Seeking Advice - Strange Behavior in Emerald/Compiz.

[Malleus]

Hello all,

First off, I am a fairly new Linux user, coming from an extensive background in Windows. I've gotten pretty comfortable and VERY fond of Linux Mint 11. I hope to become as knowledgeable with Linux operating systems as I have become in Windows environments, and maybe even contribute on an active level in the future as my understanding and skills develop.

Anyway, as mentioned before, I enjoy working (and tweaking) in Linux so far, except for (embarrassingly) one frustrating program: Emerald. It's been driving me nuts! I have installed Mint on several of my machines, some of them the same exact model of computer, and it seems that Emerald behaves differently EVERY time I install and attempt to get themes working, regardless of whether I install using the same method or not.

I have scoured search engines, forums, guides, articles and my own head for a definitive way to successfully get Emerald working on Mint 11, and I'm talking 10+ total hours worth of searching and troubleshooting. And each time I seem to get a different reaction from Emerald.

Sometimes the decorator is not present at all, sometimes I get just the emerald theme's buttons to work, and sometimes emerald just crashes. I find it unusual. I have gotten most success using the 'Running Emerald in Ubuntu 11.04' guides, but even then it's unreliable.

So, after much long-windedness, here is my question: What is commonly considered to be the definitive method of installing and running Emerald Theme Manager successfully with a fresh, updated install of Linux Mint 11? Perhaps this is a bit of a frivolous problem, but aesthetics are very important to me; I work from my computers often.

Also, my current Emerald installation is causing the title bar itself to disappear, while the buttons from the emerald theme ARE present and working. They're just floating in the air at the moment. Terminal logs are citing missing engine files: libpixmap.so and liblegacy.so. Emerald was installed via git.

Any assistance or advice would be very appreciated, and I look forward to potentially becoming an active member of the Mint community.

Thanks!

[wyrdoak]

from my notes:

How to install Emerald

sudo apt-get install emerald libemeraldengine0

To install them, go to: System > Preferences > Emerald Theme Manager and click the "Import" button and select the themes you want. To make your windows use Emerald, go to System > Preferences > CompizConfig Settings Manager and enable "Window Decoration", then click it and under "Command", enter:

emerald --replace

Then to run it for the first time, press Alt + F2 and type:

emerald --replace

If you want to disable Emerald, go to the CompizConfig Settings Manager again and for the Window Decoration plugin, enter the following under command:

/usr/bin/compiz-decorator

The next time you log in, you'll be using Metacity instead of Emerald. To disable it immediately (you'll still have to apply the steps above), press ALT + F2 and enter:

/usr/bin/compiz-decorator --replace

[Reddog1]

I couldn't get Emerald to work at all in Mint 11 after I installed it from the repos. Numerous posts said that it was broken by Ubuntu 11.04. However, by compiling it according to the instructions here:

http://ubuntugenius.wordpress.com/2011/ ... itle-bars/

If you get a 404 on that link (damn forum often truncates them), from the 404 error page scroll down the right side under "Recent Posts" and open "Ubuntu 11.04 Fix: restore missing title bars (window borders) in Compiz-Fusion" for the how-to.

it does work. Oddly enough, even if the repository version of Emerald doesn't work, it must have been installed, and then removed, for Emerald to actually load after you've compiled the new version for your machine. I also installed fusion-icon and yes, I am using Emerald -- replace in the command line for my window decorator. Anyway, Emerald and Emerald Themes are now working here, on my Mint 11, with no strange behaviors at all.