Compiz without requiring proprietary drivers
 

History
My older hardware (2008 and earlier) is able to run compiz with the videocards that were part of that era.

My current (late 2008-2009) system cannot run compiz or the ati radeon drivers (FLX) for linux.

Why cannot compiz work without relying on 3d drivers? I dont mind a performance hit (I am not a gamer), but like the functionality offered by compiz.

Any ideas (compiz and ati drivers for fedora 10, worked just fine. Nothing similar for Fedora 11, or Ubuntu 9.04


Leslie

I found this using Google, as you could have done.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiz

I am not sure I follow you.

Compiz is a compositing desktop, it heavily relies on the hardware to do all the work. Without that, compiz simply wouldn't work. The cube thing alone would be plainly impossible.

So, if you want to run compiz without all the effect, run something else. Most wm's around are far more functional than compiz has ever been.

And if you want all the candy without the 3d support via hardware then... well, it would be like asking quake4 to run without hardware acceleration...

What do you do when ATI card(s) are not supported
 

My card hit the market around summer of 2008. ATI HD3450. There is no linux support and I wonder if ever there will be some for 3d graphics.


With Fedora 10, or earlier UBUNTU, the card was supported. Not so for Ubuntu 9.04 or Fedora 11.

The fglrx driver will give you support, well... it will work at least.

The open source drivers for ati has no 3d support for anything that's newer than like 5 years old or more. Such is the situation of the 3d world in linux.

I don't care about the 3d effects, but I too like some of the functionality with compiz. One thing that I miss is being able to throw my windows around using the keyboard. Is there anyway to have the functionality of compiz's WM without the effects? Or does anyone know of a script where I can map some modifier+numpad to throw my windows to various corners of my screen? thx

This entirely depends on the wm you choose. This can be done with fvwm easily, the basic idea would be like this, more or less:

There's room for improvement, of course, but this would throw the window on a given direction, by pressing control+win+alt+<arrow>.

I don't know if there's any other wm that is configurable enough to do this with keybindings. However, it might be possible also to script this on a more generic way with wmctrl+bash or something like that.

I just use the composition manager built into Gnome. If your using Gnome you can access it and use it without a 3D driver. Get to a terminal and run gconf-editor and go to the Apps>metacity>general section and click on compositing_manager. Mind you this will use the CPU to scale graphics which on older hardware is a disaster. Granted this won't give you all of the nifty stuff that you have with Compiz, but you can still get some of the effects.

Great suggestion tekhead2, I enabled composition_manager for a little eye candy without any noticeable hit on performance. As far as throwing my windows around, I found out that 'move' has a couple of modifier keys. So I can use the alt+F7 shortcut to initiate a move, then holding shift+directional will move the window while snapping to other windows, or the desktop's edge (it'll actually step between these snapping points). An acceptable solution until ati's fglrx driver works for me. Thanks i92guboj too for your suggestion; I may give fvwm a try.

Edit: I ended up disabling composite_manager. Switching between windows (alt+tab) was slowing down considerably. CPU usage didn't really spike or anything, so I suspected maybe it was using my swap. Set swappiness to 0 with no effect, so I'm not sure where the bottleneck.

When do you think we will see fgrlx for Fedora 11/12 or other?
 

Waiting for fgrlx.

I should not hold my breathe

If you haven't accelerated 3d then all the fancy work is done in cpu, so, yes, it was your cpu. Maybe by the time while the peak should show in your monitor the monitor itself was that crippled that it couldn't show anything.

When you enable dri in a non-3d accelerated driver, all the hard work is done via software, it's slow, and wastes *a lot* of cpu cycles.

I ran a few more tests while monitoring top -d .5, and again w/ gnome-system-monitor set at 250ms updates. There was no significant difference between composite_manager=true|false when moving a window w/ transparency (gnome-terminal). If anything it was smoother and less cpu usage with composite enabled. The only performance degradation I saw was a 500-1500ms delay in my alt-tab and it looks like metacity uses adds thumbnail support to alt-tab when composite_manager is enabled. Without composite, metacity was showing about 7% usage on alt-tabs, but 30% (in top) with composite enabled, however the overall graph peaked momentarily until the alt-tab window finally displayed. When I had f10/compiz working, I noticed the same delay with alt-tab, but I believe I changed a setting in compiz to use the old metacity alt-tab to fix that. I'm not really seeing anything in gconf for that. I might search on this a little later and I'll post again if I find a solution.

Metacity will do this, but you have to set the shortcuts in gconf-editor (afaik).

gconf-editor > apps > metacity > window_keybindings

move_to_center, move_to_corner_xx, move_to_side_x

To do Super/WinKey + numpad, set them accordingly using <Super>KP_n where n is the number on the keypad.

Example:
move_to_center: <Super>KP_5

The only drawback I've found is with dual-monitors, it treats the entire desktop as one big desktop, so centering it will place it across both monitors.