| Fredderic 2007-08-25, 1:15 am |
| Howdy good folks of the internet...
I've finally got 3D acceleration going again; I had to rip out a bunch
of symlinks I'd thrown around the place trying to get Mesa going back
before I had a decent graphics card, along with a few extra mesa
packages that were holding some diversions and what-not.
Anyhow, thought I'd try out compiz, for a bit of compositing. I've
heard a little about compositing, and I've seen Windoze Vista do it,
so I figured it might be interesting to check out.
Running compiz required replacing my usual window manager with
gtk-window-decorator, which really isn't very nice, in my opinion...
And even then, when all was said and done, it was chewing up a nasty
amount of CPU time, and had some noticeable delays with the visual
appearance lagging slightly behind the functionality. For example, I
could click a button and the dialog would close before it highlighted.
Now, I'm used to that from when my system gets overloaded, and I click
a few buttons and it doesn't respond at all for 10 seconds, then
everything happens all at once. But here I click a button, and the
application reacts, but the display doesn't. Which is just odd. ;)
So I'm guessing there's more to the compositing story than that... I
plan to go Googling a little later, but from what I recall of my last
look into Google on this matter, I still don't quite understand how it
all goes together. I recall some mention of Beryl (which I think is a
fancy window manager), and AIGLX (which I think is something that's
supposed to make the compositing work better behind the scenes), but
neither of those appear to be part of Debian, and that AIGLX thing
sounds like it's a replacement X server.
So based on that (quite possible faulty) assumption, I'm a little
hesitant to look much further into it. Last time I changed X servers
(Xfree to xorg), it took me, well, from when it needed help just to
install cleanly, right up until now, to iron out the kinks. ;)
Besides, I'm very partial to my old sawfish, even if it doesn't quite
support everything. I have some very strange key/mouse combinations
that let me do things like work with a window without raising it to
the top, workspace flipping by keyboard unless I'm dragging something,
and other rather handy tidbits... Which is the other reason I'm asking
on here, not only do I want to see if I can get compositing working
without chewing through my rather antique (still) processor, but I'm
wondering if there's any hope for getting it working with a window
manager that looks nice, and at the same time can be bent around as
many corners as sawfish. I don't even care for compositing within the
window manager at all, just as long as apps that want it can use it
(a program I've written myself could do with a translucent heads-up
type appearance).
I'm all for Gnome's simplification of everything else, (although
control of an applets appearance on the panel would be nice, I'd like
the task list to be a little lighter than the rest, and I could do with
the notification area split into two lines verticaly), but I'd like
them to keep their hands off my window manager. Keyboard and mouse
shortcuts and their interaction with things on my screen are one place
where I like a lot of control. (I personally reckon Gnome would get
extra interest if they had an "advanced" mode that allowed tweaking,
even if it came with a disclaimer denying any promise of extra-feature
compatibility from one version to the next - they could then watch
what extra features ARE being used, as a guide to what might be good
to turn into a basic feature next release. But anyhow...)
So yeah, I'm wondering if there are any other window managers that will
let me do such things as control whether a mouse click raises a window
or not.
Fredderic
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