Saturday, October 25, 2008

Vanishing plugin

On Thursday had to disable the Desktop Effects for a while to test something; not much problem, went to:

"System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects"

And clicked on "None", naturally the effects died right there.

The thing, after I'm done, when I wanted to enabled the effects once again, lo and behold, I wasn't able to start them up again, the screen flickered a few times, the window manager's borders vanished, but after all of that, I got the message "Desktop effects could not be enabled".

When I tried to execute compiz from a Terminal, got this:

esteban@tango:~$ compiz
Checking for Xgl: not present.
Detected PCI ID for VGA: 00:12.0 0300: 10de:0533 (rev a2) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Checking for texture_from_pixmap: present.
Checking for non power of two support: present.
Checking for Composite extension: present.
Comparing resolution (1280x800) to maximum 3D texture size (4096): Passed.
Checking for nVidia: present.
Checking for FBConfig: present.
Checking for Xgl: not present.
/usr/bin/compiz.real (core) - Error: Could not acquire compositing manager selection on screen 0 display ":0.0"
/usr/bin/compiz.real (core) - Fatal: No manageable screens found on display :0.0

After Googling like a mad man (I wanted, most than any whooping effect I could use, my border-less windows back, dude!!!) found a script called "compiz-check" (excellent name, BTW); which checks if your system is able to run Compiz or not, and eventually, helps you to set it up (if you want to do such thing).

Executed it on my beloved Tango, and got this:
esteban@tango:~$ ./compiz-check
Gathering information about your system...

Distribution: Ubuntu 8.04
Desktop environment: GNOME
Graphics chip: nVidia Corporation GeForce 7000M (rev a2) (rev a2)
Driver in use: nvidia
Rendering method: Nvidia

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... [FAIL]

There has been (at least) one error detected with your setup:
Error: Another compositing manager in use.

Would you like to know more? (Y/n) y

The default window manager of GNOME has its own compositing manager to
provide basic desktop effects.
If this one is in use, Compiz will not be able to run.

Do you want to disable GNOME's compositing manager? (Y/n) y

After typing 'y' it seemed like the script simply hanged or crashed, and got my prompt back.
But, after executing:

compiz --replace ccp & emerald --replace &

I got all the Desktop Effects back and running smoothly.

But, after restaring X, and login back onto Gnome, the effects were gone once again, so, placed that onto a script, made it excutable, and then added the script to the "Startup Programs" on the "System -> Preferences -> Sessions" settings.

All is golden again.

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