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Howto: Ultimate Ubuntu eye-candy with Xgl and Compriz

tectonic.co.za — Online blogger and Ubuntu fan Chromakode shoots us well ahead of the technology curve with an Xgl and Compriz installation running on Dapper Drake. This one's not for the faint-hearted.

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  • Khlept0, on 10/12/2007, -12/+14It's not difficult... he breaks it down Barney style for the noobish.
    • Tycho7, on 10/12/2007, -20/+10Pssh... you clearly are the noob here. Everyone knows Barney uses Slackware and Puppy!
  • dainbramage559, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I have successfully gotten the Gentoo XGL live cd running, and it was awesome. But I have ***** up my ubuntu box numerous times trying to get XGL to work (9800Pro, shouldnt be a problem). Mainly, I just think I keep skipping a step or whatnot.
  • ericpp, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12It's 'compiz' not 'compriz'...
    • Milamber, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1This is why stories should be editable... people will ALWAYS make mistakes.
    • Aeiri, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5"This is why stories should be editable... people will ALWAYS make mistakes."

      Looks like someone didn't even click the link....

      The actual article is misspelled, too. The person posting didn't make a mistake, he copied and pasted the title.
    • energeek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I second that
  • macewan, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2I was just looking into this! thanks for the note
  • zoop, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5heh...already built into SUSE's SLED 10 beta 7. Just turn it on.
    • burnninator, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Just how might one get a hold of this "SUSE SLED 10 beta 7?" I looked just about everywhere and couldn't find anything. All I could find on the suse website after signing up for their beta program was "SUSE Linux 10.1 beta 6." Thanks in advance.
    • MOGua, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Is this "SUSE's SLED 10 beta 7" even free?

      I saw a "How to buy" button at Novell's site.
  • whalesalad, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Gentoo just got raped off the homepage. :) It would be nice if that guide had some screenshots though.
  • Wagnel, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1lol, compriz
  • gr8whitesavage, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I got it running on Dapper flight 4 no problem whatsoever. It was really, really easy. I did not dist-upgrade thought and I recommend you don't until a final Dapper version.

    I was a little bit hesitant at first like the author of this story, but using apt really makes it a breeze. If you are familiar at all with Ubuntu and have the time and resources to try this, I really suggest you do.
  • furtwan1, on 10/12/2007, -17/+2+lame because the page is dead.
  • jakedahn, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3xgl is da *****!
  • kruykaze, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2Looks great!
  • sych0, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12no screens? psh.

    Dont bother pasting links about "eye-candy" if the article contains no actual "eye-candy"
  • hyperpasta, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Wow, so unbeleivably bleeding edge...

    I don't see it.
  • Darkshine, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2This site is suffering major digg effect. Can someone mirror?
  • robomason, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I wouldn't recommend wantonly dist-upgrading for inexperienced Ubuntu users, especially to a moving target like Dapper. The dependencies change sometimes, like the recent renaming of the openoffice.org2 package to openoffice.org. Also, if you've installed a lot of packages from backports, those can also lead to some weird dependency issues and orphaned packages (not bad, but they clutter up the system). I actually completely borked my own formerly Breezy box attempting a dist-upgrade, the process left me with an unbootable system and an obsolete kernel (the linux-image package got mysteriously left out of the apt-get party...). If you're familiar with Debian packages and can kick a few packages into place, go for it, just be warned that the process isn't completely painless.
  • jbus, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6If you want to see how awesome XGL is without hosing your system or installing a development version of ubuntu you should download the the Kororaa Xgl Demo Live CD

    http://getkororaa.com/
    • mjm01010101, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1I did, and it was pretty for the one minute it stayed up. It froze, and I tossed the CD. Nothing against linux live CD's, but most of them are really buggy. The only one I've been able to get running with any reliability is Damn Small Linux.
    • shinynew, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2this CD worked great for me. competely flawless. but then i tried to get the new beta one and it competely failed, installed without a hitch but first try it didnt even try to boot, then second try it said error loading OS. Then i had to spend like 3 hours getting windows to boot, so im not going to be trying to install that again for a while.
    • kdrlx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0It worked perfectly for me.. was a little slow .. but hey its a live cd and the popping up menus and rotating cube gets your cpu .. but i ll say go for the live cd if u wanna c some of this cool stuff ..
  • benplaut, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3For those interested, there's much more in-depth info in ubuntuforums.org

    This guy isn't origional. He's just one of the many who followed the forum guide.
  • wjadams, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Nothing new here, but I'll digg because the guide is very clear with installing and what to do on ATI vs Nvidia. Plus it's one more place to show off Xgl. I can't get enough of it personally.
  • Greattastic, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1what are the system reqs/ how much does it bog down a middle-of-the-road system?

    and is it easy to remove?
    • prockcore, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1If you have a decent video card (I'm thinking maybe DX9 and above).. then it doesn't bog down a system. It improves it.

      Xgl offloads all of the window rendering and effects to the videocard. You should see a decrease in CPU usage using Xgl.

