The BigLig Thinks

I blew most of the weekend trying to get Compiz to work. Not there yet, but I learned a fair bit.
The problem I had before is down to needing more up-to-date versions of the i810 drivers. Ventajou, another D505 user, pointed me to http://dri.freedesktop.org/snapshots/archive/i915-20060117-linux.i386.tar.bz2; just pull the drivers from the i910 folder into /usr/lib/dri and /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers.

Now XGL works fine for me, but compiz does not. It loads, and the effects work (pretty well, considering the i810 inside my laptop is so feeble) but it only redraws the screen when I do a "cube" effect. It's hard to explain (and so hard to google, darn it) - I can type away in a terminal and nothing happens - even my keystrokes do not appear - or press a launcher button and almost nothing happens - except the mouse pointer changes to the "loading" animation. However, if I hit CTRL+ALT+LEFT to rotate the workspace cube left, the second I do the window redraws with the effects of what I did.

By the way, I have compiz set to load as a seperate gdm session so that I can still use my laptop whatever happens to compiz; a much better arrangement. I've also been using a sort of manual test mode; kill gdm with "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop" so I drop back into a console, then run xgl manually with "sudo Xgl :1 ac -accel xv:fbo -accel glx:fbo & DISPLAY:=1 xterm" so I get a raw Xgl session with just an xterm loaded (and no window border). Inside the xterm I can then run compiz manually.

I next tried uninstalling, removing the extra Compiz repositories, and trying the plain compiz included in the default ubuntu. No good, and now I've put Quinnstorm's repositories back in, I have a different error; the screen is black apart from the pointer, and every time I cause a new window to appear it flashes white briefly before vanishing. This is less helpful, but I think is easier to descibe and hence google.

This is slow work but I have to be fair and point out that Compiz is a)very early and b)not exactly mission critical.

On a different note, I was looking for a .cbr file reader. Comical is highly recommended, but they provide absolutely no installation instructions, and I was unable to get it to compile. Not good. So I'm going to be using Comix instead.