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Compiz in Ubuntu Update
Filed under: Compiz, UbuntuRather than reply to the comments left on my last post I’ve decided to write this so more people will see the answers.
First of all, my source of info is me. I’m on the compiz team in Ubuntu.
We’ve fixed the Intel driver so compiz+video works there unless you have a 965 (x3000 or x3100). If you have one of those compiz will refuse to start now. That is actually how we are dealing with most of the driver and/or hardware problems right now. We’re just blacklisting cards that have been known to have problems.
So, you shouldn’t have to worry about what happens when compiz isn’t supported on your card or doesn’t work right. In that case you’ll just get metacity. It’s not the greatest solution but it’s what we have to work with until proper fixes are done in the drivers.
The only hardware known to work with compiz is newer (2000 or later) ATI, Intel (other than 965), and nVidia. It might work on others if you use Xgl but those are the main ones. I doubt it’ll ever work on Via stuff, the driver situation there seems pretty bad.
On the other hand, we’ve done a lot of work over the past few weeks to get things working. Java apps, for example, should work now. We closed about 60 bugs in a week. Most of them were little annoyances, some were worse. A particularly bad one that is now fixed is gnome-screensaver not being able to lock the screen properly when compiz is running. I think we fixed the screen redraw issues after xrandr rotation but I’m not sure as my hardware does not support xrandr.
Another good thing, nVidia released the 100.14.19 driver which finally fixes the out-of-memory problems with texture_from_pixmap (black windows). Seems to also fix the problems with black screens after VT switch. All around it’s a pretty solid driver. We’ve also fixed the bug in Xorg that made nvidia+compiz+3d app crash the X server. nVidia should be working great now so long as your card is supported by the 100.14.19 driver.
Finally, Kubuntu will not be using Compiz. They are waiting for KDE4 which will have its own compiz-like compositor in kwin.
I hope this clears everything up.
39 Responses to “Compiz in Ubuntu Update”
[...] http://www.realistanew.com/2007/09/23/compiz-in-ubuntu-update/ Posted: September 23rd, 2007 Author: iGama Categories: [...]
It’s really cool.
I have a question :
Do you mean that there is no chance to see fglrx 8.42.X in gutsy (even if they are reliable)?
Anyway thank you.
Lucas
Even if Kubuntu will not be shipped by default with Compiz, do you plane to solve the recurrent kde-window-decorator crashes?
Nope, it’s way too late for that kind of change. The driver is more or less a complete rewrite. We’d probably want at least 2 months of testing.
kde-window-decorator is probably going to see no significant changes before gutsy is released.
Looks like it’s time for me to switch to gnome/Ubuntu although I’m not particularly fond of gnome. KDE4 seems in pretty bad shape and it’ll be a while until I’ll be able to use it in production
Well, compiz seems to get indeed more stable; a lot more so than feisty’s one. Nice!
Though from my own experience black windows still shows up from time to time with the latest driver. Maybe a bit less frequently now, but still enough. Also window titles are still sometimes messed up (as in not fully rendered).
A big annoyance for me currently is compiz’ broken show desktop behavior since I put a lot of thing on the desktop. The behavior of the show desktop button is really unpredictable and thus slow in usage. It’s reported at compiz ( http://bugs.opencompositing.org/show_bug.cgi?id=315 ) and LP bug #91784 ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/91784 )
but only has gotten ‘wishlist’ priority which seems a bit too low.
Since we’re on the subject…anyone know why KDE needs to reinvent every wheel in sight? what’s wrong with using compiz-fusion for their compositing?
The show desktop bug is wishlist because I prefer the way compiz does it and (afaik) it’s not doing anything wrong, just not what you would prefer.
KDE wants to keep using kwin because they’ve had kwin for 10 years or something, it’s pretty solid. Apparently the design of it made it somewhat easy to add compositing support to it, unlike metacity.
“Another good thing, nVidia released the 100.14.19 driver which finally fixes the out-of-memory problems with texture_from_pixmap (black windows).”
That isn’t true. In changelist they said that improved it, not fixed. Indeed I installed the driver and open 15 nautilus windows (aprox.), the next ones weere black :/
Try it yourself.
I have a card with 512 MB, and not happens me very frecuently, but people with less memory…
I’ve only got 256MB and even with the old drivers I could open more windows than that. Gone or not if _I_ can’t run into it a ‘normal’ user probably can’t. I’ve got a lot of crap open and I don’t like to minimize things.
@Mircea,
Well, I’m no KDE developer but the reasoning was explained on kde.org a few months back. If I remember correctly, there were several reasons:
1. KWin is stable, while Beryl and/or Compiz is not. Well, relatively speaking that is. They are stable enough for me, but the KDE maintainers obviously have higher standards than me, as well as they should. Their decisions may impact many, while my decision only affects me.
2. Kwin is better integrated in the KDE environment than Compiz. And here I have to agree. For example, some applications have a nasty tendency to not iconify into the systemtray properly when Compiz is in use - at least on my machine. Adept_notifier and Amarok tend to exhibit that behavior rather often in my experience. I don’t know if this is because of flaws in compiz, KDE or if it is because more compiz developers use Gnome rather than KDE, but in my experience both compiz and beryl work better in Gnome than in KDE.
3. I don’t remember if this point was brought up, but they would nevertheless be in a better position to finetune the composite manager for the needs of KDE if they have their own version rather than to rely on compiz.
4. This is conjecture on my part, but KWin seems to be easily adapted to compositing needs. There is, for example, already support for translucency and shadows in it.
And hopefully that “need to turn of compiz temporarily for certain apps (mostly games)” problem will go away if compositing support is built-in into the DE itself rather than as an outside add-on.
