HOWTO: configure compiz
 

After finding a way to configure compiz using only the official package, I thought it would be nice to share. We'll assume a working compiz installation and vanilla path/env.

This should turn on compiz with all the default plugins, and create a bunch of .conf in ~/.compiz/options/. Note that that's 3 lines of commands.

To set up the cube's top/bottom and skydome pictures, you can modify ~/.compiz/options/cube-screen0.conf. Dig around in there. Lot's of fun.

To set up compiz as default windows manager, we modify ~/.compiz/options/decoration-allscreens.conf with: and create a script in ~/.kde/env/ with content:
Restart X (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace) and you're all done :)

Most of this guide stolen from WulfNStein, raska and erklaerbaer.

note to the wary, I can't seem to change back to kwin now ...

EDIT: Ok, remove all modifications, runlevel 3, xwmconfig to xfce, startx, logout, xwmconfig to kde, back to kwin now (kde-window-decorator does not display chinese in the titlebar)

Hi, I've tried lots of different compiz comand lines and I always get this error:

Like, duh, I know another window manager is running, I said "--replace"

Joel

Did you have compiz working as a user or root?

I have not been able to get all effects as user. Curiosity I ran it as root on kde desktop and have wobbles, window borders etc. Pretty useless if it only works for root. Seems to me a permission issue but I haven't seen anything about permissions and compiz.

That's strange, the people at the compiz forum recomends *not* to run compiz as root. If you're getting wobbly, compiz is working.

I found out that many of them need special key presses (Ctrl-Alt-left/right/up/down) to activate the effect, and the order of load for the plugins is important (ish).

I never use root logged into kde except just right after an install for a couple things. But with root available I thought I'd try compiz since it wasn't working right in a user account.

Seems all works as root except for the much talked about cube for which not even a config file is created. That might just be my rather dated geforce2 mmx/mx 400.

Compiz starts up with user but no window borders, wobble, etc. Not all that important to me but once I've sorted things out and built packages there will be some other workstation's whose owners will want the eye candy.

mmmh... are you running kde-window-decorator right after running compiz?
After logging in, open a terminal (i.e. Konsole) and try these two commands, please tell us if you get the 3D desktop working afterwards:
Keep the ampersand signs (&) at the end, those mean to send your commands to the background so they don't crash if you close your terminal program.

Thanks to randomsel for the above tips. I hope to find the time to review them, so I can setup a skydome and some (mis)configurations and post back here my results ;)

Apropos of skydome, gradient works, but can't make it work with an image. Please share if you comes up with a solution (or an image that works). Same for top/bottom image.

Most of these configurations are undocumented, but obvious after you test them out, like 'in=1' in the cube configuration shifts your point of view to the "inside" of the cube :rolleyes: .

I am sorry for intervening in this post, but I think I should not start a new thread since this one discusses problems with configuring compiz.
So I am running Slackware Linux 12.0 with kernel vmlinuz-generic-smp-2.6.21.5-smp. My video card is 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 03)
So, following the instructions in the first post, I added

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

to my xorg.conf. When I run:
compiz --replace ini decoration wobbly fade minimize cube move place resize rotate scale switcher water zoom &
I get the following:

libGL warning: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x51
compiz: GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap is not supported by direct rendering context, trying indirect rendering context instead
compiz: GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap is missing
compiz: Failed to manage screen: 0
compiz: No manageable screens found on display :0.0

and the borders of the windows freeze and all I can do is kill kde and start in anew.

Any suggestions what is wrong?
First of all does my video card support the "shinies" that compiz allows?

Regards,
Martin

seems you haven't enabled dri yet, check out the stickied thread about enabling 3d acceleration on x11

glxinfo | rendering:
libGL warning: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x51
direct rendering: Yes

So I do have direct rendering ...

I wonder if my video card supports what compiz offers?

