COMPIZ woes...

I'm trying to get COMPIZ started under Ubuntu (dapper) on my Alienware m5550 and having a little bit of difficulty. I have an nvidia Go 7600 graphics card.

Almost everything in Ubuntu works well. Except for a few snags, I'm seriously thinking of replacing Windows with it. I'm susprised how stable it is out of the box. The problems I'm having now have to do with eye candy and so forth.

thanks..

 

Have you got the nVidia 3D drivers working successfully? If so, then you need to run AIGLX, or Xgl, for Compiz to run.

For reference:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompositeManager/AIGLXOnDapper?highlight=%28aiglx)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompositeManager/Xgl?highlight=(xgl)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompositeManager/InstallingCompiz?highlight=(compiz)

 

Compiz is a bit of obsolet. New version is called berly

 

not really... compiz is more stable, but it's in large part associated with Novell. Beryl is a community fork of compiz, which has more features and is more "bleeding edge," but is not as stable.

 

For instance, if you run Beryl in Ubuntu, you cannot play games without some tweaking... tweaking I never got to work.

 

IF you have an ATi card, you're stuck, because Xgl isn't as good as AIGLX, which is available if you have an nVidia card.

The not being able to play OpenGL games is not Beryl's fault, but Xgl's.

 

Yeah, Novell+compiz, quite sound. I doubt if you will get good game performance even your beryl tweak works.

 

My brother managed to get all of it's features to run on X1600 (ripple,rain,etc)

 

You can get all of Beryl/Compiz's features working perfectly fine. But running an OpenGL app on top of that, you can't do at this stage with an ATi card. Their drivers don't support the Texture_From_Pizmap OpenGL extension. nVidia does.

 

As far as I know, AIGLX is only possible on nVidia cards using the beta driver, not the stable releases. Not to mention that this assumes you're using Edgy with AIGLX built in, not Dapper (as I usually do) which does not feature X with AIGLX. Therefore, you have to do a lot of work to get Beryl working without XGL on nVidia cards. Older ATi cards (pre x1--- series) and Intel cards (all open source drivers) provide the best support for AIGLX on Dapper since their open source drivers easily support it. If you're a new Radeon user or an nVidia user running Dapper (such as myself), things are pretty complicated. There are plenty of HOW-TO's to get XGL working in Dapper, but very few to get AIGLX. And I'm not about to give up my Quake 4 functionality.

 

It's a small semantic thing but from the following nVidia forum post;

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=996264&postcount=28

If you're using the 9625 Linux nVidia drivers, or later, with compiz or beryl, then your system is not using AIGLX, even if you have it turned on in xorg.conf (which you shouldn't). So under Linux folks can use;

See;

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_AIGLX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XGL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIGLX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Infrastructure

 

I just installed Fedora Core 6 on a Compaq Presario R3000 (intel w/ATI) and everything--I mean EVERYTHING--works awesome! Compiz is working like a charm: all I had to do to get it going was install the ATI drivers via YUM according to Stanton Finley's installation notes (which are actually for FC5 but work just the same with FC6). and then I simply went to System > Preferences > Desktop Effects and checked "enable desktop effects" and I was wobbling 'round the cube with Compiz! Since FC6 includes it by default, I only had to install the ATI drivers and enable Compiz--no other config and it works smoothly with only 384MB of RAM.