T41 overwhelmed by compiz "Normal" and metacity

[LD 'Gus' Landis]

Dear Evan,

  I will file a bug report... Thanks for the pointer.

  You are correct.. I am running "/usr/bin/metacity --replace"
  and getting splendid response on my machine (with "Visual
  Effects" = "None".

  To get the bad performance experienced, gconf-editor->
  apps->metacity select compositing_manager ON.  Running
  with that OFF, things are great.

  FWIW, under Intrepid/Jaunty, compiz effects worked but
  with karmic, it seems to push the capabilities a bit too hard,
  and ends up freezing.

  NOTE: When karmic+compiz fails, what happens when I
  try starting Firefox (for example), a trapezoid shape (small
  side on bottom) is slightly visible (like the frame is flipping
  down to vertical) but all (mouse/keyboard have no effect on
  the cursor or selection of virtual terminal ctl-alt-F#). Only
  a power down works.

Cheers,
  --ldl

On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Evan <eapache at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 4:31 PM, LD 'Gus' Landis <ldlandis at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>>  Hard hang on ThinkPad T41 on Karmic Koala.  Probably other "older"
>>  systems.
>>
>>  The current default "Change Desktop Background"->"Visual Effects"
>>  in Karmic is "Normal".
>>
>>  On my ThinkPad T41, the Karmic version overwhelms the machine
>>  and causes a hard hang.  I was able to resolve this on three separate
>>  machines, and accidentally discovered it when I had one machine
>>  that worked (two failed).
>>
>>  I was able to get past this by immediately (after login) change the
>>  "Visual Effects" to "None".
>
> In theory Ubuntu should detect if the hardware is capable, and enable or
> disable visual effects accordingly.
> If it fails to correctly detect this on you hardware, then this is a bug,
> and should be filed appropriately.
> Please see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs
>
>>
>>  So far, enabling compiz on T41 with Karmic causes hard hang.
>>  Enabling metacity causes unusably slow response (of Firefox for
>>  sure).
>>
>>  It seems that disabling all of compiz and metacity is necessary
>>  for "older" machines.
>
> I'm not sure what you mean here. Compiz is the 3D window manager requiring
> advanced graphics cards ("Normal" and "Extra" settings).
> Metacity is a 2D window manager, ("None" setting) that should work
> practically anywhere.
> If you're running a graphical environment at all then you're likely running
> Metacity still, unless you manually switched to an alternative like Fluxbox
> or IceWM.
>
> All the best,
> Evan
>



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