antiX-forum

impuwat wrote:Thanks Djinn for the info. Gave it a try but something messed with fluxbox. menu's only partially visible. Probably just not quite enough "poop" in this old box.

Hi impuwat.

Sorry to hear that. xcompmgr is great, and i've found that it works on quite old boxes, but of course like anything, there's going to be a "cut off" point somewhere down the line.

Have you tried looking at "man xcompmgr" & changing any of the settings at all? There are quite a few things you can "turn on & off" as it were, to make it run more smoothly. May be worth a try?

OOi, what box/setup are you running it on? How much graphical ram do you have?

Djinn: Thanks for the interest.

I have a P3 at about 1 Ghz, 192 MB of RAM, and a Geforce 5200 with 128 MB of RAM. Probably enough machine after reading some of the other comments.

After loading xcompmgr I right clicked on the desktop to bring up a fluxbox menu. The menu looked super with nice shadowing....for about two seconds...then it disappeared. Further right clicking would bring up only scattered pieces of menu and no toolbar. I Ctrl-Alt-backspaced to console and removed xcompmgr to get back to a solid fluxbox. Didn't investigate much further.

Any ideas on what went wrong or what I can do?

I've tried just about anything I can think of. Changed startup parameters for xcompmgr a number of times. Installed nvidia drivers and re-tried. Nothing seems to help and same type of behavior is evident. Probably something simple....usually is...but can't seem to find it right now.

impuwat wrote:Djinn: Thanks for the interest.

I have a P3 at about 1 Ghz, 192 MB of RAM, and a Geforce 5200 with 128 MB of RAM. Probably enough machine after reading some of the other comments.

I'm running xcompmgr on several machines here, a few of which have a much lower spec than that (Graphically at least) and they all work fine. So yep, i think it's a safe bet that it's something else that's the problem.

After loading xcompmgr I right clicked on the desktop to bring up a fluxbox menu. The menu looked super with nice shadowing....for about two seconds...then it disappeared. Further right clicking would bring up only scattered pieces of menu and no toolbar. I Ctrl-Alt-backspaced to console and removed xcompmgr to get back to a solid fluxbox. Didn't investigate much further.

Any ideas on what went wrong or what I can do?

I have one idea, although it may be a long shot (but it's worth trying i guess). The problem that you're having sounds very much like the problem i had recently. Fine for a second or two, and then the desktop just goes nuts and is completely unuseable. I finally nailed it to "conky" being loaded twice, and causing major problems. I didn't realise that conky gets started from the apps file in the .fluxbox folder, so added my own conky startup line to the fluxbox startup script..... thus conky was running twice.

I finally disabled conky completely (in both places) and then just used one startup line in the .xinitrc script (thanks to eriefisher for that one) and all has been great ever since.

So, check both files ( .fluxbox/apps and .fluxbox/startup ) and possibly even the .xinitrc as well, and if you have conky starting from more than one place, it could be the cause of your xcompmgr problems. Strangely enough, this odd behaviour didn't occur when i disabled xcompmgr but still had both conkys running.

If you do try it, let me know how it goes?

I am having some issues with xcompmgr as well. The desktop just goes crazy and only parts of the windows/buttons appear when mouse hovers over them. I had to switch to a console to disable it and restart x. More to learn.

eriefisher wrote:I am having some issues with xcompmgr as well. The desktop just goes crazy and only parts of the windows/buttons appear when mouse hovers over them. I had to switch to a console to disable it and restart x. More to learn.

Always more to learn eh? Sorry to hear that eriefisher (Love the new avatar by the way, really cool). As i said in the last post, i was having all sorts of problems with xcomp, including what you've just described. But once i'd sorted out the conky problem, they all disappeared and all is now fine.

The only problem (if you can call it that) that i still have with xcompmgr, and it's only on a machine with a lower graphics spec) is that when a window gets "Automagically" resized in Rox (Like when you go from one dir to another) then all i see is the shadow of how the rox window should look.... until i move the whole window slightly, then the screen updates and all is well again. It's annoying, but it's minor.

I'd be interested to know if you find out what's causing the problem though, and let me know if i can help in any way.

Thanks. I will look when i get more time.

I only appeared to have one conky running. This is newly installed version of M7.2 with very few mods. I followed your advice, however, and completely disabled conky.

