Cannot activate emerald

I am running 11.1 and compiz is running well, but I can’t get emerald to activate. The only thing I have read on the subject is to be sure that it’s set as your window decorator but there isn’t anything distro specific. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

How about running it in a terminal with the command,
emerald --replace, have you already tried it?

I am running 11.1 and compiz is running well, but I can’t get emerald to activate. The only thing I have read on the subject is to be sure that it’s set as your window decorator but there isn’t anything distro specific. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I recently upgraded to KDE 4.2.1 desktop with openSUSE11.0 and briefly tried compiz with emerald (window decorator) enabled. Although the end-result looked nice, I couldn’t get it to stick. Everytime I restarted the DE, I need to re-enable emerald.

I have also heard that support for emerald has stopped, so in the end I decided to live without it and removed the emerald packages. I also reverted to kwin window manager. I’m not sure that compiz provides any advantages over kwin with respect to KDE 4 environment. Maybe others can enlighten me here.

In order to get emerald to work with my computer (KDE 4.2.1 “108”) I had to use the fusion-icon to change my window manager to Compiz and then change the window decorator to Emerald.

I did this first.

Then I would go into Configure Desktop (Personal Settings) and under Personal click Default Applications. Then choose Windows Manager and switch it to Compiz.

If I didn’t enable emerald with the fusion-icon first then when I chose Compiz through Default Applications only compiz would load, not emerald.

I didn’t have to do this everytime though, only the first time to set it up. It works fine on my computer now.

Hope this helps!

Thats the process I followed, but for some reason I needed re-enable it each time.

I think the fusion icon has to be set to autostart in kde 4.x. that’s what I did before when I was using it if memory serves, but since the kde 4.x kwin is capable of doing almost the same as compiz if not 100% but stable I stop using compiz. I prefer to not auto-start those effects, I just create a luncher in the panel and use it whenever I feel using it.

but since the kde 4.x kwin is capable of doing almost the same as compiz if not 100% but stable I stop using compiz.

Thats the way I feel too. However, I hope that the kde-window-decorator is developed a little more. I like the Oxygen theme (with default colours and fonts), but I would like to set the colour of the title-bar only (similar to crimson colour of beryl-default). I haven’t found a way to do this yet.

Something I forgot to mention is that I have Gnome instead of KDE which has pretty boring window deocrations. I tried adding the fusion icon but that didn’t do much for me and when I run emerald from a terminal, it either does nothing or removes all window borders completely until I logout and go back in.