desktop-effects/restricted-manager testing

[Martin Pitt]

Hi Matt,

thanks for your extensive testing and feedback.

Matt Zimmerman [2007-03-15 16:38 -0700]:
> First, I tried naïvely enabling desktop effects.  This should warn the user
> first that this is experimental software (#92681).

I grabbed that bug, that's easy to do.

> 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.

Hmm, so did I [1]. When I start desktop-effects with nv, I first get
the r-m dialog for enabling the nvidia driver, and then a dialog box
asking me to restart d-e after a reboot. If you have d-e
0.7.1-0ubuntu2, then something is wrong with r-m's nvidia checking.
When running with nv, what does this do and print?

  $ restricted-manager --check-composite; echo $?

>  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:
> 
> 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.

d-e automatically disables compiz again after 30 seconds when the user
does not click on 'keep settings' or 'revert' in the confirmation
dialog. For nv in particular, this is just a followup failure from
above module checking bug (it shouldn't have offered you to enable
compiz in the first place).

> 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).

Indeed this does not seem to work sometimes, I'll fix this.

> 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 added the necessary bits to dexconf to set arbitary driver options,
so we could do this easily. I'm not much fussed about one way or the
other.

> 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?

Maybe something like this:

 * desktop-effects grows CLI options --enable and --disable
   (noninteractive)
 * 'restricted-manager --check' is called as part of the desktop
   autostart scripts; it currently displays a notification "new
   restricted drivers in effect blabla". I could hardcode the nv
   special case and call d-e --disable if nv is running.

Still ugly, though, especially for drivers other than nv. We could
switch it to a whitelist, of course (fglrx, ati, nvidia, i{740,810} ?).

> 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 followed up in the bug report.

> 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?

Seb, any idea about that?

> 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.

Oh, funny that it worked the second time. Can you reproduce the
original wrong behaviour above?

> 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.

*ugh*, what a trip.. :/

Martin

[1] http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/main/d/desktop-effects/desktop-effects_0.7.1-0ubuntu2/changelog
-- 
Martin Pitt        http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer   http://www.ubuntu.com
Debian Developer   http://www.debian.org
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