desktop-effects/restricted-manager testing

[Matt Zimmerman]

My main desktop has an Nvidia graphics adapter, with which I usually use
the nv driver with largely satisfactory results.  I decided to use this
system to test the latest round of restricted-manager (0.9).

First, I tried naïvely enabling desktop effects.  This should warn the user
first that this is experimental software (#92681).

I went ahead and tried to enable desktop effects.  It did not direct me to
enable the nvidia driver, so there was no chance of it working.  I thought it
checked this in advance now.  It seemed to try to start compiz, which was
doomed to fail.  The display went entirely white, with only a mouse cursor.  I
couldn't find a way to get back to my working desktop, and had to restart gdm
from the console.  These were the processes running when I did so:

mdz      19003  4.7  0.6  29792 10700 ?        S    15:49   0:05 desktop-effects
mdz      19011  0.3  0.5  15928  8656 ?        S    15:49   0:00 gtk-window-decorator
mdz      19060  0.2  0.1   6268  2840 tty4     S+   15:50   0:00 -zsh
mdz      19073  0.3  0.5  15968  9016 ?        S    15:50   0:00 metacity --replace

This isn't entirely unexpected, but it used to fail much more gracefully.  I'm
not user whether the change was due to X or something else, but now trying to
start compiz on my system with nv was a disaster.

After cleaning up, I logged back in for a second attempt.  This time, I used
restricted-manager to enable the driver first.  It made the necessary
changes, but gave me no indication that they hadn't taken effect yet.  This
should have guided me to restart X (#92684).

After manually restarting gdm, I noticed the Nvidia logo.  Are we sure we
want this?  It's easy to disable in the configuration, though perhaps it's
valuable as confirmation that the user's changes took effect.

I then enabled desktop effects, which went off almost without a hitch.
Running windows behaved a bit strangely (the minimize/maximize/close buttons
weren't responsive).  This was fixed by logging out and back in, and seems
like a minor issue given that we know the shortcomings of this feature and
will warn the user.

Playing devil's advocate (or naïve user), I then disabled the nvidia driver
in restricted-manager, to see if it checked my desktop-effects setting (it
didn't).  I haven't reported a bug about this, because I'm a bit uncertain
about the best way to hook them together.  Martin?

It went ahead and disabled the driver, but unfortunately reverted to the ati
driver(!) rather than nv (#92690).  It seemed to dump a new configuration
based on debconf values, which in my case were out of date because I had
hand-edited my configuration file.  I had switched from an ATI card to an
NVIDIA card, and updated my configuration file by hand rather than using
dpkg-reconfigure.

I fixed that by hand-editing my configuration again, and logged out.  When I
logged in, I was left with no window manager running, presumably because
compiz failed to start (though it didn't destroy my screen this time).
Shouldn't it fall back to metacity?

I used the panel menu to run Desktop Effects, which (before presenting any
dialog) informed me that I needed to enable the nvidia driver!  I just
wanted to disable the effects, but my only options were to enable the driver
or cancel, so I enabled it.  This time, it told me I needed to reboot and
then run desktop-effects again!  So apparently this is supposed to work.

Having no need to reboot, I just started desktop effects again, and disabled
it.  This gave me metacity back, and a working desktop where I am now
writing this email.

-- 
 - mdz