tecosystems

No Eye Candy for Me: Striking Out w/ Xgl and AIGLX

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I’ve written in the past about my quest for some of the new desktop eye candy for my laptop, but I have to confess that thus far I’m having very little luck getting either of the Xgl / AIGLX packages working on my Thinkpad. Part of it, of course, is the nature of my machine:as a 12 inch, 4 pound laptop, the graphics card – an Intel Extreme (i810 driver / 82852/855GM chipset), is not exactly on the bleeding edge of graphics capabilities. But there are people that have gotten one or the other working on Thinkpad x40’s, so I can’t help but feel a bit deficient in this regard. I’ve followed the HowTo’s to the letter, but can never manage to get anything running.

Given that it’d been about a month since my last attempt to Xgl installed, I thought I’d give it another whirl during lunch today. As is documented in this entry from the Gentoo forums – you can almost hear the crickets – I’ve tried a couple of different tacks with respect to Xgl. None of these, unfortunately, have born fruit. In most cases, I cannot start X, end up back at the command line and have to back everything out that way.

Having had so little success with that package, I decided to try the less tricked out but much easier to install AIGLX, in the hopes that it would represent an upgrade on the path to something like Xgl. Unfortunately, after AIGLX was enabled my desktop into a series very pretty but very useless navy blue rectangles and cubes, none of which responded to keyboard or mouse. I finally had to kill X and disable the metacity compositing manager via the command line (gconftool-2 -s /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager –type bool false) before I could use my desktop again.

For those of you scoring at home, that’s two big swings and misses in this at bat. Frankly, I’m not sure what my next move is. The simplest approach would be to back up and blow away my Gentoo instance and replace it with one of the distros – SuSE 10.1, for example – that supports Xgl or AIGLX out of the box. That would mean giving up, however, and besides – I’m fairly wedded to Gentoo at this point. If it can be done on other distros, it can be done on Gentoo – I just need to keep trying. What I’m going to try, however, is beyond me. I will have my eye candy, however. One way, or another.

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