A couple of days ago I decided to try hooking up my LCD TV to my computer to see if I could use it as an extra monitor (that didn’t work that well because the TV was too big to be comfortable but that is a different story). So while I was connecting the TV over HDMI I also installed the proprietary drivers for my RADEON HD 4250 card (and promptly forgot about doing this).
Didn’t like working with the TV (too big, too close) so put it back and then noticed that my panel was no longer translucent and none of the desktop effects were working. Ignored it for a couple of days and then decided to fix the issue.
Tried disabling and enabling the Desktop effects from the Settings -> Desktop Effects but I kept getting and error stating that the effects could not be activated and that I should check my Xorg.conf for errors. Tried searching for the Xorg.conf file but that file doesn’t exist on my system so was stumped.
Ignored the issue for another day or so but then got irritated enough today to try and fix it again. Searched online for a fix and found some tips, some bug reports but nothing that worked. Then I found a page where this person was asking if the Opensource driver is better than the propitiatory one. This tickled my brain cells and I had a hazy memory of installing the other version, so decided to take a chance and uninstall the propitiatory version and re-install the Opensource version.
Used the following commands to do this:
apt-get remove --purge fglrx* apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-radeon apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-ati apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
After doing this I restarted my system (had to do it anyways) and got my desktop effects back. Yay me!
Thanks to wiki.Unbuntu.org for the steps to purge the propitiatory driver.
Hope someone else also finds this useful sometime.
-Suramya