Friday, November 14, 2008

Help! Unsolved problems with maximized Kubuntu Intrepid windows

After quite happily having upgraded to Intrepid on two machines (a laptop and a desktop), I started upgrading a second laptop. By now, I had apt-p2p installed on my first laptop, and with the help of Cameron hacked apt-p2p to allow my laptop use the apt-p2p installation of my already migrated laptop. The download went rather smoothly. Anyway, that's not important to my problem.

The problem I encountered with my second laptop, after fixing the ATI-driver problem (I had to replace to old ATI drivers with the new opensource driver package to get X11 working again), was that all windows automatically maximized:

When I minimize the window, it does, but does not have any decoration:

There is little to find with Google, except for this closed thread on ubuntuforums. I followed hints.

I removed my .kde folder, made sure I was using kwin, checked window size settings (but it even maximizes dialogs!), and Riddel was kind enough to make some suggestions, which unfortunately did not help either. Worse, I rebooted my already migrated laptop, and now I have the problem on both laptops :(

So, at least the problem is not hardware related. Also, the most recent updated laptop showed the problem with both KDE 4.1.2 and 4.1.3, so that does not seem to be the problem either. A reboot triggered the problem of my first migrated laptop, which was last booted 4 days ago. So, it seems to have to do with a package I installed upon the upgrade of the second machine, and which I installed in the last 4 days... does aptitude keep a log by now?

The problem is rather annoying, and makes the desktop quite unusable... I don't want to reinstall Intrepid from scratch... I filed a bug report with some extra details. so, if you have any suggestion, any, I am likely going to try it. Any suggestion on how to debug the problem is also most welcome...

Update: problem could be fixed with: aptitude remove devilspie. Thanx to all who replied!

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

I had the same problems with an ubuntu umpc installation on an eeepc-1000h. The default intall config made all the windows occupy the available space, so I thought that's the way the window manager was configured. But then I installed kubuntu-kde4-desktop (if I remember correctly the name of the package). Bu when I logged in kde4, the same behavior that you described occured. Even krunner, but not all the time. I tried to remove the .kde dir, but it didn't fix it. It would be nice to find out why is this happening.
I have to mention that I gave up trying to make it work, and I installed Kubuntu, which worked, at least partly, because knetworkmanager was useless.

Anonymous said...

The apt log is at /var/log/apt/term*

Egon Willighagen said...

@darken: yes, krunner too.

@esben: thanx!

Hans said...

Try (when a window is focused) Alt+F3 -> Advanced. Is "No border" checked? If it is, uncheck it. Do you get a border?

If yes, press Alt+F3 again -> Configure Window Behavior... -> Window-Specific Settings. Anything suspicious there?

Egon Willighagen said...

Hans, that first suggestion returns the borders!

The second window specific list is empty. This is, I think, the list Riddel suggested me to empty via the matching kwinFOOrc file in .kde/...

Egon Willighagen said...

Hans, so this might be a problem that my settings got messed up in some way? Which kubuntu package take care of this? Can I restore 'factory' settings? By reinstalling a certain package maybe, maybe with purging one or two first?

Hans said...

It sounded like a window specific setting (maximize, no border), but since you've deleted the relevant files and double checked the dialog I doubt that's the problem.

Unfortunately I have no idea how to fix it. I don't use Kubuntu, packages and purging are alien to me (Slackware user ;).

If I were you, I would try to make a new user and see if the same problem appear for this user. The answer is most likely 'yes' (removing .kde apparently didn't help, so I don't see why this would), then I don't know how to proceed. Maybe reinstall kwin-kde4?

Anonymous said...

Look through running processes (press ctrl+esc) for something called "maximizer" or something like that.
It's an ugly hack that Ubuntu uses in their netbook "spin" which constantly looks through all running applications for X-applications, and if finding one, tries to maximize it. You're not the first person I help remove this (as if I didn't have big enough reasons to avoid *buntu already...).
Someone should tell them to just use KWin's builtin default placement mode of "maximizing", but this is what you get from a distro that defaults to gnome ;p

Egon Willighagen said...

@sandsmark: Thanx! devilspie is what the devilish program is called!

aptitude remove devilspie

That seems to have solved the problem!

Thanks guys, for all the hints!

Egon Willighagen said...

Grmphh... after a relogin, it problem is back. So removing devilspie does not solve the problem :(

Egon Willighagen said...

OK, maybe it does. Either I have a virus, or much more likely, but more difficult to admit, I'd messed up the dpkg --purge devilspie, as the package was still installed :(