What can those of us with an x3100 do to help?
Absolutely nothing, it’s not a weird bug, it’s a lack of implementation.
Users of 965 (x3100 and others) can simply use the XShm or X11 video driver instead of XV therefore Compiz can run happily. You may however need a powerful CPU to run a non XV driver as it doesn’t use hardware acceleration.
Implementation of what? The accelerated driver for the new chipset?
Thanks for the info Travis.
What does it exactly mean that “They are waiting for KDE4 which will have its own compiz-like compositor in kwin” ? Does it mean Kubuntu Gutsy will not have compositing (because KDE4 comes only 2 months after gutsy), or does this mean the beta3 will be put in place and then let the apt updater take care of it?
I don’t want to go back to gnome, but I’d really like at least some compositing.. Compiz-kde, well not sure about it..
Thanks,
Peter
I was using Compiz Fusion on Kubuntu Feisty and now use Compiz Fusion on Kubuntu Gutsy without problems. Before I employed Trevino’s repos, now I use the official ones for Gutsy. Compiz Fusion proves more stable and faster on my HP nx6110 (Intel 915, 512 MB RAM) than Beryl ever did. Compiz wouldn’t work on my machine before.
The only issue I had was the well known problem, that the desktop-switcher applet would display 16 desktops instead of 4. That’s a problem with Compiz and KDE handling desktops and viewports differently. Since I’m using desktop planes removing the applet from the tray wasn’t a loss.
All in all, I’m very happy with Compiz Fusion and use it as my primary windows decorator. Compiz may be better integrated into GNOME then into KDE, but as of now there’s no reason for Kubunut users to wait for KDE4 to use a compositing manager.
“We’ve fixed the Intel driver so compiz+video works there unless you have a 965 (x3000 or x3100). If you have one of those compiz will refuse to start now. That is actually how we are dealing with most of the driver and/or hardware problems right now. We’re just blacklisting cards that have been known to have problems.”
Travis (or anyone),
I am still a little unclear. Will x3000/3100 users be able to start compiz on their own if they switch to X11 video drivers instead of XV?
Thanks,
Mike
Only if they override the script by starting with ‘SKIP_CHECKS=yes compiz –replace’
What about VNC? Is it still broken with compiz?
Not if you use vino for the server. However, you need to be on 100mbit LAN with the computer you’re watching if it’s using compiz.
[...] mentioned some of the fixes already in his post. There are a lot more, for example Mirco improved the look and feel of the gnome-apperance-capplet [...]
[...] mentioned some of the fixes already in his post. There are a lot more, for example Mirco improved the look and feel of the gnome-apperance-capplet [...]
Does anyone have a rough idea of when we’ll see support implemented on x3000/x3100? Are we waiting for Intel or x.org (or both)?
bah I knew there was a reason I didn’t upgrade to nvidia for my thinkpad… I didn’t want any cool effects
+1 for “Are we waiting for Intel or x.org (or both)?”
Both. We need EXA to get good.
I’ve held off upgrading to Intel platform (the now-elderly G695, G33, G35?) until their ‘open’ video hardware is adequately supported by software. It appears we must wait at least until 8.04 Hardy before the above-mentioned chipsets are finally usable the way they were meant to be.
What’s the roadmap like for the newly opensourced AMD/ATI graphics chips? The discrete HD2xxx or the integrated 690G or RX/RD/RS series?
Requirements: Free, Fanless and with solid Compiz performance.
[...] con respecto a Compiz/Fusion y de acuerdo a lo comentado en el blog de Travis Watkins (desarrollador del equipo Compiz de [...]
#11 Yeh, it not happens to me coz I have a lot of memory in video card, but I insist, the bug isn’t solved, It still happening. Open and open and open nautilus windows and if you haven’t Indirect Rendering in Compiz, you will see yet the black windows.
I understand it’s NVIDIA driver problem, only say it isn’t fixed, indeed they don’t use “fixed” in changelog, they use “improve”.
[...] Compiz team decided to “fix” this, by black listing it. (Fair enough too if they are the people that have to support it). The real fix according to the [...]
[...] con respecto a Compiz/Fusion y de acuerdo a lo comentado en el blog de Travis Watkins (desarrollador del equipo Compiz de [...]
[...] I have a card with 512 MB, and not happens me very frecuently, but people with less memory… [...]
despite nvidia’s having improved the black window problem in nvidia-glx-new (100.14.19), in my configuration (twinview 128 MB) compiz is still unusable. no more than a dozen windows triggers it, often less.
disappointed, as this has been a long standing issue.
Thanks for this info!! Too bad I bought myself a Toshiba L40 last week, which has the 965
I hope the card doesnt suck because I was planning on enjoying the notebook for years. Well I rather have a stable OS 
Well I rather have a stable OS than eyecandy - was what I meant.
I have twinview setup on a 24 inch LCD 1920×1200 and a 46-inch HDTV at 1920×1080. I have the latest Nvidia driver 100.14.23. If I open terminal and then firefox fullscreen, I get the black window bug. It’s terrible….
Hi There! Any news about using Intel’s 965/960 with Compiz?
I just installed Gutsy Gibbon to a new Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Si2636 and just about everything seem to be working out-of-the-box (I’m very happy!). But still no sign of Compiz. Keep up the good work!
-Jukka
I bought a new laptop thinkpad r61, it was very disappointing to discover that my X3100 Intel graphics card is blacklisted
do they have any plans to support this lonely card ?!!!
what about any other alternative solutions ?
Also just purchased an r61 (with the intel 965) and can’t decide if I want compiz more than I don’t want the lower quality video play back with out Xv. Want both!
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