cairo-dock bork (I mean upgrade) ...

By basd on May 14, 2009 | In kde4, linux, opensuse

Somewhat simultaneously with the kde upgrade to 4.2.3 from OpenSUSE, cairo-dock upgraded to version 2.0, with OpenGL support.

...

It has some nice new features. But in my install, each time I select the OpenGL version I am taken to the "maintenance" screens -- and when I exit, I just come back to the screen for selecting whether to use OpenGL or not.

One time (only) I managed to get it to run in OpenGL, but I'm not certain what I did differently that time, if anything.

Selecting the non-openGL choice results in no transparency/3D (even though Plasma is running with effects/3D.

All this exceeds my know-how. But, cairo-dock looked a lot nicer before the upgrade.

As an aside -- I have two older computers that USED TO have 3D in the early beta testing days of KDE4, and now do not. What's up with that? Clearly they have the capability, but it is not implemented. Maybe older technology is being abandoned.

One of them has the evil Nvidia card, which not only borked -- so that the original WindowsXP will not even load because it hangs at driver startup -- but some time ago ceased to be supported by Nvidia for linux/open-source.

I've noticed an anomaly, though. OpeSUSE YAST seems to have some packages specifically to service Nvidia GeoForce4 cards -- but when I install these, I can't even get X to start.

I don't know whether this is a driver failure or something to do with the part of the graphics card that is apparently burned out (and prevents WindowsXP from running at all).

Oh, well. At least the computer works.