With the lady friend away last weekend and a full week in the office, I figured it was as good a time as any to try and get Xgl in on my Thinkpad x40. So naturally, I started with Gentoo’s faily comprehensive wiki entry on the topic. Unfortunately, the HowTo is slightly compromised by the fact that the instructions are relatively hardware dependent, and thus a bit convoluted.
Nevertheless, I managed to get to get all of the prerequisites emerged (installed, for the non-Gentoo folks), and successfully checked out and laid down a version of Xgl. So far, so good. No problems as of yet.
Unfortunately, that was about as far as I got. Given that I work on the Gnome desktop, I chose to follow the instructions that modify GDM (think of it as the login screen in Windows XP, for those of you on that platform) to run Xgl rather than X. After the first time through, it seemed as if I was onto something because when I had everything installed and configured appropriately, I restarted and the machine refused to load Xgl. A quick boot into a Gentoo rescue disk and a chroot later, I was back in my normal X, trying to determine just went wrong.
To make a long and (very) boring story short, after tinkering with different Xgl commands within gdm.conf, as well as modifying my Xsession according to the instructions here (boy did that not go well), I’m more or less stalled at the moment. Whenever I boot into GDM and log in, it throws me an error about an “unrecognized option: vt8”, which apparently is not unheard of. Fortunately, it forgives me and boots into normal X so that I can resume normal operations.
For now, I’m defeated (though not conquered). I’ll get it figured eventually, I’m sure, but probably won’t be today.
