Desktop effects stopped working

I have a Compiz Fusion entry in Applications, System Tools that has got me out of that same tightspot.

Click on the menu entry and an icon will appear on your top panel in the notification area. Right click that to get a drop down menu. You can change the windows managers there.

Thanks for the reply, Andre. Could you explain that last bit a bit more? When I changed the default depth that is all that I changed. Are you saying that other stuff would also have been changed and that when I reset default depth the rest didn't change back? I didn't make a back up as I figured it was easy enough to undo the change if I had to and nothing else looked different.

As for the fusion-icon that won't help. As it is right now, compiz fails to load at all. I get output like this...

Checking for Xgl: not present.
Detected PCI ID for VGA: 03:00.0 0300: 10de:0392 (rev a1) (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 (1920x1200) 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

And a bunch of other stuff that looks like

expose_area (XSR): 1 rects, bounds: 1664,99 (256,335)
expose_area (XSR): 1 rects, bounds: 0,434 (316,15)
expose_area (XSR): 1 rects, bounds: 1664,434 (256,15)

Over and over. The bit about xgl not present seems important but not sure why I get that. I certainly had xgl before.

Hi Jim,
I almost went the same way as you did to change the colour depth but was put off by a notice warning me that a new xorg.conf file would be created. What other changes would go into the new xorg.conf file I do not know. xorg.conf has many backups - look in /etc/X11
If you want to try to reinstitute a previous xorg.conf file, find one with a fairly recent date. You will have to "sudo gedit" to make any alterations in situ - otherwise use the "move" (mv) command.

The fusion icon lets you restore the metacity windows manager as well as give you an option to reload the windows manager. Once you have done that, go to System, Preferences, Appearance and try to activate "normal" visual effects.

Then check to ensure that your nvidia driver is enabled and has the green light.

After that you can check xgl by typing "glxgears" (without quotes) in a terminal window. If it produces three coloured revolving gears all is well.

The next step is to check the boxes in "Advanced Desktop Effects Settings" under System, Preferences until you get your previous eyecandy restored.

Thanks for the info but I'm still very confused (and I'm not messing with xorg again).

I have lots of xorg.conf files and they end with .1 .2 up to .8 and all have the same date (yesterday). I'm pondering a reinstall as it will be easier but this is odd and I'd like to know why.

glxgears gives me the gears and 3000+ frame rates which is normal for my system when the nvidia driver is installed. However, how to I check for the green light? Or are you referring to the hardware driver screen? That does say installed so I guess I'm good there.

However, despite all this, I still get the failure with enabling "normal" desktop effects. It tries and then fails and switches back. If I run it in a terminal it says XGL not present. I don't understand the difference between XGL and GLX but clearly something is wacked.

I could try to roll back to one of the "old" xorg.conf files but which one? I also tried to do the sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg thing but that made things even worse. I did manage to get things back to working except the desktop effects. I think reinstall is the way out but curious if you have any other thoughts. The odd thing is that by all measures there shouldn't be a problem. Glx seems to be working and my driver is installed. What could be causing this?

I didn't try the compiz icon yet as my window manager is fine and no need to reload it but I guess I can give it a try.

Thanks again.

Thanks Andre Mangan, that solved my question.

Okay, I went ahead and installed the fusion-icon and reloaded and switched the window manager and it didn't seem to fix anything but then I did it again and suddenly it's all working. Very strange. I don't know why it did what it did in the first place and I really don't get how the fusion-icon should have changed anything but it did. Thanks for the tip.

Adding a more functional way to do this:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/231904

Working in Jaunty too.

Igor Gomes