Could someone give a hint as to why I’m having problems with enabling desktop effects on my Thinkpad T41? Video card in this machine is ATI’s Radeon 9000 Mobility, and I’m using the open source drivers.
a) If I enable KWin’s effects the desktop turns black, including taskbar. I can use taskbar, but it’s just beneath this black veil.
b) If I enable Compiz, most of the stuff works. Konsole’s got no decorations, but other windows do. And about one third of the desktop isn’t rendered. See the attached image.
Same problem on Thinkpad T30 (ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]). I didn’t see your thread, so I opened another one few days ago:
Have you tried the non-oss version of ATI’s driver?
I have no idea if it is any better as I don’t use ATI, but I’ve read some good things about recent improvements coming out of AMD/ATI recently.
I had that annoying “black desktop” problem with openSUSE 11 RC1 with the Nvidia driver, thankfully I haven’t had it in the final release.
Also:
Maybe try using the bleeding edge version of Compiz, I’ve found it fixes quite a few problems.
The default version of KDE4 (4.0) has a lot to answer for, again, maybe try upgrading to the 4.1 beta2 version, it is far more stable (on my laptop) than 4.0.
But be warned, it is difficult to get back to 4.0 if you upgrade to 4.1beta and want to go back, and updates can sometimes break things. Although I’ve been running 4.1beta2 for a week now and all is rosy :).
Also you could as a safer alternative, install KDE3 and/or Gnome, see if that makes a difference.
