compiz frustration
I’ve played with Compiz with a few livecds and I like it, so when I noticed Slackware 12 came with Compiz 0.5 I decided to use it on my desktop.
I got it running more-or-less ok using this howto posting as a guide. Without GNOME, it’s very difficult and frustrating to tweak the Compiz settings. The configuration files live sensibly enough in ~/.compiz/options/, but what goes in them is nowhere documented on the Compiz website or anywhere else I can find. The only clue is that the options have the same names in these configuration files as they do in gconf. That’s great to know, and there are some screenshots of gconf around, but without actually having gconf it’s rather annoying to try to figure out how to tweak the settings.
I don’t much care about the wobbly windows effects, though I’ll keep them now that I’ve figured out how to damp their springiness. But I can’t seem to make windows snap to each other or to the edges of the screen. I can make the skydome work, but I cannot use my own image for it. I’m in this for a few of features of Compiz that make desktop navigation easier, mainly the Exposé-like thingy, but as long as I’m at it I’ll be bugged by eye-candy features I can’t make work as they should.
I guess I’ll end up tweaking Compiz until it’s the way I want it, but this would be so so much easier if there were just a freaking man page to look at. I have now looked at a multitude of web forums for various distros, none of which are very specific about which version of Compiz is being discussed. I hate web forums, but that’s another rant.
BTW, on my Gentoo laptop, I don’t use Compiz because the glx module it needs to work with the laptop’s Intel video chips won’t survive suspending to hard disk. So, to use Compiz, I’d have to restart X after suspending, which would do away with the time saved by suspending in the first place. I tried Komposé, but no matter how I configured it, I took an unacceptable performance hit.