...from the last post. That was a look on the past - this time I'm looking
ahead. I'm talking about Xgl/compiz, of course, and the newly arrived
über-eye-candy for the Linux desktop.
In the anticipation of the new Dapper goodness, I've upgraded to the beta
of the new Ubuntu version a few days ago. Since both Xgl and Compiz are in
Dapper's universe, I thought I'd give it a try. I have nVidia graphics card
so getting Gl/Composite to run was no problem. I've had those in breezy, now I
just had to reinstall nvidia-settings and the other related packages.
I've set up Xgl/Compiz according to this howto. All went well and I enjoyed the newly found goodness, untill the next
time I restarted my machine. I repeated the two commands but compiz started being
evil to me - all the newly opened windows were located at top-left corner of the
screen, and I've been unable to drag the windows around holding their title-bar.
Strange, very strange. Trying out various voodoo recipies, I've managed to disable
compiz' gconf plugin, and everythign worked well. There's something fishy in there
... anyways, the lines I use are:
compiz --replace decoration wobbly fade minimize cube rotate zoom scale move resize place switcher &
gnome-window-decorator &
The next annoying thing I faced was keyboard problem under Xgl. For some reason
Xgl doesn't treat keyboard the same way as X does - it does seem to load the proper
xkb files, but the keyboard was set to US instead of HR anyways. Some googling
around revealed a hack which fixed that.
setxkbmap -model pc105 -layout hr -variant basic
The other keyboard-related problem is wrong mapping of Shift-Backspace keypress,
which led Xgl to crash (Zap) each and every time, which was *very* annoying.
Thankfully, the lazyweb provided the solution to that also (I've lost the original
link):
xmodmap -e "keycode 22 = BackSpace"
Now everything works perfectly and I'm a happy new Xgl/Compiz user! I've made
just one more tweak, added a button launcher to the GNOME panel for quick access
to Scale (ex. Expose :-). I'm using the xsendkey utility
to emit F12 keypress to the root window:
xsendkey -window root F12
I've put the launcher for this utility
to the top-right corner of the screen, so it's very easy to locate using the
mouse, and I find it easier to use than moving my hands to hit F12 all the time.
Here's the obligatory screenshot:
To really see the duo in action, you should watch this demo. It's
big (~60MB), but it's worth it.
