HOWTO: Making your windows look super sweet in Hoary (compositing)

**elgx** · October 4th, 2005

Originally Posted by bryan986

It is in System Settings -> Desktop -> Window Behavior

yeah... here it is.
Thank you very much.

**luxactor** · October 11th, 2005

It won't work for me. I have color stripees on my screen, and GNOME freeze on splash-screen. I'm using Breezy and ubuntu nvidia drivers. Can someone help me please?

btw: sorry, if the the answer for my question is allready in the thread

**poofyhairguy** · October 11th, 2005

Originally Posted by luxactor

It won't work for me. I have color stripees on my screen, and GNOME freeze on splash-screen. I'm using Breezy and ubuntu nvidia drivers. Can someone help me please?

btw: sorry, if the the answer for my question is allready in the thread

It won't work in Breezy like in Hoary. You must get into Gnome using the failsafe version, and put xcompmgr further back than 0 in the sessions tool. I use position 49.

**Fyrzen** · October 25th, 2005

I've been following this topic for a while now. So far i've managed to get by on my own but now i've hit a snag. Here's my story:

I'm running a Duron 933mhz, 256mb, ti4200. Like everyone else i couldn't get full shadow support with the latest drivers(I used 7667). Fading and simple shadows worked, log out crashes all the same but that's not an issue thanks to aladdin89's shell script. Thanks to Spelley's suspicion I downgraded to 6629. Whaddaya know, it works, shadows look and work great. This was when i started gnome after installing the driver.

But after a reboot X failed to load the Nvidia kernel module. I've been down this road before, install other driver, edit xorg.conf yada yada yada... I opted for a solution instead, luckaly this particular problem is mentioned in the 6629 readme, "(EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to initialize the NVIDIA kernel module!".

A simple workaround is to log in at the console and type "sudo modprobe nvidia", then restart gdm. It works this way, i just don't understand why it won't load the module by default. I'm out of ideas. The xorg.conf file is fine, the X log file says it's using xorg.conf. Nothing i change in the configuration has any effect, not even disabling "EnableGLXwithcomp...". Solutions mentioned in the readme don't work either.

Is there a simple way i could just have the system run these two commands without me typing them and the password?

**kamstrup** · October 27th, 2005

Fyrzen:

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showpost...4&postcount=18

**Fyrzen** · October 27th, 2005

Works like a charm! Thanks!

**Xealot** · January 13th, 2006

Originally Posted by arnoct

I've been testing xcompmgr with various WMs, they all work with it but some run better than others. For example:

xfce - has a major bug where if certain windows are resized to be bigger, it won't redraw the new part of the window until the window is moved. This bug is also present in GNOME.
fluxbox - seems to work OK, although I'm having problems with fluxbox being stupid

openbox - Works very well when xcompmgr is on, but has a major bug where, after it turns on (or off,) apps don't come back as visible--you have to kill them through a console. This is using the verison in the hoary universe repository, I think it's out of date though
icewm - didn't have alot of time to look at it, but it seems to work OK.

So far, I'd recommend openbox (with fbpanel) except for the horrible "windows will disappear" bug.

As far as i can tell, the window-will-disappear bug in openbox only affects windows
present on the current workspace, which means if you onlu have ONE terminal open on say workspace 4, and you enable xcompmgr in that terminal, it will disappear and you have to kill it.. But the rest of the windows on the other workspaces will be fine..

Also, just a small notice.. im using a Dell latitude D505 laptop model with the graphics card: (onboard)

Code:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Devi$        Driver          "i810"

and all of the xcompmgr effects seems to slow it down alot..
Oh, and the laptop got a 1500 MHz cpu.

If i can get it to work better, il re-post here later on.

**bogoliubov** · January 16th, 2006

Hmm, I wasn't gonna post anything here since most things have been said at least one time already. But I was looking for a way to use transset automatically on all windows; so if I open, say, a terminal it'll automatically have 0.9 (for instance) in opacity. Does anyone know if this is possible?

In general it works ok. But I can't put xcompgr in the startup for my account. If I do, I get a gray background and a splash screen when logging in, nothing more.
Other have written about this problem when using xcompmgr, but I couldn't find any solution here..., Any ideas?

And, my main question: Does anyone know if/when this will be "naturally" implemented in Gnome, so that you can set this up in systems-prefs-windows (or something similar)?