Xfce Forum

HeyMaan

Member

From: Kazakhstan

Registered: 2023-02-15

Posts: 3

[SOLVED] Missing title bars and unresizable windows

Hello, friends. I hope I'm in the right place to ask for help with such a problem. I didn't want to make you read a lot, but I think it's important to not miss anything at first. This is my little story.

A few days ago I did a little stuff in my Linux Lite 3.8 on an old laptop Acer Aspire. I finished, and then, before leaving I ran the 'make' utility to build something. About three hours later I was unable to see what happened on the machine, and I asked my father to see and shut it down. My father is not very good with computers, so I had to tell him exactly what to do. He had done everything right, I watched this through the phone camera.

However, a couple of days later, when I turned it on and logged in, I had some problems :
- I could open any windows, but title bars had gone;
- the next open window overlapped all the previous permanently;
- I can't full-screen them or just resize, though they can be moved by grabbing the menu bar area;
- Alt+F4 doesn't work, only Ctrl+Q/Ctrl+Shift+Q for file manager or Ctrl+W for documents;
- switching through Alt+Tab doesn't work too;
- on every login, my home directory is open;
- I tried opening Window Manager in Settings, but it didn't, just wait cursor;

So, a really strange mess for me! I just can't read documents and work in text editors. Looks like there is a problem with the window manager.

What exactly I ran before leaving was I built 'qttools' module from Qt5 framework. It was built successfully and seems quite harmless.

I think I should've tried logging in under another account and see how windows work there. You see, I'm not a linux superuser yet. I know nothing about window manager config files or something.

So, how to fix it? How can I return the system to the previous normal state without breaking the whole thing down? And what is the possible reason for that incident?

Please, any ideas. I know it's easy for you, superusers!

Last edited by HeyMaan (2023-02-17 19:44:09)

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,485

Re: [SOLVED] Missing title bars and unresizable windows

Hello and welcome.

Sounds like the window manager (xfwm4) is not running or has crashed. If you can open a terminal window, try running:

xfwm4

...to see if it returns.

Another option is that before you log in to Xfce, switch to another virtual terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F2) and login to the text console there. Then delete the contents of the ~/.cache/sessions folder. Logout, return to the graphical login screen (or reboot) and see if that fixes it.

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HeyMaan

Member

From: Kazakhstan

Registered: 2023-02-15

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] Missing title bars and unresizable windows

Thank you, ToZ.
Now I have no access to the machine. As soon as I get to the place I'll try your suggestions and respond. I am glad to be heard.

HeyMaan

Member

From: Kazakhstan

Registered: 2023-02-15

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] Missing title bars and unresizable windows

Success.

At first, when I logged in as usual and ran 'xfwm4', normal windows returned immediately, everything was OK. But after the next loggin-in, windows were bad again.

Then I logged out, logged in through the virtual terminal and cleaned the directory ~/.cache/sessions. Finally, when I logged in through lightDM, everything became as good as before the trouble.

So, thank you again, ToZ. It was easy, and I feel I should learn more about window managers. But what was the trouble caused by? I guess there might've been an outage at the time of reboot/suspend; could it crash some xfwm4 files?

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,485

Re: [SOLVED] Missing title bars and unresizable windows

But what was the trouble caused by? I guess there might've been an outage at the time of reboot/suspend; could it crash some xfwm4 files?

Either a corrupted session file (as a result of outage), or xfwm4 crashed, you logged out and the session was saved without xfwm4.

Good to hear its resolved though.

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