SuSE 11.1 with 3D effects ewnabled: Cube effect won't work

[Deja Q]

All the other desktop effects work, but when dragging a window to the left or right to move it to another virtual workspace, the screen goes black then normal again.

(All this worked great in Fedora; but after going to a tech forum where Fedora 10 users got angry over Red Hat putting out one patch and it killed their systems, they lamented that other distros are the way to go -- and I love YaST, I'll admit that...)

Anyone else experience this?
(I will be looking for solutions as well; maybe reinstalling the graphics driver or compiz)

[RoyGBiv]

1. I know the problem, but ...

... not a precise solution.

This is a very specific and complex issue related to OpenGL implementation and how the driver you're using handles it.

This is how messed up it is. One one install, I had the white cube problem. I reinstalled X and my graphics driver and then had the black cube problem. I reinstalled it all again, changed driver version down a notch, and it all worked perfectly. Later I upgraded the kernel, recompiled the *same* driver, and I was back to white cube.

This was some time ago, with an ATI card. I've been using Nvidia since and have not had that same issue, but have had others with more recent driver versions.

[Deja Q]

2. That's reassurring, thanks!

Given that 3D effects under Fedora seemed more stable, I thought about going back to it - but SuSE feels more complete on the whole. (despite SUSE not having cairo-dock :( ) And cute as they are, do they really *do* anything for me? Not really. I ditched Fedora 10 when hearing that people installed it, Fedora pushed an update, and their systems stopped booting entirely. :scared: (Dated Feb 16, too recent to ignore.)

I also found out that "sexy-python" package isn't installed and it's apparently an optional package.

That and I'd read that the P5Q Deluxe mobo with RAID 5 doesn't work under Fedora (off the DVD anyway, using an online installer might help). SuSE might -- though I won't be doing RAID for a while just yet...

[RoyGBiv]

3. Some advice ...

Same advice I give to Windows users.

Don't do automatic updates, which is what I infer happened from Fedora pushing an update. If they have somehow managed to mangle the typical setup for this so that updates are automatically installed by default, yes, that would be a reason right there to look elsewhere.

Anyway, in most Linux distros I've tried the updater is set to check automatically, which is fine, but then you can pull up the list of things to be updated and choose to install or not install each individual update. SuSE's updater is usually pretty good about this to a fault, meaning you tend not to be informed of any updates other than ones deemed critical security issues.

I avoid installing updates to the kernel, bind, anything having to do with X, or my graphics driver until the patch has been out a day or two with no major reports of massive malfunctioning. Kernel bugs are the worst. Somehow -- and I've seen it happen on every distro I've tried except Slackware -- the kernel gets patched and sent to the "stable" repository and then announced to the updaters when they check. But, for whatever reason, that specific patch was not tested before it was sent to "stable."

Nvidia's most recent update, packaged as an rpm, went out on several systems that use that packager without the instructions necessary to delete the old kernel driver. Everything seemed fine until you happened to do a reboot. Then you could not get an X server running. Twas annoying.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

4. My Mandriva AutoUpdate Story:

I had WPA/WPA2 wireless working on my laptop with an ndiswrapper-installed Broadcom driver. Amazingly, it worked.

Then, Mandriva pushed out a bunch of updates. She's a no woik.

Mandriva just pushed out a buncha updates, including BIND. I have WPA/WPA2 again.

Someone at Mandriva, most likely some software packager who sits around all day in a brown leather jacket and sunglasses, with a yellow Galoise hanging from his lips in his best Jean Paul Belmondo impersonation, needs a kick in the nuts, methinks.

[RoyGBiv]

5. Packaging can be a mess ...

More than half the problems I've experienced have occurred due to sloppy packaging. It's almost enough to motivate me to compile everything from source ... almost.

I'm still sitting here working on this SuSE system. I told myself I was going to something else after my initial playing with it, but it's grown on me. Or maybe it's the challenge of making KDE 4.x work right. I dunno. But here it is.

Whatever the case, I'm remembering one of the main reasons I abandoned it in the first place. The repository system and package management is a nightmare. The third-party repo packman, which holds all the multimedia stuff that allows viewing wmv, mp4, etc., screwed up, just yesterday, the packaging of a new version of libxine1. For some idiotic reason I decided to let this update go forward while I was in the middle of watching a movie I'd ripped. The update pretty much ended that. I spent the next hour in an adventure of figuring out how to get the old version reinstalled. A fixed package will, I'm sure, be available in a day or two, and if I'd simply followed my own damn advice I wouldn't have had the issue. Feh ...