Sunday, March 05, 2006

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.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Speaking of completely different things ... what happened to Diva? Nothing has really happened for months, as far as I'm aware. IIRC, you're on the dev team, so I just thought I'd ask.

Xgl + Compiz = the bomb, by the way.

7:16 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Speaking of completely different things ... what happened to Diva? Nothing has really happened for months, as far as I'm aware. IIRC, you're on the dev team, so I just thought I'd ask.

Xgl + Compiz = the bomb, by the way.

7:17 PM  
Blogger Senko said...

There's steady, if somewhat slow, development in Diva. The underlying C library is mostly finished (wrt the features for the initial release), and MDK (the main dev) is now finishing up some loose ends to prepare for the initial 0.0.1 release, which should happen in a few weeks. Myself, I've been mostly out of dev for the past few monts due to my undergrad obligations.

A few months ago the project changed its primary web, which is now at:
http://trac.diva-project.org/
(yup, we're using Trac now). It replaces the old wiki and the novell forge svn, so everything is in one place. If you've been checking out the old page or the svn reposizory, it would seem dead for a few weeks.

9:47 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I see, that's great! Sorry about posting twice, Blogger was being unruly. Good luck with school.

12:53 PM  

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