On Mr. Cooper‘s recommendation following my failed attempt to get xGL up and running on the x60s, I decided to give its competing project AIGLX a whirl. I was a little apprehensive, because the last time I tried to get xGL up and running – on my x40 – it turned my desktop into a bunch of blue cubes. But this time around, the process was much less painful.
Following the instructions he linked to – along with an entry on the Ubuntu Forums – I was able to get compiz and all of it’s dependencies laid down just fine. My only problem was that I somehow imported bad characters into my xorg.conf file, so initially the GUI wouldn’t load, but that was a simple fix. Incidentally, one suggestion I’d make for folks thinking of trying out either AIGLX or xGL is simple – back up your configuration files. Although the instructions don’t cover that, I always back up whatever I’m altering so that if worst comes to worst I can back out. [1]
But anyhow, when I restarted gdm everything was fine and dandy except for the fact that a.) I couldn’t move any of the windows and b.) the Windows had no borders (the part above the File/Edit/View/etc). Having run into precisely this sort of problem when attempting to get xGL working a while back, I tried the obvious things, like removing and rebuilding everything, running a ‘gnome-window-decorator –replace’, and so on, but no joy. [2] From what I can tell from the forums, it’s a common problem with the latest compiz builds so with any luck someone will figure it out shortly.
Until then, however, I’m still without the eye candy I crave.
Update: Not getting AIGLX to work was bad enough; breaking my suspend in the process was really not a positive development. Need to puzzle that out tomorrow, because suspend is critical. Maybe I can remove the xGL repositories, then apt-get update / apt-get dist upgrade?
[1] In this case, do something like ‘sudo cp xorg.conf xorg.conf.back’ and ‘sudo cp gdm.conf-custom gdm.conf-custom.back.’
[2] If you get stuck in a broken Compiz as I did, run a ‘killall gnome-window-decorator’ and a ‘metacity –replace.’ Should return things to normal.
stephen o'grady says:
August 16, 2006 at 8:26 pm
just testing comments quickly following an MT upgrade
Paul Cooper says:
August 29, 2006 at 5:59 am
Ha ha, how to break someones laptop remotely via blogs! Sorry I only found out about this late – been on in-laws then parents visit (fastest intenet connection of the two weeks, 38K modem at my parents house – there is virtually nothing that I use on the internet that is usuable at that speed – logging in to Zimbra took about 5 minutes).
Forgot to metion that there was some weird UTF voodoo going on with the instructions and text editors that meant the inverted commas were wrong – I presume that’s what caused your initial xorg.conf errors.
Anyway no-one but the Bank, and telemarketers calls me Mr Cooper, nearly everyone calls me coops (or some amusing variation thereof), paul, or sometimes in online contexts pgc (the domain may change but my username has always been pgc since 1994).