KWin troubles

[Guest]

I have been searching around the forums but is hard to track down a problem like this.

I am running Kubuntu 9.04, KDE for the first time after a few years with Ubuntu. Since the beginning I noticed some trouble, possibly a disagreement of KWin with my ATI 4850 card:

1) When enabling effects in the Desktop Settings the window decorations will get messed up, the screen will freeze and will go black. It may or may not stay black for a few seconds, then come back again to a frozen and slightly messed up desktop then back to black for usually more than a couple times. The pointer will remain movable.
2) Booting up, during the desktop initialization with the icons, the screen will flash black more than a dozen times.
3) Sometimes it will boot after the above sequence to a black screen with just the mouse pointer movable as mentioned before.
4) Resizing the windows is painfully slow yet other things are fine, such as window moving with solid contents (and wobble enabled).
5) Sometimes graphic artifacts may appear, either abstract or mirrored pieced from the desktop, always at the bottom fifth of the screen.

Is this a known compatibility issue or a bug, or is it just me?

[kevinc]

Re: KWin troubles

A quick google turned up a few responses - but not exactly the same. One suggestion was to use the older ATI 8.5 rather than 8.6, 8.7, 8.8 or 8.9 driver.

Are you using just Kwin, or are you using the proprietary ATI driver?

A look at the forums reveals that ATI video cards are the cause of many posts, and most of them result from using the proprietary drivers. A recent post (sorry I've forgotten) suggests that by the end of the year, the Kwin drivers will be better anyway. My own experience with ATI has been not to use their drivers and stick with the basic Kubuntu xorg, kwin (although some prefer compiz).

[Guest]

Re: KWin troubles

Thank you Kevin, I suspected the same.
So, its either KWin and the Open Source driver or no effects and the Proprietary driver.
Considering both KWin and the OS driver are in development, I hope that they soon will support each other, especially now that most of the technical details of ATI cards are known and the rest forthcoming.
I have been meaning to jump to Kubuntu for a while but these unfinished matters kept me away. I won't be switching again, but I hope they are dealt with soon. End of the year sounds so far in future...

[footer]

Re: KWin troubles

Sorry for resurrecting a month + old thread but I'm trying to track down a similar issue, except with Nvidia. I haven't done much research yet, this was the first post I came across in the 9.04 forum when searching for kwin, but your description rings true for me with an Nvidia graphics card and the Kubuntu provided proprietary Nvidia driver. I frequently get 'broken mirror' type artifacts on the screen and the only way to clear is to either reload the KWin window manager or log out/in and/or restart Xserver.

I've actually been doing this for months, and it's not just 9.04, I recall this happening to various degrees in older versions of Kubuntu (I've had the same hardware for 2.5 years now and have always run the latest Kubuntu). So this alone sort of tells me it's the graphics driver.

I'm running a GeForce 7600 GS graphics card and the 180.44 Nvidia driver version. Any info. or suggestions greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

[kevinc]

Re: KWin troubles

Just type "GeForce 7600" into the search window at the top left and you will get three pages of responses with over thirty responses on each page. I would have posted a few of the links, but there are so many that it may be worth the time to check a few yourself and see which ones are most relevant.

[footer]

Re: KWin troubles

Thanks for the tip. I tried a search using my graphics card (GeForce 7600) and saw the three pages of posts you're talking about. Unfortunately, many of them are older and/or not relevant to my problem. I looked over in the ubuntu forums a bit too and there's a ton of posts there about nvidia driver related issues.

Just for grins, I tried the 96.43.10 driver overnight and woke up to a black screen in the morning (only alt-ctrl-backspace could bring it back to life). So I'm back to 180.44 for now. Got the 'broken glass' affect just a few minutes ago which was fixed by reloading kwin.

I'm tempted to try the latest 18X drivers release which is 185.18.14 according to this link:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122606

but for now, I'd rather just go with the proprietary driver that Kubuntu provides (leaving the system as 'stock' as possible).

I've attached a screen shot that I captured when it was flaking out.

Thanks.

[kevinc]

Re: KWin troubles

Nice screen shot.

I have an ATI video card, and with older versions of Kubuntu sometimes found that the ATI proprietary driver was better, but with the recent versions and upgrading of xorg to 1.6 I find like you that the Kubuntu free drivers are the most suitable for my current setup. I'm happy to stick with them, being fairly sure that each version there is improvement (there has been and I expect it to continue) and with announcents about xorg improving in the next version, all not too far away. I'm waiting for June 11 and the Karmic Alpha 2 to try that, dual boot with Jaunty and see how everything works.

[footer]

Re: KWin troubles

Thanks for the reply. How about the attached screen shot? That's what I woke up to this morning. Was using compiz instead of kwin, reloaded window manager which fixed but later, had to restart Xorg as it went really funky (broken glass effect as I call it). Tried to get another screen shot but couldn't.

So yeah, I'm a bit frustrated but perhaps it's getting better? I'm still using the Nvidia proprietary drivers but using Kubuntu's hardware driver manager to install. But maybe we're talking about the same thing (you called them 'Kubuntu free drivers')?

Anyway, I guess we just continue to wait and hope each iteration gets better. I'm running 9.04 and have been since a week or so before it's debut.

Thanks!

[footer]

Re: KWin troubles

I wanted to report back on this. I put in a new video card and the funky screens are GONE. I've been living with this problem a LONG time and it finally dawned on me that hardware might be the problem. 2.5 years later, a new card that cost 1/2 as much and has 4X the memory ($50 vs. $100, 1GB vs. 256mb) has SOLVED the problem. So I guess Kubuntu running compiz or even Kwin these days needs more than a 256mb vid card

Anyway: YEAH!!!

[muzicman0]

Re: KWin troubles

lol...I was reading through this post, not realizing it was almost 2 months old...and I kept thinking 2.5 years gotta be the hardware! then I saw your last post...obviously you figured it out!

mm0

[footer]

Re: KWin troubles

Sorry for the confusion ... I should have clarified the 2.5 year reference. You probably figured it out by now but I meant, the hardware (vid card) is 2.5 years old which is when I built this machine. I'm not sure how long I've been living with this problem, I don't think it's been THAT long but it's been awhile. A restart of Xorg would always fix the problem, but only temporarily. Now, I haven't even had to do that since the new vid card was installed! WHOOHOO!!!