Bit of an odd one this.

I was digging round the settings in Amarok yesterday, and spotted "Use translucent windows", so I clicked on it and applied etc etc.

Then went off in a tangent to meddle with my samba install - which seemed to require basic log out/in to restart the server (can't remember commands - inbuilt stupidity).

anyway, when it restarted, I kept getting an error saying So Ok thinks me, how do I try and find out what version of Xorg I'm using. Never did work that out, but when I look at the Xorg.conf, I notice that there an empty
Section "Extensions", Endsection bit, so I stuck the -Option "Composite" "Enable"- bit in there.

Initially, it was looking good, but I sussed out that "it" must be on some sort of default setting for the levels of transparency/translucency i.e. the active window was solid (opaque), whereas inactive, moving and other windows where "see through".

The other result was that opening and closing windows took ages (relatively), about 3 to 5 seconds to open or close, or too switch between view.


Now my graphics card is a generic nvidia MX420 (I think it has about 64 megs of memory). So is this transparency/translucency thing "Memory hungry" and to gain full benefit, is it just that I really need a more up to date graphics card???

Because I appreciate that it's really just a pointless "eye candy" thing, but hell it did make the desktop look good! I could see my daleks through about 2 or 3 different windows, but as I say, it appeared as if the screen redraw took forever!

regards

John

If you are using the official Nvidia driver you can instruct it to accelerate Xrender. You write option "renderaccel" "1" or something in the Nvidia section in the xorg.conf file. Check out the Nvidia readme for more details.

Ok, I'll go and check that out. The other odd thing that seems to be happening now also, is that the screensaver seems to start, but shows none of the graphics i.e. the screen goes black. I already checked to see if any of the power saving options are checked but they're not. I don't even get the tests or examples in the screen saver set up window.

Hum?? Strange!