[CentOS] Desktop Effects -- questions/issues

[Dag Wieers]

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:
> 1. 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.
-- 
--   dag wieers,  dag at centos.org,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]