Wednesday, August 15, 2007

How to enable Compiz under Gutsy.

If there's one thing that I dislike about the way people design computer software, it's got to be the tendency to make it hard to configure. A good example is the question of how to get Compiz going under Gutsy. I've just upgraded my laptop to the current set of packages, and in addition to that, have built the latest Xorg git, so as to see the progress on RS480 support. Having gotten that done, the question becomes... "How do I start compiz?"

1) I used to use Beryl-manager... nope. Not there any more.
2) How about manually starting compiz? Nope. It complains that some other GL window manager is already running.
3) Grep ps for this other window manager. Nothing obvious. Kill what WMs are running and it still won't start.
4) Google. No help this time.
5) Reboot, reinstall, re... nope.
6) Eventually decide to change my wallpaper (right click on desktop and select "Change Desktop Background"). Oooh. That's a misleading name. There are tabs for your theme, background, fonts, interface and right at the end there's one that says "Desktop effects". Click there and you get radio buttons "No effects", "Normal effects" and "Extra effects". Voila!

So now I'll go open a bug (or +1 an existing one) for the misleading menu item name.

1 Comments:

Blogger Tommy said...

saweeet, thanks for the advice / how to.

8:13 am  

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