David posted on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 05:53:58 +0100 as excerpted:
> Hi there, I'm trying to enable composite through openGL in KDE 4.4.0,
> but it only works in XRender mode.
> When I try to switch it to OpenGL mode, it says someting about an error
> and it disables again.
You didn't give anything like enough information. "someting about an
error" isn't a sufficient error description, for instance, and OpenGL is
graphics, so information about your xorg version, the graphics chip brand
and model, the xorg graphics driver (servantware or free/native xorg makes
a difference too) and version, the kernel version and graphics related
config (give that I see from another post your running Gentoo, so
configure your own kernel, this would include whether you're running KMS,
built-in kernel DRM or separate, framebuffer mode and which one there or
just vgacon if not kms, etc), etc.
FWIW, I run Gentoo as well. I haven't upgraded my (32-bit gentoo/~x86
Intel Atom and chipset) netbook yet, but I don't have the problem on my
~amd64 with a Radeon 4650 card (agp not pci-e), running partially X
overlay including direct git xorg radeon driver, since the freedomware
support for the r700 series cards is new enough they don't have a released
driver with it yet. I'm running KMS on it, with now, a 2.6.33-rc-plus
kernel (direct from Linus' git tree), with support MUCH improved from
2.6.32, where OpenGL worked but was buggy.
Until recently, however, I was running an old Radeon 9200, which for years
was about the top of the line with full freedomware driver support (I
don't do servantware drivers, see sig). It did OpenGL, but the OpenGL
support was limited to overall resolutions under 2048 either direction.
Since I'm running dual 1920x1200 LCDs stacked for 1920x2400, and before
that was running dual 1600x1200 CRTs so 2400 vertical there as well, that
limited my OpenGL support to the top 2048 px, leaving 352 without OpenGL.
KDE4 doesn't handle that well (crashes) so once they added the
functionality tests, it disabled OpenGL and left me with XRender/Composite
only support. Once I figured out how to configure things to get
reasonable speed and what effects worked and which ones required OpenGL,
that wasn't /too/ bad, all things considered, but it would have been much
/better/ had there been some indication of which effects needed OpenGL and
which didn't -- disabling/dimming the ones that needed OpenGL so they
couldn't be selected if it was off, for instance. Matter of fact, that
was one of the big beefs I had with kde4, that it did /not/ give any
indication of what effects would actually work in XRender/Composite-only
mode.
Anyway, there's a checkbox available and you can choose to disable the kde
OpenGL compatibility tests and force OpenGL on if you want to try it, but
be aware that it's likely to crash if you do. I tried it, then had to
edit my xorg.conf to turn OpenGL off there, before I could get back into
KDE to turn it off again, as otherwise I couldn't get to the dialog to
turn it off. (Of course, I could have tried to find it in my user config
and disable it by editing the config file directly, too, but I knew where
my xorg.conf was and I didn't know where exactly kde stored it in my kde
user config, so it was easier to disable it in xorg.conf.) So be prepared
to do that before turning it on to try it, as chances are kde is disabling
it for a reason.
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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