I am having trouble with KDE 4 on Kubuntu 8.10. I am using an ATI Mobility Radeon X1270 card. I have the fglrx driver installed and running; GNOME/Compiz works great. However, trying to enable KWin effects gave me this message:

"Failed to activate desktop effects using the given configuration options. Settings will be reverted to their previous values.

Check your X configuration. You may also consider changing advanced options, especially changing the compositing type."

I got a few suggestions from ubuntuforums.org, but nothing that worked. I was planning on posting the same question here, when I thought, what if I tried to use Compiz with KDE?

Well, it almost works. The effects are great and smooth, but the window behavior is ridiculous. Every window now opens maximized with no window decs. Also all the panel menus (KMenu, Device Notifier menu, Panel Settings menu) open at the top of the screen at default size, then balloon to fill the whole screen. This is driving me crazy.

Any ideas? Ideally I would like to get this working with KWin, but barring that, I would like to at least get Compiz working normally. KWin is really not working well on this machine anyway; even without effects, repainting is slow and choppy. I'm not blaming KWin, I'm sure its a driver issue, but I would like to get the same smoothness I have in GNOME also on KDE, and Compiz/KDE seems the best way right now.

I'd really appreciate some help! I thought I could just use GNOME on this laptop, but having used KDE4 I can't go back. I really want to get this working.

Regarding maximized windows, see this post.

Hans wrote:Regarding maximized windows, see this post.

I already did. Appearantly compiz --replace did it for him. However, neither compiz --replace nor kwin --replace work for me. Both cause the screen to flicker momentarily, then appear again.

Here's the output from compiz --replace"

Code: Select all

Checking for Xgl: not present.
Detected PCI ID for VGA:
Checking for texture_from_pixmap: not present.
Trying again with indirect rendering:
Checking for texture_from_pixmap: present.
Checking for non power of two support: present.
Checking for Composite extension: present.
Comparing resolution (1440x900) to maximum 3D texture size (2048): Passed.
Checking for Software Rasterizer: Not present.
Checking for nVidia: not present.
Checking for FBConfig: present.
Checking for Xgl: not present.
/usr/bin/compiz.real (video) - Warn: No 8 bit GLX pixmap format, disabling YV12 image format

It seems XGL is missing. Why is that? Doesn't Compiz use XGL?

Okay, this is worse than I thought. I couldn't seem to disable compiz; even after selecting KWin as the window manager, Compiz kept coming back. So I logged out, jumped to a terminal, and deleted .kde/, .compiz/, and .emerald/ from my home directory. That should get me back to the defaults, right? Wrong. All my settings are gone, but the maximized window behavior is still there, even without compiz (due to the lack of effects and the choppy rendering, it's obvious that KWin is running here). Also, all my window decs are still gone.

Okay, I found the problem. Somehow I had installed the Ubuntu netbook desktop, and that was causing all the trouble. I don't know why it's settings were affecting KWin, but it's all good now. Thanks!

If your issue has been resolved, could you please mark the thread as solved, using the "It's Solved" button? Thanks in advance.

If I remember correctly, Ubuntu Netbook Remix has a thing running in the background that maximizes and removes the border for all windows.