desktop-effects/restricted-manager testing

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2007 at 10:00:47AM +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Matt Zimmerman [2007-03-15 16:38 -0700]:
> > 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 $?

How do you check which driver is in use?  If it looks at debconf, that would
explain it, since debconf would have said I was using ati.

I'm using nvidia at the moment, but if the problem is other than I guessed,
I can switch back and test on Monday.

> >  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).

Agreed, I didn't file a bug because this shouldn't be able to happen anyway.

> > 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.

Let's wait and see if we get feedback then.  Users are forced in some cases
to use this driver, but that doesn't mean they want advertising as well.

> > 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} ?).

Couldn't it be handled in restricted-manager itself?  If I'm switching off
the driver, and desktop-effects is enabled, it should disable it immediately
(rather than checking when the session starts).

> > 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?

As above, my guess is because the nv driver wasn't configured in debconf.

> > 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.. :/

Fortunately, I think these are mostly simple to fix, and will prevent many
users from breaking their systems while allowing the adventurous ones to
experiment with compiz.

-- 
 - mdz