Lately a lot of people tell me they found out about my stuff on other sites that were sharing those files and/or were given direct links to them.

Here's why that's not a good idea:

My projects are free software, thus I like to keep a release often, release early policy for them.

Therefore I try to update them as often as I can – which means the links to the files provided here will change.

So when linking to them directly rather than linking back to the project's homepage, you are either giving out broken links in the long run or links to outdated software.

Another problem is that people need a place to report problems and the only place I will know about them is pretty much here.

So if you like my projects and want to spread the word (and I'm thrilled if you do), please just link to the respective project's homepage (see sidebar on the right).

Thank you very much.

About

Compiz-Check is a script to test if Compiz is able to run on your system/setup and if not, it will tell you the reason why.

Additionally you can use the output of the script to look for support in the official Compiz Fusion forums or the mailing list / forum of your distribution, which will make it much easier to locate your problem.

The script is suitable for GNOME, KDE and Xfce users and is not limited to a specific Linux distribution – in fact, the script lists those infos for you.

1. List relevant system information
2. Run several Compiz related checks
3. Check for problematic hardware and problems with the setup in use.

So the output will eventually look like this:

Gathering information about your system...

 Distribution:          Ubuntu 8.04
 Desktop environment:   GNOME
 Graphics chip:         ATI Technologies Inc RV350 AR [Radeon 9600]
 Driver in use:         radeon
 Rendering method:      AIGLX

Checking if it's possible to run Compiz on your system...

 Checking for texture_from_pixmap...               [ OK ]
 Checking for non power of two support...          [ OK ]
 Checking for composite extension...               [ OK ]
 Checking for FBConfig...                          [ OK ]
 Checking for hardware/setup problems...           [ OK ]

If anything is OK like in this example, your system is most probably able to run Compiz.
In case anything fails, you will be prompted a reason and ideally a hint how to solve the problem.

Compiz-Check will not run Compiz for you, nor will it do any changes to your system (unless you specifically say so).

Download & Usage

The script is available here.

wget http://blogage.de/files/9124/download -O compiz-check

chmod +x compiz-check

./compiz-check

compiz-check

Changelog

You can find out what version you are using by running:

compiz-check --version

Configure Compiz and its plugins

Ubuntu has some unusual default configurations that makes you miss (among other things) the "infamous" cube.
If you like them, you can, of course, leave them as they are but here are some tips to advance Compiz' configurations. If you don't like them, you will at least get familiar with the settings manager.

CompizConfig Settings Manager

This guide makes use of the CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm) provided by the Compiz Fusion project.
So if you do not have it already installed, you need to install it first. On Ubuntu the required package is called compizconfig-settings-manager. In order to install it on Hardy (using Firefox), all you have to do is click here: apt:compizconfig-settings-manager

Now let's start the settings manager via
System → Preferences → Advanced Desktop Effects Settings
Or simply type in the terminal (or [Alt]+[F2]):

ccsm

Getting the cube

1. Enable the following plugins (by checking the box next to them):

	Desktop Cube You may have to disable another plugin (just follow the popup)
	Rotate Cube This plugin is necessary to spin the cube

Now we can switch desktops via [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Left]/[Right] and spin the cube via [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Left Mousebutton] – hold the mousebutton clicked, then move the mouse around.

Optional cube plugins

	Viewport Switcher In case you want to change desktops with the mousewheel
	Cube Caps Lets you use images on top and bottom of the cube
	Cube Reflection Cube on a glossy plane
	3D Windows Raises windows above while rotating

Configuring the Cube

• Change the cube's color
  Go to Cube Caps → Appearance → Cube Top/Bottom Color and choose a color for each option that fits best to your wallpaper.


• Many transparency-related tweaks and plugins are following below.

Getting windows to wobble

• First of all you obviously have to enable Wobbly Windows


• Then, if you want your panel menu wobble as well, choose Shiver in the dropdown menu at Map Effect in Wobbly Windows


• And you might want to disable Snap Inverted there as well, to prevent windows from adhering to screen edges.

Bind useful plugins to screen corners

Display all active windows at once when moving the mouse pointer to the top right corner of the screen

Make sure Scale is enabled and go to its Bindings tab. There you look for the screen icons, click on the button next to Initiate Window Picker For All Windows and choose the top right corner.

Display all virtual desktops when moving the mouse pointer to the top left corner of the screen

Make sure Expo is enabled and choose the top left corner in the Bindings tab under Expo Edge.

