Teleidoscope

Mon, Jan 12, 2009

Compiz

Posted at 2:45 pm MST to Technology

I have been having problems with the video on my laptop getting hung, generally when it is trying to run a screensaver. When it happened today I was able to ssh in from the server to look at what was going on. Killing the compiz.real process loosened things up enough that I was able to save my work and do a clean reboot.

There are some references in google to problems with compiz on KDE4 Kubuntu systems. I don't really do anything that needs fancy 3d compositing (which may be why it only died in screensavers: they are often designed to show off fancy video effects) so unless there are odd dependencies I should be able to eliminate the entire module.

I disabled desktop effects and removed compiz from the system completely, then logged out, restarted X, and logged back in. It doesn't seem to have broken anything. In fact, some of my desktop config settings that had been ignored now seem to be working as specified.

It remains to be seen whether this has really fixed the hangs. I may experiment with enabling the screensavers that seemed most prone to lock up. I may be travelling to a gig in Mobile soon, and it would be nice to have a stable system.

permanent link || trackback || 0 comments || Add a comment

Squall

Posted at 10:12 am MST to Weather

This is one of the days I'm glad to be working from home.

There were no forecasts of snow for today, but we got about an inch an hour for about 4 hours beginning at 4 am. The snow was fluffy enough and the wind was strong enough that the plows weren't ablle to deal with it well: it kept blowing back across the roads .

The morning rush hour traffic reports were amazingly bad.

We need the moisture badly, as shown by last week's wildfires. This has been a very, very dry winter along the Foothills, though the high country has been getting plenty of snow.

permanent link || trackback || 0 comments || Add a comment