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.
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/Compiz
I 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) - Look at the tips in the wiki for compiz - Increase the Video memory size in the BIOS to at least 128MB
And let me add that last point to the wiki, so people can find it there.