Tips & Tricks for Scale and Expo

Right-clicking a window lets you have a look at the application You can close a window via [Middle Mouseclick] And if you are looking for a certain application, just type the first letters of the window title

2. While in Expo mode

• You can change the desktop by right-clicking on a different one


• And you can even drag the windows from one desktop to another

Nicer window switchers

While the default [Alt]+[Tab] window switcher that comes with Compiz is certainly nicer than the one that came with your desktop environment, Compiz Fusion has much nicer ones, which can be initiated via [Super]+[Tab] (with "Super" being the win-key).

Cover Switch – if you enable the Shift Switcher this will be the default mode Flip 3D choose Flip in Shift Switcher → Switcher Mode Or enable the Ring Switcher plugin (You have to disable the Shift Switcher first, because it's bound to the same keys)

You can bind those to different key combinations, if you like and have three different window switchers at a time (the "usual" one, one of the Shift Switcher ones and the Ring Switcher).
Additionally you can use them for different needs, e.g. the Ring Switcher for the current workspace and a Shift Switcher for all active windows – just set them the way you like in the plugin's Key bindings.

Window Animations

There's nothing particularly wrong with the settings provided by Ubuntu but some of them can get quite annoying and it's always fun to fiddle with that part of Compiz.
All of the following options are located at the Animations plugin.

Reasonable window effects

• Close Animation
  Double-click on the first entry ("Glide 2" by default) and pick Zoom in the drop-down menu.
  Additionally, double the Duration to 400 (that's obviously not the most reasonable thing to do but it's such a nice effect)


• Minimize Animation
  Double-click on the first entry ("Zoom" by default) and pick Magic Lamp


• Open Animation
  Double-click on the first entry ("Glide 1" by default) and pick Glide 2


• Focus Animation (optional)
  I don't recommend changing the effect, just increase it's duration to 300 or 400 to actually see the nice effect.

Popular/exciting window effects

Just like in the section before, all of the effects mentioned here can be found in the dropdown menu after you double-clicked the first entry of the respective animation tab.

Also keep in mind to increase the respective Duration to e.g. 400, so you can see the animation in all its glory.

• Close Animation
  The most sought after effect is definitely the one where the windows go up in flames when you close them – this effect is called Burn.
  Other animations that make people go "awesome" include:

  Beam Up	If you consider yourself a "Trekkie", this one's definitely for you.
  Explode	Bursts your windows to pieces.
  Leaf Spread	Similar to Explode but the blocks scatter from top to bottom.

  
  
• Minimize Animation
  Magic Lamp is pretty much the best effect for this one already.
  If you are looking for something incredibly cool (and silly) though, choose Airplane – this folds your window into a paper plane which will then travel to your window list.


• Open Animation
  Vacuum may be the perfect choice here – this effect "swooshes" the window out of your cursor, it's particularly fitting when opening applications from panel icons.
  Other interesting choices would be the cartoonish Dream and the (in this case) "Matrix" like Razr.


• Focus Animation
  If you're a wobbly fanatic, change the Focus Effect to Wave.
  But the most popular (and – if you ask me – annoying) effect here would be Dodge, which will make your windows shuffle.

Transparency

One of the main reasons for me, why I wanted to try Compiz, was the fact that you could have real transparency (and not just the fake one, where you can't see what's actually going on below your window). It's still one of the most impressive effects to me, that you are able to move a transparent window over your desktop and it's like, well, an actual window, where you can look right through.

General transparency tweaks

• Real transparency in the GNOME-Terminal
  That's the easiest way to enjoy real transparency, since the GNOME-Terminal already supports it. All we have to do, is open the terminal and go to Edit → Current Profile → Effects and select Transparent background. You can change the level of opacity with the scrollbar, if you like.


• Steplessly adjust window transparency
  That's a basic feature of Compiz. Just press [Alt] and increase/decrease the level of opacity with the mousewheel while hovering over any window (even the panel).


• Transparent panels and menus
  Unlike the Xfce panel, the GNOME panel doesn't support real transparency. Therefore we have to adjust this manually:
  • Go to General Options → Opacity Settings and choose Add. Then in the popup window type dock and for Opacity Window values type 85 (that means the transparency is set to 15% – you can set it higher or lower, of course – but I wouldn't recommend something lower than 75, because icons and the like get transparent too).
  
  
  • Now that you have a transparent panel, the opaque menus doesn't fit too well. Click on Add again, this time type dropdownmenu and set the transparency the same way as your panel (if you are using the Main Menu, you have to type popupmenu instead of dropdownmenu – this will make your context menus transparent too!)

