Topic: xgl

[Ken Fitlike]

Original thread:

http://forums.entropysink.com/index.php?topic=1948.0

I've been fiddling around with this for a short while now and it's just great - wobbly windows are wonderful fun and the cubic desktop switching thing is fast and quite a delight.

I read somewhere or other that the latest opensuse (10.1) was simple to configure and, since I've been meaning to take a peek at another distro for a while, I installed it, ati drivers, xgl and compiz. A couple of very minor tweaks later, some super-amazing-eye-candy was mine to play around with; the total time from suse installation to final gnome/xgl configuration took a very short and surprisingly stress free amount of time.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to take any screenshots that don't look horrible but I can say that the scrolling issue mentioned in the previous thread by ygfperson seems to be gone; resizing is still very 'sticky' though. All the other effects are there: fading on minimizing, wobbly windows (even menus have a mesmerising oscillation as they open), the rotating cube multiple desktop etc; I haven't checked out the transparency effect but that's probably because I was never a fan of it on that on win2k/xp; I might yet get round to it. I'm running with a 1280x1024 display so it seems that the display limitation reported previously by ygfperson have been resolved to some extent (I've not tried it on other resolutions).

The configuration utility does list my radeon 9800pro as an 'unsupported' card but, so far, it all seems to working very well (other than resizing).

Verdict: 10/10

[ygfperson]

the scrolling issue's still there for me, but i'm pretty sure it's a video-card dependent thing. your video card probably supports more kinds of acceleration than mine (or its drivers are better supported.) the display resolution issue was due to the 32mb video card memory limit on my laptop, although you can use full resolution with a substantial performance penalty. (pretty much every card more advanced than the radeon 9000 should make short work of that problem). there are a few third party patches and packages around that add a few extra features but for the most part it resyncs with novell's version of the code often.

i think the most recent third-party packages allow you to set the size of the 'cube' from 4 to 32 sides (not including top and bottom), and you can go to the side opposite of you by pressing ctrl-alt down twice. they also made it so that brushing the mouse pointer against the border of the window would turn it to the next face automatically, which is convienent for moving windows between desktops.  i'm very impressed.

[ygfperson]

there's a trick to make resizing faster here: http://www.gentoo-wiki.com/Compiz#Known_issues
it just stretches the window as you resize it until you release the mouse button, but it's an improvement nonetheless