Compiz Prettyness
Well, it’s quite amazing that I’m actually writing two entries in one day, but what the heck – it’s for a good reason.
I decided that instead of trying (and probably failing) to get Xgl working with my i915 driver, I’d give AIGLX a shot instead. There was a nice howto and repository on the Ubuntu forums which I followed, and that got it all set up in a matter of minutes. I’m now quite pleased to say that everything’s up and running and working much better than I ever expected.
cube/rotate work extremely well, and the transparency effect when opening/closing windows is very nice. Minimize also works really effectively, but unfortunately the switcher is broken for the time being (alt–tab works, but I can’t seem to get out of it – maybe I’m just being dumb). miniwin is also broken, but the other plugins work great. wobbly is fun for a while, but not really of much use other than for nice eye–candy.
The only downside is that resizing windows is quite slow at the moment. Hopefully with successive releases this will improve, but for the time being I’m definately keeping this enabled. It’s really great to see something that’s truly revolutionary. I just wish that we’d moved over to xorg a long time ago, instead of keeping the XFree behemoth alive.