Natty is problematic for me

[Eocene Miacid]

Hi,

I'm an enthusiastic Kubuntu user for a year or two now. Terrific OS.

Though Natty is really trying my patience. I have it installed on a number of netbooks/laptops and I'm suffering a number of problems I didn't have with previous releases.

Before I decide to roll back to Maverick (which worked great for me), I decided to give the forum a try to see if the solutions might be obvious.

The first problem I would like to solve is that whenever I modify my plasma-desktop panel (for example move it to another screen edge, or add widgets and then close panel settings) my KDE session freezes completely. This happens on both of my machines. I just upgraded to KDE 4.7 and deleted every plasma config file in .kde/share in my home folder, but it still happens. I can switch to a different console and reboot there, but killing the plasma-desktop process doesn't give me control of that session (though if I check with top afterwards, the process is gone)

Anybody able to help me out with this?

Regards

[Teunis]

Re: Natty is problematic for me

It sounds similar to problems others had and solved by deselecting some desktop effect.
I don't remember which one, blur maybe? but you could start disabling 3d effects.

[Eocene Miacid]

Re: Natty is problematic for me

Thanks for your reply.

I disabled desktop effects in general and unticked each specific effect to make sure. I run Compiz as my window manager anyway.
It would appear that was causing the problem for me - when I switch to KWin first before modifying the panel, it appears to work fine.

So really, that's good enough. It's not like I need to modify the panel regularly.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Natty is problematic for me

IMO Compiz is a large part of your problem. Kwin does about 70% of what Compiz does - cube rotate, etc..

[Teunis]

Re: Natty is problematic for me

I don't even have Compiz installed yet have all the gimmicks I want.

[Linkmaster]

Re: Natty is problematic for me

KWin works a lot better than compiz does on KDE computers, or at least as my experience has proved. Especially on my underpowered machine, the only thing I can't use is blur, and 4.7 almost fixed that for me[its sluggish for me rather then completely locking up]. See what happens when you toss Compiz, and let KWin show its beauty

[LinuxRocks]

Re: Natty is problematic for me

I know this is a little old, and you seem to have fixed your problem by disabling desktop effects, however, I had ran into the same issue and also issues re-sizing some applications.

The fix for me, and others, is to upgrade your Nvidia video card driver (Providing your using an Nvidia graphics card - I'm willing to bet you are based on the problems you are having).

If you are, and have installed the driver from jockey, you can simply follow the following instructions to fix your issue:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

sudo reboot

You might even benefit from this repo if you are not running nvidia hardware due to other drivers and X updates that are included.

If you get into trouble with this ppa, you can simply install ppa-purge and remove it.

Hope this helps!
Joe