      It looks amazing on my cheap fx5700
  • Kruncher, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I have a Nvidia FX 5600XT (128MB).
    Without XGL and Compiz running, I get around 1300 in glxgears (low I know :). With them installed and running I get like 300! Why is that?

    With XGL//Compiz enabled, moving a window, resizing, or doing anything "normal", my cpu usage jumps to almost 100%. Why is that?

    Is it because my card is listed as having "no direct rendering" support?
  • PoptartKing, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Newbie question: if I switch to this shiny thingy from Metacity, will future GNOME upgrades be hell?
  • phoenixp3k, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I've tested Xgl on a live CD. It's cool and all. But I'm not in a hurry to install it. I'll wait the stable release of Dapper (in a month) and then try it out. I guess by that time they'll have improved Xgl and Dapper as well :p (of course, Ubuntu guys are geniuses).
    But congrats for the simple guide!
  • CrazyZ, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2Tried it. It sucks so far in my opinion. Uses way too much cpu..... It offers nothing for me but "eye candy" which I don't really care about. If you want something that does nothing but offer eye candy and uses up your memory and cpu cycles, why not just install windows, and bonzai buddy?

    I'm not a MAC fan, but anybody comparing this to the grace and style of the MAC gui is, well, just fooling themselves...
    • dainbramage559, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5IMO, XGL is far easier on the cpu than regular gnome is. Move the window around and watch the system monitor if you dont believe me. It uses the gpu instead.
  • robomason, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1(reply to question by PoptartKing, crazy captcha unthreaded my reply)

    To the best of my knowledge (and I haven't tried XGL/Compiz personally), it shouldn't be too much of a problem. The worst case scenario, and this is probably very unlikely anyways, is that GNOME won't boot anymore. Of course, this can be fixed very easily by dropping to a terminal and replacing Compiz with Metacity (reversing a change you make when you install Compiz).

    That being said, if you're inexperienced with Linux and/or uncomfortable working from the command-line, I'd hesitate to recommend XGL on a computer you actually use. If you do choose to try it though, I highly recommend checking out the Dapper Drake Development forum at http://www.ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=111 . There are a few posts there that should be very helpful, and if you break anything there the experts will be more than happy to help (if you ask nicely).

    Good luck!
  • pupppet, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1Linux, still not ready for the desktop-

    #!/bin/sh
    # Start up Xgl, compiz, and GNOME
    # Run Xgl server on :1, on top of normal X
    Xgl :1 -fullscreen -ac -accel xv -accel glx:pbuffer &
    # Tell subsequent X programs to access the Xgl server at :1
    DISPLAY=:1
    # Start Compiz window manager
    gnome-window-decorator &
    compiz gconf decoration wobbly fade minimize cube rotate zoom scale move resize place menu switcher &
    # Start GNOME
    exec gnome-session
  • stanleyfeinbaum, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Upgrading to Dapper Drake totally killed my system.. I'm going to wait for a stable release before I try any of this
  • randomc0de, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Is it because my card is listed as having "no direct rendering" support?"

    Just to clarify what treed said... yeah, that's probably why. I have one of the "no direct rendering" cards and was disappointed in the lack of eye candy. Prettier than my Dapper install, but not amazingly so. I'm going to try later with an ATI card I have.

    As an aside, I always thought Nvidia was better with drivers than ATI... what happened?
  • rekleiner, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Funny all of these cool eye candy effects coming out lately. Think I will stick to Fluxbox. It's simple, small, and does what i need.
  • panthrosrevenge, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1i just got this running on flight 5 and it's pretty cool, although i still need to do some tweeking
  • dandiemer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Online blogger....are we assuming there are offline bloggers? those are called writers.
  • gookie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2compiz...compwiz...now compriz.

    LOL
  • oceanplexian, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Cool that linux is catching up to OS X, but still, it's not like Apple users haven't had this capability for a long time with Quartz.
    • intelliman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0They've never had an ever-present cube on which to work. This is how multiple workspaces should work. What's to stop them from making it a hexagon? Or expanding the side length for dual-monitors?
      I love you now, Novell.
  • NoOnEx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I tried to install Xgl / compiz on dapper, It was by no means painless at all. I tried several tutorials from the ubuntu forums. I got Xgl to run, but for some reason wouldn't use my fglrx drivers, even though X did.... I eventually installed SUSE 10.0 and followed the SUSE tutorial on the page and got it working in minutes. I love it, it looks amazing and the expose clone helps out a lot. Now If I could only swap out SUSE for ubuntu......
  • beerorkid, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I saw this, played with kororaa and knew I had to test it out in ubuntu.
    I used http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=131267&highlight=xgl to get it done.
    I have an HP sr1750nx, nvidia 6800GS, 2gb RAM, AMD 3500+. I have had all sorts of issues with breezy and gave up. Tried dapper flight 5 and it solved all my problems. XGL is icing on the cake.

    eyecandy is silly, but this is awesome.
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