And now for something completely different

...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.