Xfce Forum

GS

Member

From: place once called Transylvania

Registered: 2010-06-23

Posts: 41

[Solved] Adverse Changes in Xfce behavior since clutter update on 12/17?

Hi,

I've got five Debian testing systems -- four are i386 installations, and one is amd64. On 12/17 there was a clutter version upgrade (among other things). There was a warning from apt-listbugs concerning the new clutter version breaking mesa, and referring to http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=620908.

I confirmed that I wanted to install the upgrades. I have seen no untoward result on any of the i386 systems, but I have seen the following three symptoms on the amd64 system, starting immediately after the upgrades.

1. Xfce's compositing is broken. If I  turn it on, I see large gray shadows around the panels and all windows.

2. The desktop selection applet in the settings manager cannot be used to set any kind of background / wallpaper image. The only background that can be shown on this system's desktop is what is selected via update-alternatives.

3. I get no menu when right-clicking on the desktop.

I really have a hard time believing that these isolated issues (when everything else in Xfce is working fine) are caused by clutter breaking mesa.

BTW, all software on these systems comes from the testing main repositories. The amd64 installation is on a Lenovo T520i notebook with integrated Intel 2nd gen. graphics controller.

Is this just a weird coincidence, a real issue caused by the clutter (or some other upgrade in the mix), or should I be looking for a way to fix something that's been screwed up in the configuration of Xfce? (I've briefly compared the Xfce configuration with that of the i386 systems and didn't notice anything amiss.)

If someone can at least point me in a possibly fruitful direction, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks,
Gilbert

PS: The entire list of upgrades installed via aptitude on the problem system is below -- just in case it might be of interest.

[REMOVE, NOT USED] libgnome-desktop-3-0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gir1.2-atk-1.0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gir1.2-clutter-1.0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gir1.2-clutter-gst-1.0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gir1.2-cogl-1.0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gir1.2-coglpango-1.0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gir1.2-evince-3.0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gir1.2-freedesktop
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gir1.2-gdkpixbuf-2.0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gir1.2-gst-plugins-base-0.10
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gir1.2-gstreamer-0.10
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gir1.2-gtk-3.0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gir1.2-gtkclutter-1.0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gir1.2-gtksource-3.0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gir1.2-json-1.0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gir1.2-pango-1.0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gir1.2-sushi-1.0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gnome-sushi
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] gnome-sushi-common
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libclutter-1.0-0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libclutter-1.0-common
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libclutter-gst-1.0-0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libclutter-gtk-1.0-0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libcogl-common
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libcogl-pango0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libcogl5
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libgjs0b
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libgnome-desktop-3-2
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libgtksourceview-3.0-0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libgtksourceview-3.0-common
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libjson-glib-1.0-0
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libmusicbrainz3-6
[INSTALL, DEPENDENCIES] libsushi-1.0-0
[UPGRADE] gnome-desktop3-data 3.0.2-2 -> 3.2.1-3
[UPGRADE] gstreamer0.10-gconf 0.10.30-2 -> 0.10.30-2.1
[UPGRADE] gstreamer0.10-plugins-good 0.10.30-2 -> 0.10.30-2.1
[UPGRADE] libmikmod2 3.1.12-1 -> 3.1.12-2
[UPGRADE] libnautilus-extension1a 3.0.2-4 -> 3.2.1-2+b1
[UPGRADE] libnfsidmap2 0.24-1 -> 0.25-1
[UPGRADE] libsasl2-2 2.1.24~rc1.dfsg1+cvs2011-05-23-4 -> 2.1.25.dfsg1-2
[UPGRADE] libsasl2-modules 2.1.24~rc1.dfsg1+cvs2011-05-23-4 -> 2.1.25.dfsg1-2
[UPGRADE] nautilus 3.0.2-4 -> 3.2.1-2+b1
[UPGRADE] nautilus-data 3.0.2-4 -> 3.2.1-2

Forester

Member

Registered: 2012-01-01

Posts: 13

Re: [Solved] Adverse Changes in Xfce behavior since clutter update on 12/17?

Buna,

I have a suggestion.  It cured some weird behaviour I observed after upgrade on several systems but I can't guarantee it will work for you:

Reboot in failsafe mode, su to your usual user id and delete:

$HOME/.cache/sessions/xfce4-session-*

where * will be the machine id : display number.

Then bring the machine up as normal.

