TuxCentre

I know its a bit late for posting it but there are still newbies attacking on a wonderfully evolving new Desktop enviornment i.e. KDE 4 and i m sure many of u r still seeking help in using compiz fusion desktop effects in your newly installed KDE4.

Well the steps are really simple.Firstly u need to install all the compiz fusion packages either from the compiz fusion’s site or for openSUSE simply use the XGL repo from the community repositary. Please note that in the new openSUSE 11.0 have removed the XGL layer and has added AIGLX which means no more remembering of the enable/disable commands. The efeects can be simply turned on with the help of fusion-icon of compiz-manager and for a surprise KDE 4 makes it much easier to set programs that have to be started up every time.

To add a program to start up simply open the “configure desktop” option form the K-menu. Next open the “advanced tab” on the top and then click on the “Autostart” icon and then just use “Add Program” button on the right hand side. Now thats wht i call a good desktop experience

Now you can add the fusion-icon to the startup and every time u log in u will find its icon in the system tray which will help you simply switch between various Window manager so u can switch on/off the effects from there.

Hope u enjoy the new KDE 4 which is like a revolution in the morden day personal computing

The recent problem faced by me was that suddenly after an online update my computer went too slow….i could feel the zagginess while while moving windows. After using “ctrl+esc” i realized that Xorg was using a lot of CPU % which didnt come below 25% n every thing was getting slow coz of it. I though it was due to some problem in compiz or Xorg n will vanish after one or two updates but that didn’t happen so it striked to me that it must be due to some plugin so i turned off all the plugins n every thing was normal again

I started to turn on each plugin one by one and observe the changes n i saw that blur plugin was on but its own n it was causing the problem and also the reflection plugin was causing the problem ( well i dont have a graphics card n if u do maybe reflection plugin wont make a difference i think) so u can try this n if even this doesnt solve the problem try switching off the KDE4 native effects. Hope this will solve the similar problem faced by any of u

Compiz 0.7.6 is out with a splash. The long tested Full sphere is out in the stable XGL repo and trust me it looks amazing.Though it took a little time for me to find out from where to turn it on. Well u can find it in the “effects” group under the “Cube reflection and deformation” plugin. There under the “Deformation” tab you can chose between the sphere and cylinder or a notmal cube. And if u select sphere and remove the tick from the “Deform caps” and “Cube Atlantis” is on then u will see a very very cute aquarium i have added a screen shot with it.

Another thing added is the “Static Switcher” plugin which shows thumbnails of all the open windows and moves caret instead of thumbnails.

One more thing added is the wallpaper plug in.This plugin helps u keep a different wallpaper for each phase of the cube. The only problem with this plug in is that right now Kdesktop doesnt support transperency so u wont be able to see the wallpaper set by compiz. At this point of time you have 3 options — first is that you can kill kdesktop but the problem is you wont be able to see the icons on your desktop. Second option is there is a patch available for transparency support but you will have to re-build kde-base.Third option is that u wait for the changes to come pre-built with the new kde-base

These were the differences i noticed n there might be more. If any of u find out, can paste it as a comment to this post

Though compiz is back n running on my openSUSE…but its like a new baby again. Its just like i started using it around a year back.Lots of bugs but the features are gud n up to date…But its good to finally use these mind boggling effects again on my laptop without a graphics card.

I just added the cyberorg repo in my openSUSE 10.3 n m going to update just now…n lets see what all is new in it…

Screen shots comming soon…

Finally Compiz is back in openSUSE 10.3….the latest update from the XGL openSUSE repo fixed the problem. But there is also another change that comes with new version of XGL… now the old command - “gnome-xgl-switch” no longer works…. now the command to start xgl is “xgl-switch –enable-xgl” and to stop it is “xgl-switch –disable-xgl”.

There are many new features added…i will test them and add new posts about them with screen shots

Hi every one…I think i might have helped many using this blog. But this time i might need some help. Actually i have been using Compiz fusion almost since it was released. I have gone through many ups n downs with it ( ups could be when i was amongst the first to see new features been added and downs would be when i was amongst the first to see all the bugs and crashes that came with the new versions). But all was well i was actually enjoying the ups and downs and was using the version 7.2.0 fairly well…and then i updates and the effects stoped working. Actually i got a command line instead of the login screen whenever xgl was on….i thought this bug will be sloved with yet another update but 3 updates came past me but it stilled didnt work out….my problem remained the same…no login screen… Then i thought it might be a problem with some plugin so i turned off all the plugins and sill the same problem. Then i reverted back to the oldest version of XGL that was available in the OSS repo of openSUSE 10.3 ( Oh! sry i forgot….i m using openSUSE 10.3 with 768 mb ram n intel 915gm board). Well after reverting back to the oldest XGL i got the login screen but after logging in compiz crashed. This made me realise that maybe XGL in the XGL repo of open suse is not up-to-date with the compiz fusion i m using. Does any one know a work around for this problem i m facing…. and if someone realted to openSUSE comes across this problem please Fix this bug….Its been more than a week since i havent seen any of that beautiful desktop effects on my comp

