periodically the system will just crash and dump me out to that empty screen. Only way to recover is to do a hard reboot of the system (hold down power button on case until PC reboots).
So I do a little more Googling to see what the problem is, and find several threads that imply that the problem is xserver-xgl. Remove that, they say, and the bugs will go away.
And they're right. Except that without xserver-xgl, there are no desktop effects. So I'm right back to square one.
I guess the question is: is xserver-xgl just so buggy that I should forget about desktop effects at all?
(For reference, my video card is an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro, and I'm using the fglrx driver. fglrxinfo confirms that the driver is loaded -- no "Mesa 3D" nonsense. I know that Compiz has historically had issues with ATI hardware, so that may be the cause.)
Imagine my surprise, then, to do the upgrade and discover... nothing. No snazzy effects at all -- even after I go into the Desktop Effects tool and explicitly turn them on.
I do some Googling and discover that the effects won't work unless a package called "xserver-xgl" is installed. A quick apt-get later, it's installed, I reboot and... lo! Desktop effects.
Except now a whole raft of weird new behaviors has cropped up:
1) When I try to shut the machine down, the dialog that usually has the Shut Down button (along with others to lock session, etc.) now has only one button -- Log Out.
2) If I click that Log Out button, the dialog goes away but the logout process appears to hang. The system waits indefinitely on an empty screen.
3) Periodically the system will just crash and dump me out to that empty screen. Only way to recover is to do a hard reboot of the system (hold down power button on case until PC reboots).
So I do a little more Googling to see what the problem is, and find several threads that imply that the problem is xserver-xgl. Remove that, they say, and the bugs will go away.
And they're right. Except that without xserver-xgl, there are no desktop effects. So I'm right back to square one.
I guess the question is: is xserver-xgl just so buggy that I should forget about desktop effects at all?
(For reference, my video card is an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro, and I'm using the fglrx driver. fglrxinfo confirms that the driver is loaded -- no "Mesa 3D" nonsense. I know that Compiz has historically had issues with ATI hardware, so that may be the cause.)