Window transparency plugins

	Go to the Move Window plugin and set Opacity to 85. Now the windows get 15% transparent every time you drag them.
	The Trailfocus plugin makes windows more transparent the later you last focused them.
	If you enable ADD Helper and set Misc. Options → Opacity to 85, all of your windows get 15% transparent except for the focused one (you may want to set the other options to 0).

Cube related transparency options

Set the cube (semi-)transparent

Set Desktop Cube → Transparent Cube → Opacity During Rotation to 75.0000 (or whatever suits you best)

• Additionally you might want to disable Lighting in
  General Options → Display Settings

Transparency related cube plugins

Those plugins make use of the ability to make the cube transparent, to see what's going on inside.

	Cube Gears Show the cube's engine
	Atlantis Turns your cube into a fishtank

There are obviously many other plugins and lots of additional options to explore and we haven't even mentioned the really useful effects like "rain on your desktop" and "setting your screen on fire" (OK, we already had the incredibly important gears) but I guess you should be experienced enough by now to find them yourself – and customizing everything on your own is much more fun.

Troubleshooting

No window boarders (titlebars)

Insert the window decorator of your choice (gtk-window-decorator, kde-window-decorator or emerald) in
CompizConfig Settings Manager → Window Decoration → Command

Additionally for Nvidia users

Make sure you have a nvidia-glx driver installed and use the following command to configure your xorg.conf:

sudo nvidia-xconfig --add-argb-glx-visuals -d 24

(you have to restart X to make it work)

16 Desktops instead of 4 (although configured correctly)

This can happen on KDE, try starting Compiz like this from now on:

compiz --replace --ignore-desktop-hints

Clicking on a window doesn't bring it to the front

Again, this is a known KDE problem

Go to CompizConfig Settings Manager → Preferences and disable Enable integration into the desktop environment

Can't drag windows around

Make sure the Move Window plugin is enabled.

No Cubecaps or Skydome

Make sure the JPEG and/or Png plugin(s) are enabled, depending on the image(s) you want to use.

Compiz-Switch is a simple program to switch Compiz off and on easily.

If you are looking for a simple yet effective way to switch between Compiz and the window manager of your desktop environment, then this is for you.
Compiz-Switch provides this on a single click.

• If Compiz is running, it will switch to the default window decorator of your desktop environment.
  
• If Compiz is not running, it will be launched immediately.

There is no need to compile anything and the only dependency is a GNOME, KDE or Xfce environment with a running version of Compiz.

Available versions

• Ubuntu (this includes Kubuntu and Xubuntu)
  compiz-switch_0.4.3~ubuntu-1_all.deb

• Compiz compiled from (git) source (any distribution)
  compiz-switch-0.4.0~source.tar.gz
• Suse
  compiz-switch-0.4.0~suse.tar.gz

If you'd like to have a version for your distribution as well, please go here.

Installation

If you are on Ubuntu, all you need to do is download the deb linked above and double-click it afterwards.

For other distributions, first download and extract the archive – e.g. for the "source" version, do

wget http://blogage.de/files/3531/download -O- | tar -xzf - 

Then change to the extracted folder (directory depends on the version you downloaded):

cd compiz-switch-0.4.0~source

Now you can choose between the usual way to install and checkinstall. The latter will install a basic deb-package that you can remove via apt-get or Synaptic/Adept. (This should also work for Suse/rpm.)
For Compiz compiled from source it's best to install via make install.

Usual way (make install)

All you need to do is (make sure you are root when not using sudo):

sudo make install

Do not remove the folder afterwards – you'll need it, in case you want to remove Compiz-Switch again.
In order to do so, navigate to the directory again and run:

sudo make uninstall

Checkinstall

First you need to install checkinstall itself:

sudo apt-get install checkinstall

Then use this command to install:

sudo checkinstall

Usage

After you installed Compiz-Switch it should show up in the menu under:

GNOME
Applications → Accessories → Compiz-Switch

KDE
K-menu → Utilities → Compiz-Switch

Xfce
Applications → Accessories → Compiz-Switch

Panel icon

• If you want the icon to show up in the panel, all you have to do in GNOME and KDE is drag & drop the icon from the menu to the panel.
  
• For Xfce this is unfortunately a little more complicated, because it doesn't support d&d for that. Here's a little workaround:
  
  First run Applications → Accessories → Appfinder
  Then do a right-click on the panel and choose Add New Item in the context menu and double-click Launcher.
  Now you can drag & drop Compiz-Switch from the Appfinder in the field with the New Item icon.
  Finally remove the New Item entry and choose Close.
  Now you should have the icon in the panel.

