There are a number of people who want to quickly (or not) use my computer to check e-mail and otherwise browse the web when at my house. I tend to leave myself logged in, so they just use my open firefox. The downside to this is that I often come back and can't find the firefox status bar (I didn't even know you could turn it off) or there will be 20 new files on my desktop that don't belong there.
The obvious solution to this is to setup another account and use the fast user switcher. I gave it a whirl tonight and everything was looking great when I switched to the new user. I checked to see if that account could do everything it needed to and it seemed to be fine. So I logged out and went back to my main account. Except, all I get is a mouse cursor and a blank screen.
Thankfully my paranoid mind hits save in emacs every 30 seconds, so I wouldn't really lose anything if I had to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace my way out of X. A quick investigation of this new blank screen did reveal an interesting fact: if I move the cursor half way down the screen, it turns into the text box cursor. Ah, yes! This is the "input your password" screen from the fast user switcher. Typing blind is an old hobby of mine (if you admin enough boxes, you'll run into this situation), so I typed the password and hit enter and the blank screen faded away to reveal my desktop!
Since it's easy to blame compiz, I searched for bugs related to compiz and fast user switched and found ubuntu bug 160264. The conversation is actually blaming the NVIDIA drivers, so compiz gets away with it this time. What's even more surprising is that NVIDIA does not maintain a bug tracking system; they just watch their forums looking for people reporting problems and then don't really tell you what's going on after that.
Despite NVIDIA's lack of bug tracking, they do apparently talk to some free software developers. Mario Limonciello reported that NVIDIA has no near term plans to fix this bug since it's a big code change. But, being the slick Ubuntu developer that he is, he showed how to fix this by undoing some unnecessary patches to compiz. By looking through changelogs he was able to deduce that the patch was unnecessary, and by tinkering and recompiling, he was able to show that it worked. To top it all off, he made his changes available for everyone and even made it easy to install themselves, so that anybody affected by this bug can get the fix before Intrepid comes out.
And that is why Free Software works.
8 hours ago
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