How to bounce Compiz

I’ve had this problem with Compiz (both compiz-vanilla and compiz-quinnstorm beryl), but after I’ve been using my desktop for a while (could be minutes or days), Compiz just sort of freezes up and won’t accept mouse or keyboard events (mouseovers, buttons, whatever). So I’ve got a NASTY HACK to bounce it easily.

Right now, since I’m using GDM, my gnome session starts connected to a dbus daemon, with all the environment variables that entails. However, if Compiz freezes, I plainly can’t use my current gnome session to restart compiz.

Here we see that compiz-manager starts up first, followed by my startcompiz script. Compiz-manager’s the handy little notification area app that provides a menu to do things, and also starts compiz for me. Why is my script running right after it?

Because it doesn’t really start compiz anymore. The part that’s not commented out:

        echo "   Fixing backspace"
            xmodmap -e "keycode 22 = BackSpace"

        echo "   Preparing fixcompiz"
            rm fixcompiz
            echo export DISPLAY=$DISPLAY >> fixcompiz
            echo export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS >> fixcompiz
            echo compiz --replace dbus csm >> fixcompiz
            chmod u+x fixcompiz

Since this runs from within a gnome session, $DISPLAY and $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS are defined, so this simply populates ~/fixcompiz as so:

export DISPLAY=:0.0
export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:abstract=/tmp/dbus-vCUILqIE6W,guid=589d124566cc145b6368533289986500
compiz --replace dbus csm

Now, when your compiz breaks, you can ssh or switch to a shell terminal and just do ./fixcompiz.