Brian's Blog

I've been hearing about this compiz thing for quite a while now. Supposedly it has some really nice effects. Well, actually it does have nice effects as can been seen if one searches Youtube for the word 'compiz'. I'm usually a late adopter but I figured I'd give it a shot on my TC4200 Tablet PC running Kubuntu. The purpose of this post is really just for me to record what the heck I did to get it working. Maybe someone who stumbles upon this entry will find the info useful.

Here's what I did:

1. Followed the very good Compiz, Emerald, Fusion-icon in Kubuntu Gutsy How-to on the Ubuntu forums.
2. I found an odd problem with the window contents not drawing right, see the screen shot to the left here. To fix this odd think I had to add Option "XAANoOffScreenPixmaps" "on" in the Device section of my xorg.conf
3. Restart X and compiz.

The modified section of my xorg.conf file looks like this now:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller"
        Driver          "intel"
        BusID           "PCI:0:2:0"
        Option          "XAANoOffScreenPixmaps"         "on"
EndSection

Things now work quite nicely and look pretty too. It's kind of cool watching the window you just closed go up in flames rather than just disappear from your screen.

Compiz is nice, but it is still a bit buggy I think. Every once in a while Emerald crashes when using Alt-Tab to change windows. It's easy enough to restart Emerald but it's still sort of annoying. To get around this I just disabled the Application Switcher plug-in and went with the Ring Switcher which does the same thing but with a cool "windows moving in circles" effect.