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Accepted
Jonathan
Asked: 2011-03-21 02:44:02 +0800 CST

How can I restart Compiz from a TTY? (& Related, how can I set up a fallback WM?)

  • 772

I'm testing Natty, and Compiz keeps crashing on me. However, it doesn't always give me the option to restart Compiz, and for some reason doesn't have a fallback window manager(WM) configured.

Without a WM, all my programs are still running, but they're not accepting input from the keyboard, and I can't switch between them.

I can, however, press Ctrl+Alt+F1 and get a terminal, and I can killall Xorg to reset everything; but, I'd rather just reset Compiz, if possible.

If I try typing compiz --replace in the TTY, it complains "fatal--couldn't open display." Is there a way to have TTY1 restart Compiz? Like compiz --replace --display=something?

Additionally, is there a way to configure a fallback window manager so that there's an easier way to recover from Compiz crashing?

command-line

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Switch to terminal number 1 (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and run 

    DISPLAY=:0 unity --replace

    or

    DISPLAY=:0 compiz --replace

    Sometimes it doesn't restart. Just kill all compiz processes and try again in case.

    • 68

  2. You need to set the DISPLAY environment variable, in the usual case of a single Xorg instance you can do that with

    export DISPLAY=":0.0"
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  3. I had a similar problem with my menubars and taskbar having disappeared.

    I tried the above solution but it did not work. However with the following I got my stuff back to normal :)

    DISPLAY=:0
compiz --replace
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