Hi,

I have an ATI Radeon 9600, and i also get this message:

LibGL warning: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x4b
compiz: GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap is not supported by direct rendering context, trying indirect rendering context instead
compiz: GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap is missing
compiz: Failed to manage screen: 0
compiz: No manageable screens found on display :0.0

Should i install the proprietary drivers ???
I have this post here: h**p://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=568200

Regards

PS:please move or delet my post if you think it does not belong in this thread

Thanks raksa,

Yes, I'm using the complete command in two lines with "&" following each line. I played around a bit more and it seems that I can get something worthwhile if I leave out the "ini", e.g.

# #!/bin/bash
# compiz --replace decoration wobbly fade minimize cube move place resize rotate scale switcher water zoom &
# kde-window-decorator &

I have a ~/.compiz directory and some config files that were created in it when I first ran with "ini" in the script. There is a ~/.kde/env directory with your short script in it named start-compiz (for lack of any other name) and it is executable.

If I run this script manually:

# #!/bin/bash
# compiz --replace ini decoration wobbly fade minimize cube move place resize rotate scale switcher water zoom &
# kde-window-decorator &

I get the following error:

" kde-window-decorator: Could not acquire decoration manager selection on screen 0 display ":0.0" "

which I now think is a failure to read the ./compiz configs and not a permission problem.


I'll have to do some more research.

For configuring your video card to handle compiz I strongly recommend reading the tutorials on the compiz site.....

http://compiz.org/Documentation/Documentation

There are steps for configuring Nvidia, ATI, and Intel cards.

There is also a lot of helpful information on there forums.

http://forum.compiz.org/

Good luck.

I had a strange and disappointing experience with Compiz.

Fake:

First of all, I created a brand new user: "fake". I didn't want to risk my environment. I killed X, logged in as "fake" and installed Compiz. What I call "installation" is nothing more than running these commands:

I didn't get any error messages, and Compiz worked flawlessly. All features worked. Impressive! I killed X and logged in as "fake" again. Compiz was still there working flawlessly. I restarted X once again, Compiz was hanging tough. So I assumed it was installed for good. But the first funny thing in this story is that I inspected ~/.compiz and it was empty! No files, zilch, nada.

Myself:

So I killed X and logged in as myself. Installed Compiz and this time I got error messages. Something more or less like "file such and such not found, using defaults". Or something like that. The message was echoed about 6 or 8 times, and about 6 or 8 files were created inside ~/.compiz. Well, this time Compiz did not work at all. It was running in the background, but none of the effects worked. Sometimes it would even make KDE freeze completely and force me to kill X.

Myself with empty home:

So I dropped to runlevel 3 and moved everything in my home directory elsewhere and ran startx. I was still myself, but with an empty home directory. New installation and, again, I got the same error message about 6 or 8 times in the console, and about 6 or 8 files were created inside ~/.compiz. Now Compiz sort of worked, just a couple of features. I restarted X several times and nothing improved. And Compiz never started itself automatically as when I experimented with the "fake" user. Now I always had to run it manually.

My old self again:

So I deleted everything from my home directory, restored the backup and installed Compiz as myself with all the old baggage once more. Again, it ran in background, but none of the effects worked.

Faketoo:

I made another new user: "faketoo". Then I killed X, logged in as "faketoo" and installed Compiz. It would work fine with another brand new user like "fake", right? Wrong. I got the same error message and just a couple of features worked.

Fake:

Finally, I logged in as Mr. fake again and Compiz ran just fine. Automatically. I didn't have to "install" it. It was there already. I figured I could just copy whatever Mr. fake had in his ~/.compiz directory, but it's still empty.

Then I gave up. Too bad. It was fun while it lasted.

All my efforts to configure compiz in Slackware 12 so far have failed. I either get a very slow and unusable X when I call compiz like this:
LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 compiz --replace ini decoration wobbly fade minimize cube move place resize rotate scale switcher water zoom &

or I get the errors:
libGL warning: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x51
compiz: GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap is not supported by direct rendering context, trying indirect rendering context instead
compiz: GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap is missing
compiz: Failed to manage screen: 0
compiz: No manageable screens found on display :0.

