As I mentioned the other day, I upgraded one of my systems from Kubuntu Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon and had to fix some quirks with Compiz Fusion. Another anomaly I had was the appearance of wide white borders around application menus as well as the K-Menu in KDE. It appeared as though the menu shadows weren’t being rendered properly.
Fortunately, the fix for that was quite easy. Instead of the default KDE window decorator, gtk-window-decorator, use Emerald. The package can be found in Adept. After installing it, run emerald –replace to turn it on without having to log out. To adjust settings and customize the window decorations, go to Settings in the K-Menu and run Emerald Theme Manager.
So far, I’m liking Compiz Fusion. It hasn’t crashed and it’s very fast. I don’t notice any performance penalty as compared to using the regular 2D desktop. Granted, the 3D animations are just eye candy but they’re fun.
The white border problem is more easily fixed by disabling the shadows in the Appearance->Effect Menu and adding the string !dock (minus the quotes) to the Shadow Windows entry in CCSM->Window Decorations. So my entry looks like any !dock
Cheers!
Hi Adam. Are you referring to the “Menu drop shadow” option in Appearance -> Style -> Effects?
Removing the menu drop shadow worked great, but I couldn’t find the Shadow Windows option. I’m looking in KControlCenter in Appearance -> Window Decorations -> Window Decoration. There are several tabs (General, Buttons, Background, Logo, Overlay) but I don’t see a Shadow Windows. Are you using the Crystal window decorations or a different set?
Sorry, the Shadow Windows setting is in the compiz config settings manager (CCSM) Settings->Advanced Desktop Effect Settings. Select the “Window Decorations” plugin and the option is in there (Last option). This is all in KDE too btw.
If you don’t have the settings manager installed simply do:
$ sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager
Ah, OK. I have CCSM installed. In the KDE menu, it’s called “Advanced Desktop Effects Settings” but when you run it, then you see “CompizConfig Settings Manager” so I didn’t make the connection. Thanks for the clarification, Adam.
Unfortunately, I still get the white border. I thought disabling the shadow in KWin fixed it but what actually happened was that when I turned off the shadow, KWin crashed. Then, after I restart it with kwin –replace, then compiz died. So it looked like the white border was gone, but compiz wasn’t actually running.
After starting compiz back up, then the white border is back. Control Center still shows that shadows are turned off and !dock is in the CompizConfig Window Decorations.
As a side note, I uninstalled Emerald before trying all this.
You may also want to try putting in 2!dock, I can’t remember exactly what it references. But it is required in some configurations.