Additional options

To get a list of all available options, run:

compiz-switch --help

Kill and restore Screenlets along with Compiz

Version 0.4 supports quitting all running Screenlets when switching off Compiz.

There are two options available how to restore them, when running Compiz again (use only one of them at a time, of course):

• Restore exactly the Screenlets you were running before
  Add the -s argument when using Comiz-Switch to use this:
  

  compiz-switch -s

• Restore only the Screenlets you added to you autostart programs
  (using screenlets-manager) – the argument for that is -sa:
  

  compiz-switch -sa

Use the icon as a status icon (experimental)

When adding the -c argument, the icon for Compiz-Switch will change according to the status of Compiz

compiz-switch -c

This seems to work only in the GNOME panel, if you stored a starter for Compiz-Switch there.

You can, of course, use multiple arguments at a time, e.g. compiz-switch -s -c

Previous Versions

• Ubuntu (this includes Kubuntu and Xubuntu)
  
  • compiz-switch_0.2.0~ubuntu_i386.deb
    
  • compiz-switch-0.2.0~ubuntu.tar.gz
    
  • compiz-switch_0.4.0~ubuntu-1_all.deb
    
  • compiz-switch_0.4.1~ubuntu_all.deb
• Compiz compiled from (git) source (any distribution)
  compiz-switch-0.2.0~source.tar.gz
• Suse
  compiz-switch-0.2.0~suse.tar.gz

Icon Design

By gavintlgold, also founder of FusionCast.

So... here we are. Me and the so-called Web 2.0 - who thought we would ever get along?
I've never posted a video on youtube or uploaded one of my photos to flickr. And I'm certainly wouldn't even think of submitting something to myspace.
I do have a last.fm account, though. But that's two years old (back in the days when it was just a nice little tool, to create your own private hit parade, called audioscrobbler and, well... didn't belong to a multimillion-dollar network) and I rarely use any of those fancy features. Mostly because I don't like people shouting at me.

And now a blog... what has become of me? Where will it end? Will I get poked?
Hopefully not, because I don't plan to taddle and twaddle here. For now I will just use it for How-To's mostly, because I feel like I've been around in the Linux-community long enough to share my knowledge.

Alright, if you insist... here are some informations about myself:
I'm 26 year old student (I'm studying philosophy and mathematics intending to become a teacher) from Cologne, Germany and I'm married with two children (this always makes me laugh, because in german you say you're married with and not to someone... so if you translate the sentence word by word, it means I'm married to two children).
I'm using Linux¹ for one (and a half) year now and my first distribution was Ubuntu Dapper Drake.

The first time I got hooked on the whole concept of free software was when Firefox came out (or Firebird as they called it that time) and it still amazes me to this very day. The community played (and still plays) a big part in this for me.
I was attracted mostly by Ubuntu because of it's community and got a regular poster on the german Forum right away.
When Edgy came out, I thought I was experienced enough to try Compiz but switched to the newly created fork Beryl (again, mostly because of the community).
I learned a lot about window managers, the XServer and things like Xgl and AIGLX. In general, I can say Beryl and Compiz made me understand Linux and free software a way lot better and I learned to help people out, that weren't so much into it.
Right now I'm an active member of the Compiz Fusion community, compiling from git on a daily basis, following the mailing lists... you know, the geeky stuff.

Because of that, I always stumble upon people that are fairly new to Linux and since desktop effects are a popular way to attract people to free software, I want to help them out with a detailed How-To once in a while.
And this is what a majority of this blog will be about.
Another thing I'm planning to do are previews of alpha/beta stuff of both Compiz and Ubuntu.

So much for the introduction. Stay tuned for more Happy Days.

Regards,
Nick

P.S. as you might have noticed the title subtitle of this blog is quite long but I always loved this line (it's from the song "Much against everyone's advice" by Soulwax) and if the guys at blogage.de let me use unreasonable long titles subtitles it's their damn fault, so don't blame me.
I guess the The title will be has been changed some time soon to something short and boring.
(The one who knows on what song of which band the subtitle is a pun on, wins... uhm... a virtual banana.)

¹I will use Linux as a short term for the GNU/Linux operating system and Linux-kernel for the kernel itself on this blog. If you want to know more about the distinction, see Linux and the GNU Project - by Richard Stallman