Last night I tried running compiz using compiz --replace but it hasnt had the effect Id hoped for. The windows now all appear small in the top left corner and cant be resized, dragged and dont have any of the buttons (close, minimise etc.)
Also on firefox the drop down menus (such as file) cant be access because when the cursor hover on them they close. Also, desktop items are now half hidden under the top panel.
How can I find out whether compiz is the window manager or xfce is?
Should I just restore to before I ran compiz? If so, how?
If I installed compiz config manager would I be able to solve this?
Is this a KDE, XFCE or Gnome desktop? Have you considered moving to KDE 4.8.3 if this is KDE? KDE, Gnome and XFCE are all desktops environments while Compiz is a compositing window manager for the X Window System, using 3D graphics hardware to create fast compositing desktop effects for window management.
Compiz will not work with GNOME3 (yet), is complete overkill on KDE, since kwin can do almost all of the effects.
For now, I would uninstall compiz and its manager, and see that you get back to a default XFCE. Then first start reading on how to get XFCE and compiz work nicely together. No doubt you will find useful HOWTO’s.
Why not create a new user and log in as that user to see if its a configuration problem. If it is a config we could then solve the issue by removing the XFCE config for instance.
The everything seems to be working fine under the new user. Can I replace the xfce config file in the older user with the one from the new user? Where is the config file? I cant seem to find it.
AFAIK, that’s not a single one, I’m afraid, it’s a folder, not to be removed whilst logged in.
While logged in as the newly created user, open a terminal window, and do
su YOUROLDUSERNAMEHERE
(enter olduser's passoword)
mv ~/.config/xfce4 ~/.config/xfce4.old
Logout the newly created user, login as the olduser and report if things have gone back to normal.
Ok so xfce is back to its default look on my original user, however the problem persists; there is still a firefox window in the top left corner which wont move or close, in fact all application windows open to the top left and cant be dragged.
Nah, if it would be an X problem, the newly created user would experience the same problem.
What happens if you open a terminal window and do
xfwm4 --replace
According to the docs, that should replace compiz by XFCE’s own windowmanager.
Question: do you have any essential data stored in your homedir yet? If not, if your just trying things out, there’s an easy solution, that would bring back a default “clean” useraccount. USE ONLY IF DATA DON’T MATTER:
login as the newly created user
su OLDUSERNAMEHERE
(enter olduser's password)
rm -rf ~/.*
then log back in as the “normal” user. The account is exactly like it was immediately after install. Except for things you stored in folders not beginning with “.” (a dot).