Compiz

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Alright Freddie, you keep extolling Compiz as a means to blow away windows graphically. So I've installed it via synaptic (Got fed up with the blocky, clunky interface by default)

Now, how in hells do you actually use it? How about giving a n00bs guide to setting it up, and setting some interesting things on it?

 

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What distro are you running? I can't remember.

 

Debian. Ummm. its the stable release - Etch as I recall.

 

OK. Are you running an ATI or Nvidia graphics card? Also, are you running Gnome or KDE?

 

Crap. Neither. Specs on the machine are Here. Running on Gnome.

Might not be able to hook it up after all (mutter)

 

I can't get to any of your specs. It gave me an error, something about a session having timed out. Are you running an Intel card? Compiz will work with them.

I finally got compiz running today myself. I'd never had a card that would run it so I ordered a GeForce 6200 with 256 megs of ram. My motherboard is so old I can't run anything that won't run on anything newer than a 4x AGP slot so I'm pretty limited when it comes to graphics. Anyway, the card came today and I got compiz up and running along with fusion. CompizFusion is the marrying of compiz and beryl, and it is pretty cool.

I really like the cubed desktop. It's a good productivity tool, and the wobbly windows and other stuff is fun to play to play with. With what I have running Sid there must be close to 50 main options available for customizing the desktop with some of them having another 10-15 options inside the main option. There's so many option available it's going to take me some time to figure out what all each of them do, and how to put bunches of them together to get the combination of effects I want.

Running Sid I'll have more options available than you will running Etch. If you find you can run compiz on your hardware you might trying upgrading to Lenny. It's stable enough that you shouldn't run into problems, but it has a lot more of the newer "cool" stuff. It's what most Debian users run on their desktops. I like the challenge of Sid as things break there every once in a while and it's a challenge to figure out how to work around or fix the problem. But, at the same time I am usually no more than a couple of months off the bleeding edge of Linux development so I'm running a lot of latest software available.

 

its a Trident Cyberaladdin-T - 16MB (and even thats stolen from the RAM) (its an old laptop, about 4-5 years old). Its an Intel processor, but beyond that I cant really say much about it.

 

I don't know about that graphics card. I have no experience with it. It's doubtful that it will work but you can give it a try. All it will do is not work if it isn't compatible.