Playing with wallpaper plugin. Compiz crashed, I restarted, no more XFCE!

[Mysticle31]

This is strange to me

I was playing with the plugins I downloaded. I was playing with the wallpaper plugin. I found two image files to load. One was the default brown Ubuntu one, the other was the default Xubuntu one. I clicked enable plugin, and compiz crashed. I had no more ability to move/control my windows.

So I restarted my computer.

I boot up, and I see the XFCE boot screen. The desktop loads, conky loads, emerald/compiz loads, AWN loads. Just like my XFCE desktop. I have not, knowingly anyway (no doubt some gnome stuff was installed while I was installing/configuring) , installed or EVER booted gnome on this Xubuntu installation.

But something is different.

My wallpaper is now the brown Ubuntu wallpaper and not the Blueish Xubuntu wallpaper. I find I no longer have the right click to access application menu that I had in XFCE. I find that I can drag to select files, which I can not do in XFCE. Somehow part of Gome took over XFCE! I wasn't using any pannels in XFCE, just AWN. And I don't have any pannels in my "sudo Gnome" desktop.

I've already tried logging out and selecting XFCE from the menu. .I've tried failsafe gnome and failsave xfce too.

What happened? How do I find out what happened? How do I fix it? I looked for a compiz log in /var/log or an XFCE or Gnome log. Nothing. What must I do?

I really don't want to have to reformat again. Even MythTV channel changing on my set-top box works now! Maybe it's what I get for playing :P

[coz]

Hey Mysticle31,
I am not sure of a solution for this, however, can you get into the system long enough to uninstall the wallpaper plugin?
I am assuming you kept the folders for the downloaded plugins you installed, and a sudo make uninstall should remove it once you cd to that plugin folder.
coz

[Mysticle31]

I kept the plugins' install folders. I will try to uninstall it.

It wasn't installing the plugins that did it per say. Becouse I rebooted after installing the plugins. Then I added conky to startup and rebooted again. Then I played with the other plugins (3d windows..etc). The wallpaper plugin was the last one I played with.

[some-guy]

try running killall nautilus

[einheitlix]

Also, I'd look into xfce-setting-show. There, select Desktop and see if "Allow Xfce to manage my desktop" is checked. If it isn't checked, no wonder right-clicks on the desktop don't work anymore :)

And you're sure that compiz has properly started, and you're not running some other gnome-wm, like sawfish? :)

[Mysticle31]

Yep, I did not know that nautilus could draw the desktop. That's good for me because I can use gnome, disable nautilus drawing the desktop, and run XFDesktop instead!

I wonder how nautilus took over?

I know that only one window manager can be ran at a time. However, gnome uses metacity and compiz --replace works when I run gnome. How can I change from metacity to something else and still use compiz? I would maybe think that if I somehow changed the start metacity command when loading gnome into a start <something else> when loading gnome, that I would still be able to use compiz --replace?

Then again, it isn't a window manger that gives me my right click menu like Xfdesktop does. But I was told to look into it. It seems more like the desktop manager does it and not the window manger.

That was actually, a really cool problem!

[Fyda]

I know that only one window manager can be ran at a time. However, gnome uses metacity and compiz --replace works when I run gnome. How can I change from metacity to something else and still use compiz? I would maybe think that if I somehow changed the start metacity command when loading gnome into a start <something else> when loading gnome, that I would still be able to use compiz --replace?Metacity cannot possibly be running when Compiz is running. If you are seeing Metacity themes being applied to the window borders, then that is gtk-window-decorator, which uses Metacity themes. :)

gtk-window-decorator can be replaced with emerald, if you prefer.

Then again, it isn't a window manger that gives me my right click menu like Xfdesktop does. But I was told to look into it. It seems more like the desktop manager does it and not the window manger.I don't know about Xfdesktop, but in the default GNOME desktop environment, Nautilus (the file manager app) draws the desktop window. Thus, the desktop window behaves much like any other Nautilus window: it has a right-click menu, and it contains icons representing files. It is simply special because it's fullscreen, cannot be moved, and is always behind other windows.

So, it is entirely possible to run Nautilus in a non-GNOME desktop environment and have it draw the desktop; I've been able to do this inside an OpenBox session, for example.

And yes, the drawing of the desktop window is not really related to Compiz. :)

[Mysticle31]

Very cool.

So any effect I would gain by running say, enlightenment would be negated when compiz took over.

Thanks for all your help guys.

Is there a section on this forum where I can ask non-compiz questions? You guys are some of the most knowledgeable people, that actually answer questions (quite well at that) that I've met as of yet. I've had luck on other fourms too, but learned the most here. I havn't checked if there is a section or not yet.

[eeexp]

I was running into a problem like that when I chose not to autostart compiz fusion.
Have you tried pressing alt + F2 and entering
xfwm4 --replace
That worked for me, so I added to my autostarted applications.