Hi!

I have installed Kubuntu 11.04 on my dell inspiron m101z.

Now, everything was working fine, including kwin special effects.

But on a sunny day I went to tty1 (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and then back, suddenly, after my log-off, special effects are by default disabled.

Is there a way to enable them back? They clearly work on my computer and kwin is wrong in judging that my graphics card is unsupported (I am using the native open source driver).

Can you check the content of ~/.xsession-errors for messages from KWin?
The config file to remove (outside of KDE) is ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrc

Sorry for such a late reply... had a lot of work to finish by the weekend.

Here is the .xsession-errors when the problem was occuring: http://pastebin.com/08YX69yp

Then I deleted kwinrc - but that didn't do anything! When I tried to logoff and login, I was stuck at the icon that blinks just before 'K'. So I deleted everything related to kwin in ~/.kde and emptied /var/tmp and /tmp and /root/.kde

Now everything is back to normal

Here is the .xsession-errors when thing are working: http://pastebin.com/q64vddVF

On a first glance, I notice this difference:

Code: Select all

kwin(1380): ""fsrestore1" - conversion of "0,0,0,0" to QRect failed"
kwin(1380) KWin::Workspace::setupCompositing: KWin has detected that your OpenGL library is unsafe to use, falling back to XRender.
kwin(1380): Failed to initialize compositing, compositing disabled
kwin(1380): Consult http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KWin/4.0-release-notes#Setting_up

But of course, the techbase article doesn't help.

Do you have a proprietary graphics driver installed? If you don't, which distribution (and version of it) are you using? If you are using a proprietary graphics driver, what is it's version number?

You can set OpenGLIsUnsafe=false in your KDEHOME (.kde or .kde4)/share/config/kwinrc under the [Compositing] section to force KWin to skip this check. Notice that this may lead to visual artifacts or other problems in case your driver is buggy.