The Composite Manager Guide: How to Get Vista-ish Effects in (K)(X)Ubuntu.

[poofyhairguy]

First off - thanks for the how to, it written really clear and detailed.

Would really like to try this, but have one question.

When you said I would need the official nvidia drivers do you mean the ones found int the repositories, or the one from the nvidia web site??

sorry for the noob question, but just want to be sure.

Both will work. I use the repo ones. I know people that do it with the newer ones installed by hand. You just need some Nvidia drivers installed.

[phend-one]

This is REALLY nice!

Thanks for sharing this!

*hugs old GeForce 4200Ti* And they told me you were useless!

[ba5e]

What a great How-to.

It works great on my pIII 733 w/nvidia FX5200.

[poofyhairguy]

What a great How-to.

It works great on my pIII 733 w/nvidia FX5200.

Works great with old machines.

[ad0]

Can someone put some screenshots to see how that looks?

[hesee]

Works great with old machines.

Any hope to get this working with my old Geforce2 mx400? processor is AMD 2600+ XP...

[Neo40]

Any hope to get this working with my old Geforce2 mx400? processor is AMD 2600+ XP...

I have a GeForce2 mx400 and it works fine. However, I find drop shadows a little bit slow. Is it my card? I don't know...

[xingmu]

The HOWTO is excellent, had no problems following it. But the results were disappointing to me. The "shadows" are really just a fuzzy gradient border around every window, panel, and menu. I wouldn't really call it a shadow because it doesn't follow basic principles of physics (i.e. the shadow is on all four sides of a window??). It was also a little overkill to have a shadow on my already semi-transparent side panel and my auto-hide mini panel.

The fade in and fade out was not bad...but it made GNOME seem a lot slower and clunkier (quite the opposite of being more responsive). I notice the problem a lot when Alt-Tabbing between windows (which is how I switch windows all the time).

BTW, this was all on a Toshiba Tecra M2 with a GeForce FX Go 5200....cpu is...I forget...Pentium 1.6Ghz plus or minus some.

Anyways, my big question is what the original poster meant by saying that xorg is moving in a different direction than composite. What direction? What will be seeing for eye candy in the future?

Some screenshots:

[poofyhairguy]

I have a GeForce2 mx400 and it works fine. However, I find drop shadows a little bit slow. Is it my card? I don't know...

Yeah, older Nvidia cards have problems with shadows.

[JazzCrazed]

Just FYI... Things seem to work well on my Acer Aspire 3002LCi using an SiS Mirage chip! I don't know whether that's accelerating it, or whether my Sempron 2800+ is powerful enough to do it on its own (I know that driver support for SiS Mirage is lacking). Shadows run really fast, though, and the window acceleration is pleasurably noticeable. Fades are too sluggish to use, though.

Also, sometimes when I started up xcompmgr with the appropriate commands, the Gnome panels wouldn't show up, and I'd be forced to restart GDM. Since I added xcompmgr to my startup options, I haven't encountered that problem again.

Ultimately (meaning, after about an hour of straight use), I ended up turning off shadows because the panels also get shadows, and the shadows overlay all the other windows - which is annoying when I have a window maximized (the shadow is cast over the window's title bar). The disappearance of the annoying ugliness when dragging windows is welcome change, enough!

Thanks for this howto!