Saturday, January 07, 2012

New kwinrc Fixes KDE 4.6 Desktop Effects

To my great surprise, I've got KDE 4.6 Desktop Effects working again. My recent desktop environment problems had led me to reinstall Debian testing and upgrade to unstable (sid). The newly-installed KDE Desktop Effects were working properly until I copied all my /home/rebecca files onto the new installation and restarted. I tried to adjust them using the GUI panel:

System Settings > Desktop Effects > Advanced


No luck. I couldn't revert to a clean install. I was just going to live with it because I didn't care about the missing desktop effects at all, but I really hate it when I don't know why something does or doesn't work, so I have looked sporadically for answers, and this morning, I found this: [SOLVED] KWin effects not working (ATI, catalyst, KDE):

I have had something like this happen a few times, too. Removing ~/.kde/share/config/kwinrc always seems to fix it.

I renamed the kwinrc file, moved it to an out-of-the-way directory, and rebooted. A new and much shorter kwinrc file was generated, and I haven't found any other KDE attributes changed. Here's the difference in file size between the new kwinrc file and the old, renamed file:


rebecca@hecate:~/.kde/share/config$ wc -l kwinrc
23 kwinrc
rebecca@hecate:~/.kde/share/config$ wc -l /home/rebecca/xxx
166 /home/rebecca/xxx

I haven't yet figured out what those 143 lines in the old file did, but the problem must be in there somewhere. Something to occupy my idle hours, I suppose.

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