Black Desktop

[GUIGuy]

After an update that ran this morning the desktop rebooted to black. I worked out that I could get it back and sort of working again by turning desktop effects OFF.

How do I get the desktop effects working again?

Kubuntu 9.04
KDE 4.3.1
Kernel: 2.6.28-15-generic
nvidia gfx: 190.36


TIA

[lmilano]

Re: Black Desktop

AFAICT, there is no reliable way to run the effects, so whether they work for you and use them, or they don't and you don't. None of my systems run them reliably, so I still have them turned off.

They are very, very nice but I can do without them. Oh well!

[GUIGuy]

Re: Black Desktop

AFAICT, there is no reliable way to run the effects, so whether they work for you and use them, or they don't and you don't. None of my systems run them reliably, so I still have them turned off.

They are very, very nice but I can do without them. Oh well!

They'd been working perfectly well for months. Why do they bother with their updates if they keep on breaking things?

[GreyGeek]

Re: Black Desktop

.....
They'd been working perfectly well for months. Why do they bother with their updates if they keep on breaking things?

Since developers time is at a premium, I doubt that they would make changes for change sake. So, if an app or feature is working and it is updated my guess is that they added a security patch, or modifications in other, dependent, applications/utilities/etc required an update in app.

[lmilano]

Re: Black Desktop

That's correct, if you stick to the official repos you only get security and important bugfix updates. These are necessary to keep you safe, but you can disable the updates and keep your software frozen forever if you's like to do so.

When people commit an update, this is tested to some extent, but I hope you understand there are countless combinations of hardware and software out there, so it is impossible to guarantee that no one will ever get affected.

One reason some people get tired and stop developing free software (very many of them in their spare time, for you, out of their altruism), is that they get bitched all the time, no matter what they do

[GreyGeek]

Re: Black Desktop

is that they get bitched all the time, no matter what they do

<P>
And usually by folks who couldn't write an "Hello World" program if their life depended on it.

Look at the ungodly amount of flack that the KDE dev team took, 99% of it undeserved because the whiners didn't understand the effort required to create an entirely new desktop from scratch. Porting KDE3.5 would have taken longer and resulted in a kludgey nightmare. I tried porting just one of my Qt3 apps to Qt4 and the result was so unsatisfactory that I found it much easier and quicker to start from scratch, taking advantage of Qt4's power. The result is that KDE 4.3.1 is an OUTSTANDING release, and I suspect that KDE 4.4 will be even better because of the power in Qt4.5 and beyond.

In fact, because Ubuntu's Technical Board has decided to make Ubuntu Desktop remixes DEPENDENT on MONO and because MONO now has bindings into GTK2+, I have begun the task of finding KDE replacements for ALL apps that are built using GTK2 before they require MONO as a dependency. In that regard I used apt-rdepends to determine how many apps in the Kubuntu repository depend on mono-runtime and noted there were about 500 of them. While many were libmono* and mono-*something files, there were the usual suspects: f-spot, tomboy, beagle, banshee etc... I did notice that one file, kdebindings-kde4, contained bindings to Pything, Ruby AND CLI. I plan to ask the KDE dev crew to break out the CLI bindings so that one doesn't remove python or Ruby bindings trying to remove C#/CLI bindings.

[GUIGuy]

SOLVED: Black Desktop

Just to let you know I solved this. However, as you were more inclined to put me in my place rather than help me sort it out it's probably rather pointless posting the solution.

[Fintan]

Re: Black Desktop

I for one would like to see the solution

[trevor4706]

Re: Black Desktop

Me too!

[GreyGeek]

Re: SOLVED: Black Desktop

Just to let you know I solved this. However, as you were more inclined to put me in my place rather than help me sort it out it's probably rather pointless posting the solution.

I wasn't talking to you or about you. Were you talking to me?

Regardless, a couple folks are asking how you did it. Are you going to answer them?

[quarkslot]

Re: SOLVED: Black Desktop

Just to let you know I solved this. However, as you were more inclined to put me in my place rather than help me sort it out it's probably rather pointless posting the solution.

I would be very interested to hear the solution so no it's not pointless.

It bugs me that desktop effects work on my netbook but not on my dual-core, ATI graphic card powered desktop!