Recently I came into a situation where my windows (in any application) would draw black on their insides. The mouse would still change in reaction to buttons, etc. But my eyes wouldn’t see anything.

If you are having an issue with this, I found a solution courtesy of http://www.futuredesktop.com/.  This has been pulled verbatim from here.

If you have NVIDIA’s graphic card and you get black application windows when running Compiz on Ubuntu 7.10, this may (may) help you.

Take a backup copy of /usr/bin/compiz file.
$ sudo cp /usr/bin/compiz /usr/bin/compiz.old

Then edit it (it’s a shell script).
$ sudo gedit /usr/bin/compiz

And change the line
COMPIZ_OPTIONS=”–ignore-desktop-hints –replace”
to
COMPIZ_OPTIONS=”–ignore-desktop-hints –replace –indirect-rendering”

You can simply run this command to do the change.
$ sudo sed -i ‘s/COMPIZ_OPTIONS=”–ignore-desktop-hints –replace”/COMPIZ_OPTIONS=”–ignore-desktop-hints –replace –indirect-rendering”/’ /usr/bin/compiz

Then restart the X by pressing CNTR + ALT + BACKSPACE keys.

For a while I had an issue on all my ubuntu based machines where vi would insert A, B, C, or D when using the arrow keys under Insert mode. Well, for any of you who use vi, this might become an annoying problem quite quick.

So, I found a fix.

Simply edit your ~/.vimrc file. Add the following:

set nocompatible


This should fix your problems. By the way, if you don’t have the ~/.vimrc file in your home directory, just create it (adding the above set command).

I’ve been using my current setup for about 6 years without any issues. Knock on wood.  I decided it was time to start to upgrade the beast…lets start with the most crucial part to any computer…the ability to see it.

Here’s the newest addition to my computer project. Dual 22″ Widescreen LCD’s. You may have noticed all the dell stuff there on the desktop…keyboard was free and the monitors are damn good! If anyone is wondering, that’s Ubuntu 7.10 running in the background.