After disabling conky, xcompmgr worked....sort of. The taskbar is visible and working. Menu seems to be fine. The problem I'm seeing is a rendering problem when re-sizing windows. For example, if I resize terminal I have what appears to be two terminals visible. I can take the re-sized terminal, and move it as an eraser to wipe the vestiges of the larger terminal that remained.

This first screenshot is with xcompmgr up and working. The second shows the result when resizing terminal.





I'm going to try some different xcompmgr settings to see if I can clean things up.

Edit: Forgot to mention that xcompmgr seems to change the default text size, resulting in a smaller titlebar and menu sizes. I've noticed in the past that removing xcompmgr restores this text size to the original size on the next startx.

I have had that happen before, but only on hardware that either had the wrong graphics driver installed (ie: one that worked but not the onoe that was optimised for the hardware) or when the hardware was just too old & although it worked, the refresh's etc were slow. That erase thing for instance, i still get on my old PIII test machine. The graphics are from a really old SiS onboard graphics chip, using shared mobo memory, so i'm not surprised, and although it's a pain, it doesn't bother me too much.

As i'm pretty sure that your hardware is up to the job, then maybe it's worth finding out if there's a better graphics driver that you could install?

With regards to what you mentioned about trying out different settings when starting xcompmgr, that's definitely worth a try. I think if you do a "man xcompmgr" that should get some info, or failing that have a look at this thread. It's a couple of years old, but still very relevant.

I can't say that i've noticed the change in the Menu & Titlebar sizes that you mentioned, but i'll do a check "with & without" xcompmgr running & see if there's a difference. All in all, i have xcompmgr running on 4 different machines here, all with different hardware, and it runs fine on all of them, with the exception of the PIII mentioned above.

I'm away in the UK all of this week, so doon't have access to my other machines (only my laptop and this windows machine at my parents house!!) ..... but i'll do some research and digging when i get back home to see if i can come up with some helpful stuff. Let me know if you get any good results in the meantime?

I did replace the standard nv driver with the latest nvidia driver using the x windows assistant and saw no change in performance. I have to confess I'm not that knowledgable about video drivers for linux.

I also have the same performance you describe when manually resizing a window larger. I have a black shadow that is quickly filled in by moving the window slightly.

Have you tried using compiz at all? I'd be interested to know if you still get the same results using compiz. Also, have you got any other installs (Distros) on your machine(s) that you can try xcompmgr on to see if it's the same as on your antiX install? I've tried xcompmgr on several different distros, and it's worked pretty well across the board, although there were a few differences, but they were minor.

I'm surprised that you have the nv drivers installed and it's still playing up. I don't really know what else to suggest, but you can be sure that if i think of something or discover some new info, i'll be straight back here with it.

Djinn:

Just thought I would let you know that xcompmgr is working flawlessly on my new system (P4 2.60, 1 GB RAM)....using the same video card I had been trying with before (Geforce 5200, 128MB). Processor or memory (I'm guessing memory) just didn't have enough poop in the old machine.

Spoke too soon on the last post. Realized as I was typing it I hadn't tried xcompmgr with conky. Turned conky on and had the same behavior as before. I then turned conky off and re-booted. After that xcompmgr was flaky leaving partially drawn windows even without conky. There is definitely a conky-xcompmgr incompatibility that rears its ugly head.

impuwat wrote:Spoke too soon on the last post. Realized as I was typing it I hadn't tried xcompmgr with conky. Turned conky on and had the same behavior as before. I then turned conky off and re-booted. After that xcompmgr was flaky leaving partially drawn windows even without conky. There is definitely a conky-xcompmgr incompatibility that rears its ugly head.

Hmmm, that's interesting. Thanks for the heads up. It may be worth posting your .conkyrc here, just in case there's a line that needs to be changed that you're unaware of. I know that there were a few lines in my conky that i had to change to get it to work correctly. It works on my P4 (Once i get this "X" problem sorted anyway) but, although it also works on my old PIII (Which has onboard graphics - 16mb i think) it's not perfect. If you expand any of the windows, they won't actually expand "On Screen" until you just move whatever you have re-sized (PCmanFM, Rox, Terminal etc) and also, xcompmgr & xterm don't work together well at all.

If i find anything else that may help in the meantime, i'll be sure to post it here.