Missing minimize/maximize/close buttons in KDE 4.2

[jonrpick]

My girlfriend has been trying to get Compiz working on her laptop.

Her goal is to have some of the same desktop effects I have on my Mandriva 2009 installation (KDE 4.2 as well). Specifically, I have a feature that if I move my mouse to the upper right-hand corner of the screen, all open windows are miniaturized and shown over the desktop. It's very similar to Exposé on Mac OSX or Komposé for Linux.

She went to this page: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RenderingProject/compiz

and ran the following command:

compiz --replace gconf

How do we undo this and restore her minimize / maximize / close buttons?

[wvn]

You need to enable "window decoration" option from the compiz-manager settings

[jonrpick]

You need to enable "window decoration" option from the compiz-manager settings

Ok... kinda had an "Ah Ha" moment...

I went to the terminal, did a "whereis compiz-manager". Ran /usr/bin/compiz-manager.

The title bars appeared, and as an added bonus, the specific feature she was trying to get also worked!

However, it was simply running in a minimized terminal window. Killing compiz-manager with Ctrl-C took away the title bars and effects.

So... #1, how do we access compiz-manager through the GUI. #2, based on what we just saw, compiz-manager needs to actually be running in order for the effects and title bars to work. What needs to be done to make it run by default?

Thanks... I think we're really close to getting it working.