The DistRogue

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Update: Compiz on Fedora Core 6

In my review for FC6, I said that I had trouble getting Compiz/Beryl/AIGLX/whatever working. Well, I have a solution, but it involves futzing around in xorg.conf. At the terminal, as root, type:
nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Add these lines to the end of the file and save (Ctrl+O, ENTER, Ctrl+X):

Section "Extensions"
Option "Compositing" "Enable"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

Then, go to System > Preferences > Desktop Effects, and click the button. Voila! The really bizarre thing is that I got them running on my laptop- which I didn't even think HAD any 3D acceleration.
The cube-rotation runs incredibly smooth, with no performance hit- on an i810 graphics chipset. According to Fedora's wiki, however, you need to change the line in xorg.conf that starts "DefaultDepth" from 24 to 16 for an i810 chipset (older laptops, for instance). But it can be done.
On a related note, Fedora uses an incredible number of Python scripts. Some are graphical (such as the splash screen, and the Anaconda installer), and some are just background applets (like the annoying update daemon that you have to close to use pirut). This is cool because you can have them running even without a desktop- but you need to start X first. (On the plus side, starting X sooner doesn't affect the startup time.)

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