And I do have direct rendering enabled:
glxinfo | grep rendering:
libGL warning: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x51
direct rendering: Yes

My driver is intel, my system is stock Slackware 12.0. Any ideas? I suspect that my videocard does not support the functionality that compiz allows.

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Regards,
Martin

I second WulfNStein's suggestion. While I haven't sorted out reading from my .compiz configs, The docs at the compiz site were spot on with regards to configuring my xorg.conf and with using "ini" all worked just fine.

I have already read the stickies in those forums concerning configuring compiz. Alas, nothing seems to work properly on my system. I wonder why I could find no documentation about compiz coming with Slackware 12...

I'm not talking about stickies in forums, I'm talking about compiz documentation here:

http://compiz.org/Documentation/Documentation

Slack ships with Linux How-to's and man pages. Not instructions for near beta eye candy no matter how much fun it might be.

I have added /user/doc to directories scanned by recoll and yet nothing comes out when I type compiz. There is no man page either. Concerning the above link, the "configuring compiz" section includes three links. GConf is not present in Slackware, compiz-setting is no more supported, and I havo no gnome on my system for the third option ...

Those would be for configuring compiz's plugins, which you can do by editing the .config files generated by the ini plugin.

You might want to look/ask around in the compiz forum about your particular problem. They'll probably have a solution for your.

Hi,

I have Slackware 12.0, and I installed Compiz 0.6.5 from the Slacky.eu repository, but when I execute this:

I get the same problems that tramni1980 has. Decorations disappear, the keyboard get locked along with the Konsole. And I get almost exact error messages.

EDIT: I've added the two commands from the original post to a script and executed the script, it still locks up and I lose the decorations, but Compiz seems to be "working" because the window wobbles when I move it and the cube rotates when I switch between desktops...

Not suggestions as much as questions...

First, what kind of machine are you running this on? How much memory? How fast of a machine? What kind of CPU?

Second, have you modified your /etc/X11/xorg.conf as follows:
Compiz will work without them. Read the edit below.

EDIT: Those lines can actually hurt more than they help. I was wrong on this point. After much experimentation, I have discovered that the above lines aren't helpful, and may cause a little extra instability. I was wrong. I am sorry for that.

I see you already included the following lines
. You also need to add the upper lines as well.

I am running compiz on two laptops. Both are equipped with Intel video adapters. One is a less than six months old Compaq with a Celeron M at 1.86 GHz. The other is also a Celeron, but a PIII version at 1.06 GHz. The first one runs it as smooth as silk. The latter runs it, but it's a bit on the ker-chunky side. No matter, it works on both!

One more thing, if you are using a custom compiled kernel, make sure that you set up the video drivers under as modules. If not, your compiz has no chance of working...at least the install on my other laptop didn't work until I recompiled its kernel as instructed above.

Now it works, albeit slowly.

And as someone said somewhere else, compiz is buggy. It certainly is! There are a few bugs in it that really uh...BUG me, but I have compiz set up so I can turn it on and off at will.

X never falters. KDE never fails to come back up. Anymore than that will come with time, and more dedicated compiz developers, testers, and users becoming allied with the project.

Blessed be!
Pappy

pappy_mcfae, I've tried what you suggested, but I still loose all the borders when I run compiz.

My setup is a laptop with intel dual core processor and an integrated I945 graphics adapter and 2GB od DDR2 ram. Like I mentioned before, compiz worked fine on Fedora Core 6 which I tried earlier, but it seems to have a lot of problems runing on Slack 12.

My humblest apologies for that. It sure worked with me...and my machines are nowhere near as balls to the wall as the one you describe above.

My new laptop is a 1.86GHz Celeron, and only one Gig of memory...DDR2, as a matter of fact. It is also running the I945 chipset with 128 megs video RAM. It took a while to get all the gears meshing properly, and I spent a lot of time looking around at other threads devoted to compiz.

