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

[Jucato]

Oh I see. I hoped that maybe the composite managers would have improved. I guess I have to wait for the next update to kompmgr. Or try out this compiz thing, which I have absolutely no idea about.

[poofyhairguy]

Oh I see. I hoped that maybe the composite managers would have improved. I guess I have to wait for the next update to kompmgr.

At this point most of the improvement will come from the composite extension getting better or drivers getting better. But neither has grown leaps and bounds since Breezy. KDE 3.5 has the most advanced "normal" compositor and you can get that now in Breezy. Big changes in this area will come from thing that are more than just a compositor, such as XGL + Compiz.

Or try out this compiz thing, which I have absolutely no idea about.

Its worth looking into on Dapper.

[Sutekh]

Thanks so much for the effort you have poured into this guide poofyhairguy.

Also big thanks to tseliot for his excellent NVIDIA HOWTO.

I had no problems installing the 8178 Drivers, then was surprised at how easy it was to install xcompmgr.

Integrating with XFCE was a little harder, but the Gentoo Wiki had a tip for turning XFCE's own composite manager off.

Cheers also to frodon for the toggle script.

Unfortunately pictures just don't do it justice. I wanna get a video together but am scarce for time. I absolutely love the desktop wrapping and auto-focussing ability of XFCE. Combined with the composite manager it is mouth-watering.

The first pic is the XFCE menu opening over Firefox.

The second pic is me moving the mouse from one desktop to another, from Rhythmbox to Firefox. This picture just can't hope to show how COOL that looks, sorry, but I hope you get the idea.

Now to create some space for Dapper and try Xgl/Compiz!

[hitman012]

Regrettably, I can't seem to get everything to work properly here. Hardware acceleration of windows seems to be OK as well as the fading (which is nice), but using a command involving drop shadows results in a complete GUI lockup, needing a hard reset.

If it was maximising the CPU usage, I'd expect at least some responsiveness and the cursor does move smoothly but with no response from the windows at all. I understand that it's buggy, but surely this isn't simply a problem with the program?

I'm running it on a Duron 1.3GHz with 1GB of RAM and a GF4 MX440. My suspicion is the card, but I don't have an unused one to test it with (other rigs are PCI-E).

Thanks in advance

[John.Michael.Kane]

@poofyhairguy I got this guide of yours to work minus the transparency, on laptop with a sis based gpu running dapper... how stable it is time will tell. good work on the guide ...

[escape]

Might want to add a note that this breaks fglrx on ATI cards, and gives you the Mesa stuff instead. Know any way to get around this (besides using xgl instead)? I'm pretty sure the exact cause is putting the Extensions/Composite Enabled part in xorg.conf.

[pestypest]

Hey poofhairguy, i was wondering if i could see ur xorg.conf file to see if mine looks the same? i tried to installing and i killed X and i had to change evrything back to the way is was. I think i may have put a space or somthng in the wrong spot but im not sure so if maybe u could post it so i know what to look and how it should look that would be great. Also i was wondering if you could tell me if my specs meet the req's to run this?

Amd X2 4600+ smp kernal K8
Nvidia GO 7800 GTX 256mb
160 GB HD
2GB ram
Ubuntu Breezy

Im trying this on my laptop.

[RAOF]

Might want to add a note that this breaks fglrx on ATI cards, and gives you the Mesa stuff instead. Know any way to get around this (besides using xgl instead)? I'm pretty sure the exact cause is putting the Extensions/Composite Enabled part in xorg.conf.

The ATI drivers are crap. You can use exactly one of:
1) 3D acceleration
2) Composite

Your pick

Xgl gets around this problem by doing 2) with 1)

[Sutekh]

Also i was wondering if you could tell me if my specs meet the req's to run this?

Amd X2 4600+ smp kernal K8
Nvidia GO 7800 GTX 256mb
160 GB HD
2GB ram
Ubuntu Breezy

Im trying this on my laptop.

I'm really no expert, but with hardware like that you really must be able to get it working. You should keep track of exactly the commands you make, it may have been a erronous space that messed things up. It was a really easy thing to setup for me.

Again, sweet hardware.

[dartmusic]

First off, I'd like to give a big thanks to Poofy for a great HOWTO.

Second, I'd like to know the best way to turn all of this off! I've got it running and it's pretty damn breathtaking! But (and there's always a but), it's SO unstable that I can't use it for long before Xorg starts using huge amounts of CPU and the screen redraws become extremely unstable to the point that clicking on anything in the kicker results in a big, fat nothing and I have to either do a ctrl-alt-backspace to restart the X server or sometimes it locks up the entire machine and I have to do a hard reboot. This happens at least once a day.

For now I'm going to wait a few more weeks for the stable Dapper release and try compiz, but for now I need to disable all of this stuff so as not to constantly be disrupted by lockups and such. Do I simply remark out the two new lines that were added at the end of the xorg.conf file? Is there something else? I'm running this on an HP zd7000 series notebook with an Nvidia video card.

Thanks again.