I'm using Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop and its been working great so far. I also have Compiz enabled.

I like to keep X-Chat by itself on workspace #2 while I'm browsing on workspace #1. The problem is, Workspace Switcher only shows an outline of the program (or its icon if the program is maximized), rather than a real-time preview of what the window looks like. This would be really convenient because it's annoying having to keep switching workspaces just to check on recent activity.

I've done this before--maybe with KDE, I can't remember. I was just wondering if anyone knew of a way to accomplish this with Gnome and/or Compiz?

I know with compiz-fusion one of the settings can give you a live window preview if you hover above it's icon on the taskbar with your mouse, for example if a movie is running maximised in another workspace, hover over the icon and you can watch the movie in a small preview.

Sorry, I'm not sure about standard compiz though and I'm using Kde.

Compiz should have the potential to do it. In fact, any compositor should be able to (plain WM without support for compositing will not be able to). I don't know if there's a pager/plugin for compiz that will actually do it, since I don't use fancy things like that.

I think that enlightenment (e16, don't know about e17) is able to do that as well.

I am sorry that I am not able to provide more concrete details.