App Title Bar Problem

[davr1834]

I've just installed Kubuntu 11.10 on a laptop (which has the Intel 855GME graphics chipset) and the desktop looks fine except for one problem: The title bar of the apps appears displaced to the right and stretched. The title bar buttons do not work at their apparent position, but are actually functional in the correct position relative to the window below and can be found by hunting for the tooltip popups.

Any ideas about what might be wrong? Any further info I can provide to narrow it down?



Edit: This title bar bug does not appear if I simply start Kubuntu from the Live CD. To check for the possibility of a corrupt installation to hard disk, I did a surface-check of the partition, reformatted, and re-installed Kubuntu -- and the bug appeared as before. So the bug only occurs if Kubuntu is installed to hard-disk.

[james147]

What happens if you change the window decoration theme?

[davr1834]

"Plastic" theme: no visible buttons:


"B II" theme: buttons only partly visible and offset from their functional position:

[james147]

Nether of those look right...

I have never seen it do this before, especially on a new install.

Only other thin i can suggest is trying another decorator, qt-curve or besin might work better.

[SteveRiley]

Long shot, but might work...

1. Log out
2. At the login box, press [Ctrl]+[Alt]+F1 -- this will take you to a text-mode console
3. Log in
4. Delete the file ~/.kde/share/config/kwinrc
5. Log out
6. Press [Ctrl]+[Alt]+F7 to return to the display manager
7. Log in

Let us know if it works.

[woodsmoke]

Do you have compiz running?

if so you may not have beryl installed.

woodsmoke

[davr1834]

The problem has gone now. All I had to do was restart just the desktop by logging out and logging in. I'd previously done several full reboots without that having any effect. But now the problem has gone away and doesn't come back on re-boot.

Using the default kwin windows manager. I'd accepted all the defaults during install.

[davr1834]

Because steveriley mentioned the ~/.kde/share/config/kwinrc file, I looked at that:

[$Version]
update_info=kwin_focus1.upd:kwin_focus1,kwin_focus2.upd:kwin_focus2,kwin.upd:kde3.0r1,kwin.upd:kde3.2Xinerama,kwin3_plugin.upd:kde3.2,kwin_remove_effects.upd:kwin4.7_effects,kwin_on_off.upd:kwin_on_off

[Compositing]
OpenGLIsUnsafe=true

[Desktops]
Name_1=
Name_2=

[TabBox]
ListMode=0
ShowTabBox=true

[Windows]
IgnoreFocusStealingClasses=kio_uiserver

Guessing that OpenGLIsUnsafe=true might be relevant, I changed it to false, then rebooted, and the bug returned. I rebooted again and the bug remained. I logged out then logged in and the bug was fixed.

I watched the changes to the kwinrc file from a [Ctrl]+[Alt]+F1 console, and the change of OpenGLIsUnsafe from false to true did not occur during the logout, as I expected, but during the login. i.e. the change does not occur if I log in from the login screen that follows a cold start, but does occur if I login from the login screen that follows a log out.

So it seems that a fallback mechanism does exist to fix this bug, but the fallback mechanism itself has an issue.

Edit: And when starting Kubuntu from the Live CD, the [Compositing] section of kwinrc just contains: Enabled=false