On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 06:43:49PM +0200, Dag Wieers wrote:
On Sun, 15 Jun 2008, fred smith wrote:
I finally tried enabling the desktop effects yesterday. I'm using an old Nvidia card (GeForce 4 MX440) with, of course, Nvidia's drivers. this is on a fully updated Centos 5 system.
Enabling from the gnome menu doesn't exactly work compltely, one needs to google around a bit to find out the remaining magic incantations to make it fully work. So, I've done that and it's working.
Issues:
- I notice that the text in the bar at the top of each window appears to
be a different font, and it is outlined in black. Is there any way to tweak that setting? 2. If I have a window that is slid partially off the edge of an individual desktop it now oveerlaps the edge of the one "next" to it, when it never did before. Not sure if I like that or not, is there any way to change that behavior should I decide I don't like it? 3. I have (and always have had) the panel settings set to "autohide". I now notice that it sometimes does not hide itself until I explicitly click in an empty part of the panel, then somewhere else on the desktop. Anyone know if there's a way to resovle this?
Question: Should I decide I want to revert to the way it was before I enabled these effects, how would I go about that? there is no "disable" button on the gnome menu, only the "enable" button. I know how to un-do the changes I made manually in the xorg.conf file, but no idea how to undo whatever it is that the "enable desktop effects" button does. Clues would be appreciated.
Dag, thanks for the reply!
Not sure if this is helpful to you, but here is my experience:
I have an older/cheaper onboard nvidia in my mediacenter. It was hooked up to a 1920x1200 TFT screen. compiz was terribly slow and play video's did not work with some error message.
I tried both the nvidia drivers as well as the Open Source nv driver and was disappointed, blamed the old/cheap nvidia and the high resolution as the cause for not being able to use compiz.
Initially I also had problems with display-errors that were attributed to a very simple fix described here:
http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/CompizI finally found that by increasing the video memory size in the BIOS from 32MB to 128MB (system was upgraded from 512MB to 1536MB) compiz worked very fast and the video-overlay/XV problems were gone.
My advice would be:
- Use the nvidia driver (we have dkms-enabled packages in RPMforge)
I'm using a driver I got directly from Nvidia. Are you saying that some of the re-packaged nvidia drivers are better (in other ways than that they make use of the distro's packaging, I mean)?
- Look at the tips in the wiki for compiz
I think I already did but I'll go check again in case I missed something. I assume you mean the Centos wiki...
- Increase the Video memory size in the BIOS to at least 128MB
Sorry, no can do. It's a dedicated card with 64MB. I'm thinking of picking up something less obsolete, though. I probably ought to do it soon, as it looks like AGP cards are now being relegated to the low-end and it's probably getting worse as time moves on. My display is "only" 1280x1024, so that 64 megs may not be too terrible a limitation.
performance isn't a big issue (except for resizing windows which sometimes is fairly painful--I read somewhere else (possibly on compiz' own site) that this is due to something other than compiz but right now I don't remember the details.) I can rotate the cube quickly and easily, and the jello windows jiggle nicely, assuming one likes jiggly windows.
And let me add that last point to the wiki, so people can find it there.
-- dag wieers, dag@centos.org, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]