Window borders disappear when clicked on

**trikster_x** · January 26th, 2009

I am running hardy on a acer aspire one with 1 GB ram, 120 GB HDD, 1.6 GHz atom processor.

The problem I am having is with the emerald theme engine. After I downloaded and ran fusionbuild to install the latest version of compiz fusion from git for me, emerald stopped working. When I try to grab a window border to move the window, it disappears, like emerald just shut itself off. I have to restart X to get the border to come back, but it disappears again as soon as I click anywhere on the border. I have tried removing and reinstalling emerald with no luck. Running emerald --replace in the terminal does nothing. I have the command set in sessions and window decorator, so it isn't that I missed something on the setup. Everything worked perfectly before using fusionbuild. When I use the normal GTK windows, everything works how its supposed to. Is there a conflict between emerald and the latest version of compiz that I should know about, or is the latest version of emerald just this unstable?

**I just got emerald to work again by removing the newer version of compiz and going with the version in the add/remove program on Hardy. It would still be nice to get it to work with the newer compiz so I can use the deform cube plugin. If any one has an idea, it would be appreciated.

**gettinoriginal** · January 26th, 2009

Go to CCSM and under "window decoration" command, type "emerald --replace.

**trikster_x** · January 27th, 2009

Originally Posted by gettinoriginal

Go to CCSM and under "window decoration" command, type "emerald --replace.

If you read my first post entirely, you would have seen I did that already. I wish it was that simple because I wouldn't have had to start a thread to fix the problem.....

I do have some more info, though. It appears that I can't enable the visual effects at all with the latest version of compiz installed. But when I removed it last night, and installed the original version I had, emerald worked fine and I could enable the normal and extra settings of visual effects. So I am starting to think it is a problem with compiz not emerald.....

Any thoughts?

**gettinoriginal** · January 27th, 2009

Just did some research on Fusionbuild, and notice that by the authors admission he is still working on it, and invites questions here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=871165&page=3
and has a blog here:
http://fusionbuild.wordpress.com/
Sorry I cannot be of more help, I'm basically a chicken and stick to stable stuff

**trikster_x** · January 27th, 2009

Thanks for that forum link. I left a reply there, and will continue to update in this thread.

It might be helpful to mention that when I first boot into Ubuntu, I can go to Preferences>Appearance>Visual Effects and extra is selected, but as soon as I try to click a border, none becomes selected. When I try to select extra again, I get the message "Desktop Effects could not be enabled".

**VeeDubb** · January 28th, 2009

Sounds like your home-spun compiz isn't working right. (I know, stating the obvious)

Have you considered just going back to the compiz in the repos?

**trikster_x** · January 29th, 2009

I actually did that. But I kinda want the cube deformation plugin, which is not available to the version of compiz in the hardy repositories. All the other newer plugins work with it though, so I will probably have to settle....