If this works, then your xfce session cache file was corrupt.  If you don't save the session when you log out (there's a box to uncheck) then you won't get this problem.  It may be that the corruption is associated with upgrades (not convinced) but if you are running Debian Testing upgrades are rather hard to avoid so perhaps weirdness will return- certainly is has for some people.

Anyway, best of luck.

GS

Member

From: place once called Transylvania

Registered: 2010-06-23

Posts: 41

Re: [Solved] Adverse Changes in Xfce behavior since clutter update on 12/17?

Well, for pity's sake! Would you look at that! It seems that I have to re-learn this trick every few months!

Normally, when an upgrade savages my Xfce session I'm used to seeing all kinds of heck break loose. The issues this time were so tiny and isolated it never occurred to me to even log on under my test profile to see if the problems existed there.

My amd64 installation (and its xfce session) is behaving itself now.

I think I'm going to frame your post and hang it above my workstation so that I don't forget

Thank you very much, Forester.

ossgrouch

Member

Registered: 2011-12-30

Posts: 3

Re: [Solved] Adverse Changes in Xfce behavior since clutter update on 12/17?

I'll be ...... Thanks guys, that trick did it. I got so frustrated of a similar issue that I re-installed the whole operating system to get it back to normal. And it worked for a few days, until I installed something that messed it up again.
The Grouch

GS

Member

From: place once called Transylvania

Registered: 2010-06-23

Posts: 41

Re: [Solved] Adverse Changes in Xfce behavior since clutter update on 12/17?

I'll be ...... Thanks guys, that trick did it. I got so frustrated of a similar issue that I re-installed the whole operating system to get it back to normal. And it worked for a few days, until I installed something that messed it up again.
The Grouch

Ouch! I'm glad I didn't go that far, but -- on the other hand -- I'm just compulsive enough that I might have gone there eventually if I had seen a subsequent update to mesa  and/or clutter without seeing resolution of the problems.

From now on, I'm going to remember to keep the session corruption issue foremost in my thoughts when I run into weirdness like this. It really hadn't occurred to me that session corruption could cause less horrific outcomes than what I had become accustomed to previously. I usually saw really serious and widespread issues with the desktop environment when corruption occurred But, apparently, minor issues can also arise from such corruption.

Forester has, indeed, done both of us a service by reminding us of this "basic" fact of life with Xfce.

I don't remember seeing this sort of thing with other DEs like Gnome or KDE. However, I like Xfce enough that this minor problem with using it is nowhere near enough to make me think of switching to an alternative DE. I find the aforementioned Gnome and KDE to be way over the top, feature-wise and complexity-wise. I find Xfce to be very close to my ideal desktop environment. Whatever quibbles I might have about it would be buried under the avalanche of issues I have with most other DEs. (LXDE is the only alternative in my experience that I find even remotely interesting.)

Without Xfce or LXDE, I'd just go to a window manager and forget the whole DE thing.

I'm glad my whining had a positive result for you, as well as for myself.

Again, thank you to Forester.

ossgrouch

Member

Registered: 2011-12-30

Posts: 3

Re: [Solved] Adverse Changes in Xfce behavior since clutter update on 12/17?

I had experimented with different desktop enviroments after upgrading to 11.10. It turns out that my old favourite KDE has become a little too complicated to my liking, and GNOME's newest version isn't any better. I used to have XFCE on an old laptop with limited rescources years ago, and it worked suprisingly well. So I made a new partition and tried XUbuntu, and then installed the GNOME desktop as well, and then the LXDE desktop, on the same installation, and thats when my problems started. So a clean install helped bring things back to normal. But I favour Nautilus over Thunar, like to have a couple of tabs open, and it has built in search capability.
Now I have figured out that Nautilus likes to take over control of the desktop, and it makes that file that Forester told us to delete. Nautilus takes away the right click menu, makes the desktop background unchangeable or just plain blue, removes desktop icons etc. I have since learned that Nautilus can be started with a "--no-desktop option". So by changing the Exec= line in my Nautilus.desktop file to Exec=/usr/bin/nautilus --no-desktop I can still use my prefferred filemanager without any problems.
I have also tried Linux Mint, it is built with Ubuntu, and the latest version (Lisa I think it was) uses Mate, which is a continuation of GNOME2, and it worked really well out of the box, but at prescent time I am going to concentrate on XFCE, it is snappy, customizable, and seems to do everything I like to do.

Osscar Grouch