Following the recommendation of another thread, I booted my system into level 5 (normally I stop at level 3 and run startx when needed) in order to test whether I could get a USB drive to mount. Never got that far as the first thing I noticed was that compiz was automatically getting launched. I never asked for that fairly useless feature -- even my daughters got bored with the wobbly windows after a minute or so -- and I cannot figure out how to disable it.

I've gone into the sysconfig editor and made sure that Xorg was the X server being used -- thinking that, perhaps, compiz required Xgl -- but it had no effect. I've even gone into one of the X startup files that seemed to be launching compiz (/etc/X11/xdm/Xsetup) and commented it out but to no avail.

I'm ready to go into YaST and remove it if that's what it takes (and is even possible).

Short of that, does anyone know how to turn off this ridiculous piece of eye candy?

Many TIA...

--
rt

Hi.

Although it's not necessary to run XGL to use compiz, if you are using it, you can quickly disable compiz with:

gnome-xgl-switch --disable-xgl (as root) and restart the GUI

This works even if you are using KDE as your desktop. However, if you take the time to explore compiz a little, I'm sure that you will find that some of it's effects become very hard to do without after a while, such as the ability to fade windows (<alt>and scroll wheel) and the shift switcher (<superkey><tab> instead of <alt><tab>).

I agree that the wobbly windows are rather annoying, but you can turn them off and explore the other effects by using the compizconfig-settings-manager, if you have it installed. You may well have - if it's not in your menu, just type compizconfig-settings-manager in a console.

Compiz gives you a whole load of very useful features and, wobbly windows aside, is very pleasing on the eye. Just turn off the wobbly windows by clicking in the check-box and enjoy the rest of what is on offer!

If not, your uninstall option will work just fine...