Finally, I found one that had some information that finally got my compiz up and running. This particular link has a lot of information on compiz as it comes with Slackware 12.

It wasn't until I used the script that tramni1980 provided that I even got close to getting things going. This article is the one that really got things straightened up and (almost) flying right. It is compiz, which means there are a few bugs hanging about. Oh well, I've worked with buggier software. Thanks to 1337ln for the above link.

Be of good cheer. It seems that while compiz doesn't just hop up and work right the first time around, once you do get it to work, it stays working. I can't wait until they get some of the more annoying bugs worked out...like focus.

Blessed be!
Pappy

This link sure helped me get Compiz running. It suggests changes to the xorg.conf file:

http://www.izmiran.ru/~osin/slackware/compiz.html

I have the following 2 scripts in my /usr/local/bin/ directory:

startcompiz
stopcompiz

Try editing the ~/.compiz/options/decoration-allscreens.conf file and adding "kde-window-decorator" to the line "command=".

Brian

That means that compiz is actually loading. I was doing some experimenting last night, and I made an interesting discovery. I discovered that for some reason, if you were to set up your compiz command as follows:
sometimes kde-window-decorator won't start. However, if you were to change it to:
where the "ini" plugin isn't the first option given after "--replace", then kde-window-decorator works. I forget exactly which document on compiz told me that one, but low and behold if it didn't work for my PII 450MHz.

The point was really moot because compiz runs really, REALLY SLOWLY on that machine. It's sort of pointless to run it on it, but it does actually run.

I am in the middle of writing a howto document for compiz that is distilled from LOTS of other stuff I have read on the topic, as well as my experiments. So, for the time being, I am going to experiment on that machine to see what process is needed to make compiz functional...things like does /etc/X11/xorg.conf really need all those added lines...and what happens if they aren't there.

I'll gladly post my results as soon as they come to pass, in another thread.

Blessed be!
Pappy

Well, I'm happy to report that I made a lot of progress using the info on this link: http://www.izmiran.ru/~osin/slackware/compiz.html

Compiz now starts and I do not lose the decorations. But, some glitches are still there:

1. After runing the startcompiz script I get this warning:

/usr/bin/compiz (blur) - Warn: No stencil buffer. Region based blur disabled

but I guess that has to do with the abilities of my hardware.

2. Second problem is regarding the looks of the decorations, as they get distorted a little. First I noticed a white line going all the way acros the scren on top of the bottom panel. It's about 6 pixels wide. The same white line (this time border) appears around all tooltips and menues.

3. Opening Home, System, Trash or any other directory opens just a partial window with no contents in it (not as if it is emtpy, but as if it is partially loaded).
EDIT: After playin around for a few mintues, the contents of the windows are now ok.

4. One more thing, when I maximize a window, it seem to strech to far (beyond the screen by about 5 pixels)

I guess I'll cut down on the number of plugins and add one by one and see how it goes.

Still new to slack, had all this jazz set up fine on Ubuntu a couple months ago, but this is a different ball game it would appear.

Installed everything I think I need to get compiz to run, but when I run the command I get this:

What am I missing?

Oh by the way this removes my window borders and locks up opening/closing/moving anything on the desktop.

Any help ya'll can give would be much appreciated. I'mma go restart x now so I can move things again...

The stuff going missing means that compiz loaded, but it didn't load properly. What you are most likely missing is a start-up script like the one below:The LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 part is very important. I cannot get compiz to load on any of my machines without it. I didn't get compiz working until I created the script above.

A word to the wise: if you use the script above, and decide to add to it, be sure to keep the ini plugin from being the first one after --replace. For some reason, some machines won't start the decorator if the ini plugin comes right after --replace. I don't know why it is, but I do know my PII machine has that problem. Fortunately, it's easily fixed.

Hope that helps.

Blessed be!
Pappy

Read my posts above yours. You will see I had the same problems and how I fixed them.