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I just did a release upgrade from Ubuntu 12.04 to 12.10 and I noticed that even though I have the overlay-scrollbar package installed, it is not used. I have tried purging and reinstalling the package, but nothing has changed even after reboot (see screenshot).

What can I try to do to get the overlay-scrollbars working again?

overlay-scrollbar is installed

jeremija
  • 3,358

1 Answers1

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It seems that the main reason why overlay scrollbars didn't work is because I have configured my system to boot to console first. I then use a custom .xinitrc script to start xfce:

#!/bin/sh

case "$1" in
    xfce4) 
        xscreensaver -no-splash &
        exec ck-launch-session xfce4-session
        ;;
    awesome) 
        exec awesome
        ;;
esac

For some reason, when I used the command xinit xfce4 under Xubuntu 12.04 and previous versions, the overlay scrollbars appeared. However, it seems that 12.10 doesn't load this GTK module, so I had to manually execute this line declare -x GTK_MODULES="overlay-scrollbar". I ended up adding it to my .bashrc file so that I don't have to type it every time.

I got this idea from the /etc/X11/Xsession.d/81overlay-scrollbar file which says:

# This file is sourced by Xsession(5), not executed.

if [ -z "$GTK_MODULES" ] ; then
    GTK_MODULES="overlay-scrollbar"
else
    GTK_MODULES="$GTK_MODULES:overlay-scrollbar"
fi

so I guess that this file used to be executed on each start of the X windows syst, but now it isn't used because the GTK_MODULES variable wasn't set after start.

jeremija
  • 3,358