Hi everyone,

I put a copy of Mandriva 2007 Free onto a machine with an Nvidia FX5200 AGP graphics card and the Nvidia 97xx drivers installed, in the hopes of checking out the AIGLX/compiz 3d desktop. No luck though.

I used the drak3d configuration tool to select 3d effects using AIGLX. I ran the compiz config tool and plugged in everything. Drak3d asked me to restart my session, which I did, to no effect.

However, as I normally start up in runlevel 3, I thought the problem might be to do with the fact that I wasn't running dm (the display manager). So I had dm start at boot, logged in, enabled AIGLX 3d effects, logged out and tried to login again after choosing the drak3d session type. This threw up a root password prompt to run drak3d. I ran it, it told me to log out and restart the X server (Ctrl+Alt+Backspace). I did that, and the same behaviour repeated itself. (Call drak3d, restartXserver, call drak3d, restart Xserver ...) For variety, I would get an occasional dcop server error:

Could not read network connection list.
/tmp/1664583563/.DCOPserver_hostname_0
Please check that the "dcopserver" program is running.

Fun. I decided to try Xgl. Simply enabling it and logging in again (even from init3) made a few changes ... fonts were different and some menu animation was present. No transparency, wobbles or cube however.

In init5, with dm running, Xgl behaved like AIGLX ... a neverending cycle of restart the X server, run drak3d, restart the X server, run drak3d.

I'd love to see this cube effect, so any advice would be welcome! Thanks!

Oh, one more thing: "glxinfo | grep direct" does show that direct rendering is active. glxgears shows an appropriate framerate. The nvidia drivers are working.

Thanks again!

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More work on the same problem:

OK, I decided if the drak3d tool was useless, I could still activate AIGLX manually. So here's what I've done. I booted in init3, started X, openned MCC->Hardware->3D effects and set AIGLX.

Next, I left X and editted /etc/sysconfig/compiz to read:
COMPIZ=yes

And I changed /etc/sysconfig/compositing-wm to:
COMPOSITING_WM_START=yes
COMPOSITING_WM=compiz

Now, when I run startx I see the splash screen. It soon disappears, leaving a blue square within a black background. However, the desktop is clearly up ... I can hear my startup sound and I can use Ctrl+Alt+Del to logout. During logout, I see a brief flash of my normal desktop. So, that's rather closer. Ideas are still welcome!

Here's the solution (well, at least a partial one) I've found. AIGLX and XGL both seem to dislike the nvidia drivers I compiled using the binary from the nvidia site. With the PLF 96xx nvidia rpms, however, Xgl works fine ... no more white cube.

AIGLX still doesn't work, but if you just want 3d effects and don't particularly care whether they are delivered by AIGLX or Xgl, try the PLF rpms.