shadows have "disappeared" in Ubuntu

[lkingjr]

I had compton running fine in Lubuntu 12.04-12.10. Now those no longer have shadows nor does Lubuntu 13.10. Any thoughts?

[zakkak]

Did you try building from the trunk? It is working fine for me on lubuntu 12.10 with openbox.

[lkingjr]

well, if the trunk is the zip file yes. it might be an lxde problem. the reason I started using compton was because shadows quit working with xcompmgr and LXDE. compton was working fine and everything is still working except the shadows. beats me.

[zakkak]

Yes xcompmgr 1.1.6 breaks the shadows and although there is a patch that fixes it, the developers still didn't release it.

Try cloning the trunk and build compton from it. (That's what i did and works fine)
git clone https://github.com/chjj/compton.git

[lkingjr]

I would if I knew what you are talking about. :D I'm lucky I managed to get the dependencies and build it as it was.

[richardgv]

Huh, this looks even trickier...

1. You have enabled -c, and you don't use some extreme shadow parameters, right? Please try running compton with this:

   compton --config /dev/null -c -o 1
   

2. Please build from the current master branch and check:

   mkdir -p ~/git
   cd ~/git
   git clone git://github.com/chjj/compton.git
   cd compton
   make clean; CFLAGS='-ggdb' make
   killall compton
   ./compton --config /dev/null -c -o 1

3. Do other features work? Fading (-f), inactive opacity (-i), inactive dim (--inactive-dim)?

[lkingjr]

well, "compton --config /dev/null -c -o 1" gives me shadows. I am calling the sample.compton.conf file to start compton. apparently there is a setting in the conf file that has to be changed but I don't know which one it would be.

edit: everything else seems to be working.

re-edit: I'm getting an error when I run this in a terminal...
louis@louis-Lubuntu:~$ compton -config ~/.compton.conf
[ 150.81 ] error 3 (BadWindow) request 20 minor 0 serial 53272
[ 150.81 ] error 3 (BadWindow) request 2 minor 0 serial 53279
[ 150.81 ] error 3 (BadWindow) request 15 minor 0 serial 53280

[lkingjr]

For what it's worth, I just noticed that after loading .compton.conf which ends up with no shadows, if I kill compton then run compton -c, I get the settings in the .compton.conf and shadows. I don't know why. Perhaps it will help tracking the problem.

[richardgv]

well, "compton --config /dev/null -c -o 1" gives me shadows. I am calling the sample.compton.conf file to start compton. apparently there is a setting in the conf file that has to be changed but I don't know which one it would be.

Well, you scared me. This doesn't look like a big problem! :-) Say, I would recommend you to be a little more careful when you report a bug next time.

The first thing is to make sure you have shadow = true; in your configuration file.

The way to figure out which line is causing the shadow to disappear is to comment out them all (except shadow = true;) and enable them one by one until the shadow disappear. no-dnd-shadow, no-dock-shadow, shadow-exclude, shadow-ignore-shaped, wintypes, etc. could all cause shadow to be disabled in certain cases.

re-edit: I'm getting an error when I run this in a terminal...
louis@louis-Lubuntu:~$ compton -config ~/.compton.conf
[ 150.81 ] error 3 (BadWindow) request 20 minor 0 serial 53272
[ 150.81 ] error 3 (BadWindow) request 2 minor 0 serial 53279
[ 150.81 ] error 3 (BadWindow) request 15 minor 0 serial 53280

Please read my comments on #52.

[lkingjr]

Sorry I scared you. :) I didn't mean to imply I found a bug. I just knew I had compton working on two installs of Lubuntu and it just stopped working due to some update or other I'm sure. Then when I installed compton on Lubuntu 13.04 daily build it wasn't working either.

As far as the shadows go, since I ran 'compton -c', now when I boot, restart or logout, the shadows are working. I didn't actually change the .compton.conf file. Shadows were working when I booted so I haven't bothered commenting everything out to see what the problem was since it's now working.

As far as the comments I did find in the process of fooling with the compton.conf file changing the settings of one line which escapes me at the moment made the (BadWindow) error go away.

I would like to thank you for your help and I really didn't mean to scare you :)

[lkingjr]

ugh, I spoke too soon. I logged out after my last post and logged back in and no shadows again. I killed compton and ran compton -c and the shadows were back. Looks like I will have to go through the conf file. :(

[lkingjr]

I found the problem. All this time I had the sample.compton.conf file saved as .compton.conf in my home folder. I added the line "@Compton -conf /home//.compton.conf" to /etc/xdg/lxsession/autostart. It had worked that way for months then suddenly shadows quit drawing but everything else worked. I went through the process of commenting everything out then uncommenting one at a time and nothing seemed to help. As it turns out all I had to do was change the line in autostart to "@Compton" and now everything works. strange.

[richardgv]

compton does read from ~/.compton.conf by default, as mentioned in the man page:

... If --config is not used, compton will seek for a configuration file in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/compton.conf (~/.config/compton.conf, usually), then ~/.compton.conf, then compton.conf under $XDG_DATA_DIRS (often /etc/xdg/compton.conf)...

Even if you are to explicited specify a configuration file, the command should be:

compton --config /home/USERNAME/.compton.conf

[lkingjr]

yes well as I said, it had been working for months on end and actually the only thing that stopped working recently was the shadows. I had the config file as ~/.compton.conf and was calling it from /etc/xdg/lxsession/autostart which worked fine up until recently. in three different installs. now I just don't explicitly call the file and it's fine. :)