Desktop effects at startup (Solved)

[The Liquidator]

Hi all

Thanks to advice I've received about new intel drivers and "greedy" settings et al and (importantly) recognising that glxgears is a fairly minor benchmark, I now am able to use the desktop effects from within the system settings. One or 2 of the effects are rather cool, in particular the various alt+tab effects.

Trouble is, when I shut down and reboot, the effects are turned off. It's a simple matter of ticking a check-box but is this normal behaviour? If not, does anyone have any idea as to how I might fix this?

TIA

Ian

[lmilano]

Re: Desktop effects at startup

This is not normal, that setting should be remembered. How do you log out? Do you notice the display system crashing on log out? That would explain it (on a crash you might lose the setting you selected)

[The Liquidator]

Re: Desktop effects at startup

No, there is nothing to suggest a crash, On shutdown I simply get the kubuntu logo withj blue bar. At the very end I do get the message

"will now halt"
"unable to iterate ide device"

but then I've had that ever since I started with Jaunty (maybe intrepid as well).

All the settings are retained, it's just the "enable" box that is unchecked. This also happens if I simply logout the log back in. No error message at all.

In did read somewhere that kwineffects will self-disable if thinks the graphics card is too slow... maybe that's it.

[lmilano]

Re: Desktop effects at startup

Ah, that would explain it. If that's it, this is bad design: you should get a pop up warning you about that. We should try to find where in the config text file this is switch on, and see what happens if you turn it on there to double check. I don't have the time now though ...

[The Liquidator]

Re: Desktop effects at startup

One other point.....

My 9.04 installation is an upgrade from 8.10. I wonder whether many of the foibles have been carried forward from there.

Think I might try a clean install and see what happens.

[growled]

Re: Desktop effects at startup

Think I might try a clean install and see what happens.

I imagine the issue will clear up. I can't speak for others, but upgrading between versions seems to always bring up some little annoyance for me. Sometimes two.

[lmilano]

Re: Desktop effects at startup

I don't know, I have upgraded the same installation for 5 years, and now I have a fresh install only because I moved to a new machine and I switched from 32 to 64 bits. I always customize things quite a bit so starting fresh is a PITA. Actually, one of the things I love about Linux is the ability to smoothly upgrade :-)

[The Liquidator]

Re: Desktop effects at startup

Fortunately I maintain a separate home partition so that should not be too big a deal, downloading aside.

I have in fact 4 partitions: root and home, both ext3 "virtual" ext 3 which is the home for my virual Win XP installation, and "data" being FAT 32, the main home for data (being a throw-back to my dual - boot days. Might just merge the last 2 and format them as Ext 3.

Any thoughts on ext4 - is it stable enough for everyday use, or am I better with Ext3 would you think?

[lmilano]

Re: Desktop effects at startup

I am using ext4 in / , and it is great. I still don;t trust it for /home, which is a big, fat xfs partition (xfs is very nice for large files like my dvd movies and large filesystems, I also get online defrag for free!)

[The Liquidator]

Re: Desktop effects at startup

Have you found a speed increase with ext4?

Thanks

[dibl]

Re: Desktop effects at startup

I installed 9.04 on an ext4 partition. The only thing that is noticeable faster is the mandatory (every 30 or so boots) fsck. That is WAY faster for ext4 -- perhaps one tenth as long as for ext3.

[lmilano]

Re: Desktop effects at startup

I got faster bootup with ext4. I measure boot to a running kde session with a script, so this really is accurate. I can't remember the speedup though, I will post it if i can find it.

A more systematic comparison can be found here (xfs also does very well):
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...nchmarks&num=1

Switching is easy:
http://kernelnewbies.org/Ext4#head-3...148a1e28c6a9d4
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-...le-system.html

[The Liquidator]

Re: Desktop effects at startup

I did the reinstall on Friday. Also followed what I thought were the instructions to upgrade kde to 4.2.4 and wound up with the 4.3 beta!

At first desktop effects as usual didn't work. I found help here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troublesho...telPerformance

Tried setting up UXA first and got the big freeze. Disabled v-sync in the desktop effects sector and it worked! I played around with the xorg.conf file a bit and settled on the "greedy" settings, so that aspect at least seems to be sorted.

Got issues with a couple of other apps though - Google Earth is painfully slow, and Digikam menus don't seem to have any text in them! - will have to try with desktop effects suspended - just hope it's not KDE 4.3 doing it