[arch-general] Compositing broken on laptop, Compton and xcompmgr

[Harley W]

I will definitely try this when I get home! Strangely enough, I was a bit suspicious of the -b because until recently I think I had both the -b and the & but I realized that was redundant so I removes the &. Didn't think it would be a big deal.
Thanks for the help!

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On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 6:52 AM, Levente Polyak <anthraxx at archlinux.org<mailto:anthraxx at archlinux.org>> wrote:


On 03/12/2016 11:29 PM, Harley W wrote:
> I've been using Compton on my laptop for about a year without any issues. Recently, I noticed that transparency stopped working, and even more recently, shadows stopped working. If I try calling Compton from the command line I get an error saying "Failed to make GLX context current". I tried to use xcompmgr, but shadows and transparency still don't work, though I don't get any error messages.
> My Compton command is compton -b -z -c -r 32
> My xcompmgr command is xcompmgr -r 32 -o 0.75 -l -16 -t -16 -a -c
> On Compton, I tried multiple backends, none were successful.
> I am testing this within bspwm, and got the same error on xmonad as well. However, compiz seems to be working perfectly in my xfce sessions.
> Recently, WiFi broke on my laptop as well, and now I have to run rfkill unblock WiFi when I start my computer. I'm thinking due to the recent onslaught of issues that this may be a hardware problem, but the laptop is only 3 years old.
> Any idea what's wrong?
> Thanks,
> Harley Wiltzer
>

TL;DR: It seems to be the daemonize -b switch, try without and putting
it yourself into the background via &.

Recently the same issue popped up for two of my boxes that are using
nvidia-libgl. GL and hardware rendering in general is working totally
fine and no logs show any problems (dmesg, Xorg.0.log, journalctl...) so
I started debugging the invocation of compton.
For me it turned out that its the -b switch that is putting compoton
daemon mode and forks to background. I simply replaced the -b invocation
and since I'm putting the process simply into the background with & its
working fine:

    compton --config=.config/compton/compton.conf &

Did not further investigate what the exact reason or change that
introduced this regression is, but that solved it for me ^.^
Maybe I should go through the last installed packages, but did not yet
have time as the workaround does its job :P

cheers,
Levente