hi,

everytime i start my box the compositing is turned off, even though it was turned on in the last session. sometimes the compositing disappears whenever i change something in the system settings, i have yet to find a pattern when it happens and when not.

i'm running kde sc 4.5 on gentoo ~amd64.

You are using an Intel graphics card, right? Please disable the functionality checks in the advanced compositing settings.

no, it's a radeon.

but also the free driver? Please try the hint with the functionality checks nevertheless.

well, it seems to work -- kinda. though kwin crashes *very* often whenever i change some "Appearance" options in the system settings, and then there goes compositing. will file a bug report next time it crashes.

you don't need to file a bug report. It's obvious that it crashes in the driver and that is known. If you want to report a bug, please report to the bugtracker at freedesktop.org

i see, so all the weird flickering and crashes are due to the radeon driver.