I just got XGL and compiz on Gentto up and running and to put it mildly its amazing! It provides a win win with both advanced usability and the coolness factor at full throttle. Plus its very fast. Watching it on a co-workers computer didn’t compair to customizing it for myself and taking the steering wheel. It will be nice when xgl is there as a default install option, as opposed to the many many rough hours I have put into getting it working the last 2 days in Gentto on amd64 bit hardware.

Thats a pretty good review considering it has crashed twice since I have started writing this and to type capital letters I am having to hit the right shift and hold, hit the left shift, let go of the right shift, and then type the letter as a capital. My other options: use caplock everytime or disable all plugins except for gconf and decoration and then enable each of them. It seems that no one else has these wonderful shift key problems DOH! So, there are a lot of bugs and it will be cool to see this software in its more mature, futuristic state.

Gentto HOWTO_XGL/Troubleshooting

My 2 tips:

1. If you are having trouble getting it to run after everything is compiled make sure your xgl is compiled against your video cards libGL.so and that compiz is compiled against mesa’s libGL.so.
   My biggest hold up was getting this error: GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap is missing. It took me a while to get all of my components built correctly so they were built and would execute against the right libraries.
2. If your desktop locks up drop to a console, run killall compiz, and restart compiz on the same display it was running: DISPLAY=:0 compizrc. This way your x session and windows are still running.

One thing I will definately be looking forward to is running transparent videos over desktop images to create a lively, flowing, dynamic desktop environment. I’ve been messing around with overlaying almost completely transparent fullscreen videos over the top of my desktop background and then using applications at no or little transparency on top of that. The effect is great! I think fluxbox has finally reached its date for this box.

more xgl videos

This entry was posted on Monday, July 3rd, 2006 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Linux, Scott, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.