KDE Desktop effects

[Duncan]

Bogus Zaba posted on Mon, 17 Sep 2012 20:13:42 +0100 as excerpted:

> Did not work, but maybe there there is a clue here because this middle
> tab is...
> completely empty! There is a one-line text box into which you can type a
> search term and a much bigger box which presumably should contain a long
> list of effects which I should be able to play with.
> This is weird because the system clearly does know about available
> effects because on the first tab I have set (for example) : Effect for
> window switching to "Box Switch" from a pick-list.

Wow!  I'd say that probably has something to do with it, for sure!  But 
it's totally out of the blue, for me.  I've never seen or heard anything 
like it!

Two possibilities and if those (and sdowdy's suggestions) don't pan out, 
hit bugzilla and see if there's anything close.  I'd say file a bug if 
you don't find anything like it, but what they're working on now is one 
and a half to two years of development beyond the 4.6 you're running, so 
it's probably not worth even thinking about at this point, if there's 
nothing already there about it.  Once the new Slackware's out and you're 
on 4.8.x, however, if the bug's still there, I'd file it.

There are only two possibilities I can think of that would be anywhere 
/close/ to that.

1) Check to be sure, you're running kwin as the window manager, correct?  
Obviously if it somehow got replaced by compiz or the like, there'd be 
some dramatic loss of window manager configurability within kde, but I've 
never tried it, so I'm not sure what the symptoms would look like.

Probably the easiest way to be sure kwin's your window manager is to run 
kwin --replace, from krunner or the like.  You might also try from konsole 
or the like, and see if it spits out any useful information as errors, 
but if it's like most kde apps, devs apparently don't expect users to be 
watching STDOUT/STDERR at all, so they print out all kinds of alarming 
looking stuff even when things are working, for all one can tell.  As a 
result, that output tends to be useless for troubleshooting unless you 
have another similarly configured system that's working to try it on as 
well, and can do a diff to eliminate all the "normal noise".

You can also check top or kde's task list (from krunner or "the app 
formerly known as ksysguard", aka the impossibly generic system monitor), 
etc, and see if kwin is listed there as a running application and if 
killing it kills your window manager.  Do something like the following, 
to be sure you're not left without a window manager for more than the 5 
second test:

killall kwin; sleep 5; kwin

2) Perhaps some kwin related files are missing.  I don't know how slack 
breaks down its packages, but see what package contains the kwin 
executable, and try reinstalling it.  Also check /usr/share/kde4/services 
(or the appropriate analogous dir for slack if different) for a kwin 
subdir with a whole bunch of *.desktop files, and a bunch of 
kwin*.desktop desktop files in the services dir itself.  Here, these are 
part of the kwin package too, but it's possible they're in a different 
package there.

Hmm... I see one library with a very interesting name given your 
hardware, too. /usr/lib(64)/libkwinnvidiahack.so.4 as a symlink to 
liblkwinnvidiahack.so.4.9.1 (or whatever your kde version is, 4.6.5 IIRC 
in your case), in the same dir.  I'm not even sure there is such a thing 
in 4.6.5 or what it actually does presumably with nvidia hardware/drivers 
only, but if there's supposed to be and it's missing or corrupted, that 
could throw a monkey wrench in who knows what.  Again, here at least, 
it's part of the kwin package.  (You may not have the symlink, just the 
actual library, on a binary distro that splits its libs into separate 
runtime and -dev packages.  That'd be more trouble than it's worth on 
gentoo, since there /everything/ is generally built from source, so 
keeping the dev bits in the same package is simply easier and less 
trouble.)

Hopefully it's one of those two items, as that's about all I can think of 
that would leave you with an empty effects list!  That was a TOTAL 
surprise here -- I didn't see THAT coming AT ALL!

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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