Intrepid Sprint (London)
The great thing about the Ubuntu distro team development sprints is that you get to sit around a table and share your knowledge about workarounds for all of the broken things in the current release:
- To get the machine to resume from suspend, boot an older kernel
- To get X to start, disable usplash
- To get a useful desktop, wait for the white screen, press Alt+F2 and type “
metacity --replace“
Hurrah, Metacity is useful.
In the spirit of this post: Wordpress has a nasty habit, which appears in this post, of assuming that people who write two hyphens together want an em dash. Then when people try out the command, copy and paste breaks it. I’ve found it useful in the past to insert an empty HTML comment between the two hyphens.
The “white screen” is from bugs in the current Mesa build, which “works” with direct rendering on various cards that didn’t used to support it in Compiz. The problem is that textures from windows still don’t map, so you get a white display. The simplest fix after getting yourself into Metacity is to force INDIRECT=”yes” in /usr/bin/compiz (compiz-manager). Search for the line INDIRECT=”no” and switch it to “yes”.
From what I’ve seen, X always starts, but sometimes the display is completely black, but switching to a VT while usplash is running seems to keep things working properly.
Instead of pressing Alt+F2 and typing “metacity –replace“, you may want to install fusion-icon.
When you run it from the menu, it places an icon in the notification area which lets you switch between compiz and metacity.
It gives you other quick access functions which I don’t use as often as the one I described.
Could you share with us information about your upstart 0.5 release plan? The most important question is “when it will be ready?”.
Regards,
M.
Hey Scott. Happy Birthday. xx
Silvio: no doubt that would work excellently well if such an icon were visible! It doesn’t work so well when you’ve just got a white screen …