Compiz fusion and compiz have been updated to version 0.7.2  with the following updates —

Compiz:
- Translation support in gtk-window-decorator.
- Updated translations.
- Added wrapable session functions to core. This allows to provide a full
session save/restore in a plugin.

Compiz Fusion:
New Plugins:
compiz-fusion-plugins-main:
- session: Communicates with session manager to save/restore window state
- bs: Change window brightness and saturation with key/button bindings
- mousepoll: Provides a generic system for other plugins to get the current
mouse position
- mag: Provides a magnifying glass under the mouse pointer with 3 different
display modes (simple/image overlay/fisheye)

compiz-fusion-plugins-extra:
- 3d: Adds depth to your desktop by raising windows in layers off the cube
- loginout: Provides a simple system to implement login and logout animations
- maximumize: Resizes a window to fit within the available empty screen space
- notification: Displays error messages on the screen with libnotify
- shelf: Shrinks a window to a preset size for monitoring many windows at once
- showmouse: Paints particle emitters that orbit the mouse pointer to make it
more visible

compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported:
- atlantis: Renders an aquarium inside of the transparent cube

Configuration manager changes:
ccsm:
- Action settings were split into button, key, and edge settings, each using
its own widget.

simple-ccsm:
- New settings manager focused on simplicity and aimed at end users

Kiba dock is a beautiful application dock that uses the Akamaru physics engine to render
complex interactions. Its a MAC style dock that i built for Linux. It works on Linux with graphics effects turned on. Can be used with both KDE and Gnome. Well what more can be said…the with the video below you can see it all for your self…

Installing Kiba Dock :–kiba dock source can be downloaded form its svn server using the command “svn co https://kibadock.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/kibadock/trunk kiba” which will copy the files to kiba directory in the directory you execute this command. Then you will have to install it normally by using the commands — make , make install and intall.
If you are using openSuse simply use 1 click install option from the link www.software.opensuse.org/search.

When i first used compiz fusion with kde the way to enable was using the command “compiz ccp” (which is also there even now) but another way introduced was the compiz fusion icon which have many advantages as will be discussed further…

Previously compiz was enabled automatically but making an executable text document containg the command “compiz ccp &” in the bin folder of the user you use to log in. The compiz fusion icon which came in fedora from the start only, can be started  in the same manner by making an executable text file in the bin folder of the user you log-in into and adding the text “fusion icon &”.

Revison of the steps to do so :–>

1. Open the bin folder in the folder of the user u log into (eg: for root user open “/root/bin” for other users use “/home/user_name/bin”).

2.Create a text file in it.

3.Open the file and write in it “fusion-icon &”.

4.Save and Exit.

5.Right click on the file and in open properties for the file.

6.Under the permissions tab check is executable.

Restart and u will see the compiz fusion icon in system stray.

The greatest advantage of the fusion icon i think is that whenever compiz crashes (which happens many a times due to unstable versions) u can simply reload it by right clicking on the fusion icon and clicking on the reload window manager. Secondly you can Switch between various window decorators installed on your system (again by right clicking on the fusion icon). Thirdly you can change the window manager whenever you want (like when you are doing some serious work and the effects are irritating you). Fourthly you can also access the settings manager from it….

Please note the you need to have fusion icon installed on your system.In openSuse its available in the XGL repository.

Dont worry if you are using compiz and the title bar of all your windows suddenly disappear…this is just because the window decorator you are using has crashed….

Now there are two ways to get out of it…clean one is restart you machine….but if u r stuck with something and dont want to restart then just use the following command —>

1. “kde-window-decorator –replace” (if you are using the kde3 window decorator).

2.”emerald –replace” (if you are using emerald window decorator).

3.”kde4-window-decorator –replace” (if you are using kde4 window decorator).

And if compiz-fusion as a whole crashes the try the command “compiz ccp&”.

But u will need a restart eventually to make EVERY thing normal.