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.
