Mike Southby

A fairly common issue within Ubuntu after installing and configuring Compiz is that your titlebars disappear leaving you with an unsightly workspace and in some instances, the inability to close windows and applications.  The problem seems to affect mostly systems with an NVidia GPU and in my case, occurred after switching to a higher resolution on my second monitor.  The fix is thankfully, simple:

• Open a terminal window and type:
  sudo su
  followed by your password when prompted and then:
  gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
• Once gedit opens scroll down to the ‘Device’ section and just before ‘EndSection’ add the following:
  Option “AddARGBVisuals” “True”
Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “True”
• Save the file
• Restart Ubuntu

You should now find that all of the titlebars return and life is good again.  The above method should work for all recent releases, I’m using 10.04 Lucid.