<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 4:31 PM, LD 'Gus' Landis <<a href="mailto:ldlandis@gmail.com">ldlandis@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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". </blockquote><div> 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 <a href="https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs">https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs</a> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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. </blockquote><div> 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. </div></div>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