A few days ago I upgraded x11 from version 6.7.0 to 6.8.1 so I could play around with some very cool looking eye candy in fluxbox - like shadows and translucent windows and such. So I added the appropriate lines to xorg.conf to enable extensions and added a line to start xcompmgr in the .xinitrc file that gets my window manager going. The flux menus looked way cool with shadows and all, though things slowed down a little. But there were two problems: first the slit was moved from the center right where it should be to the upper left, where it usually appears when flux is starting, and I couldn't get it to move back. And second, and worse, when I tried to run a program the system crashed and I had to turn the machine off - ctl-c didn't work, nor did ctl-alt-bksp. My system has been super stable (as linux usually is ). I am currently running Slackware 10.0 and fluxbox 0.9.10 on an IBM R40 Thinkpad.

My question is: is it worth it to try to get xcomposite working or is it too resource intensive and crash prone? I really hate crashing things and being forced to shut down without properly umounting hard disks - it can't be good for the hardware.

-geomatt