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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?

Kevin Bowen
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Jonathan
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3 Answers3

68

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.

David Foerster
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Owais Lone
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    Latest unity starts itself on DISPLAY=:0 automatically. – Owais Lone Apr 16 '11 at 17:31
  • You can also switch use 'setsid unity' btw – Owais Lone Aug 16 '12 at 09:39
  • Both your comments seem valuable, but they're not yet clear to me: do they mean 1) that DISPLAY=:0 can be dropped, even when using tty-1 to replace unity running, crashedly, in tty-7 ? and 2) do you recommend using setsid for this purpose (rather than () or & disown or nohup) and if so why ? – nutty about natty Feb 07 '13 at 09:44
  • cf setsid and http://askubuntu.com/questions/106351/running-programs-in-the-background-from-terminal/106359#106359 – nutty about natty Feb 07 '13 at 09:54
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    I have killed compiz and I had to run DISPLAY=:0 unity --replace to start unity. Just running compiz did not show full screen window decoration and did not automatically start unity. – conualfy Feb 12 '14 at 10:42
  • This closed almost all of my 1000+ windows I had open. Seems to be even more destructive than logout/logon (which tries to reopen closed windows). – Tino Jul 07 '21 at 10:38
13

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"
Adam Byrtek
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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
anonymous2
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Nosferius
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