On Wed, 2006-18-01 at 18:42 +0100, Rakotomandimby Mihamina wrote: > Hi, > I use Fdeora Core 4, on a ATI XPress200M graphic chipset (ATI drivers), > installed as the tutorial of fedorafaq.org told. > I use GNOME, my ystem is up to date, with "testing" repositories. > I would like to enable transparency. > Would you know any tutorial/howto that could help me to do it the Fedora > way? I setup xcompmgr a little while ago after someone posted to this list about having problems getting it running. It got me interested, so I tried it out - amazingly I got it working after an hour of reading, finding files, etc. Unfortunately, I didn't take notes. Remember, most of this is from memory. I'm sure there are mistakes. Oh, this is also Gnome centric. Most of it should be applicable to KDE as well. 1. Download the xcompmgr source RPM from here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=172755 2. The source RPM is supposed to go into Fedora Core extras, and is currently configured for Fedora Core 5. This means that the SPEC file needs to be edited before xcompmgr can be built for FC4. Delete all "BuildRequires" lines in the xcompmgr.spec file, and replace it with "BuildRequires: xorg-x11-devel". That is: Delete these: BuildRequires: libX11-devel BuildRequires: libXfixes-devel BuildRequires: libXrender-devel BuildRequires: libXdamage-devel BuildRequires: libXcomposite-devel BuildRequires: libXext-devel Add this: BuildRequires: xorg-x11-devel I have a many other developer packages installed on my laptop. I'm not sure if I covered all of them in the spec file. But, xcompmgr should only requires the sources for xorg. 3. rpmbuild -bb xcompmgr.spec If the build fails because you're missing dependencies, including the one in the spec file, install them. After they're installed, run the above command again. 4. Install the resulting RPM. 5. Download and install gcompmgr, a Gnome GUI based tool that lets you easily configure transparency and other effects. I think it's available from sourceforge. There may be similar apps for KDE. 6. Edit your xorg.conf file: Section "Extensions" Option "Composite" "enable" EndSection I've read on a few sites that the following options are necessary too (in the same section): Option "RENDER" "true" Option "DAMAGE" "true" I wasn't sure, so I threw them in as well. Try it with and without. Maybe they're not necessary. I have a nvidia card in my laptop, so I also use the following option in the "Device" section for my card: Option "RenderAccel" "1" I think I read somewhere that the RenderAccel option doesn't work too well on ATI cards: run a Google search, or just try it out. 7. Log out of Gnome/KDE, and then restart X (a CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE) should do the trick. 8. Log back in. 9. Fire up a Gnome terminal, and type the following at the prompt: [ksandhu@krs ~]$ gcompmgr & 10. You can go ahead and configure xcompmgr and translucency, or you can start xcompmgr with the default settings. To do so, just click on the "Start xcompmgr" button. If your machine doesn't go down hard at this point, rejoice! You can edit your settings after xcompmgr is running, and then just click on the restart button in gcompmgr to apply them. You can also save them to your Gnome session so that xcompmgr always starts when you sign in. Instead of starting gcompmgr from a terminal, you can create a gcompmgr.desktop file and save it to /usr/share/applications. I setup mine so that gcompmgr gets added to the Applications -> System Tools menu. Here are the contents of the file: [Desktop Entry] Name=xcomposite manager Comment=GNOME application for xcompmgr Categories=Applicatio;System;X-Red-Hat-Base;X-Fedora; Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/xine.png Exec=/usr/bin/gcompmgr Type=Application Terminal=false Encoding=UTF-8 If you have problems, use Google. I was able to iron out all of my problems by just searching on the issues I was experiencing. Remember: your desktop is likely to slow down. I used it for about a week before finally turning it off. The eye candy is great, but web sites with a lot of animations (e.g. banner ads) can drive CPU usage way up. There is a "fix" for that, but I decided not to use it. Be warned: xcompmgr is essentially experimental. You should expect your X server to go down at some point. It happened to me once! Have fun! Regards, Ranbir -- Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu Linux 2.6.14-1.1656_FC4 i686 GNU/Linux 13:55:10 up 6:54, 2 users, load average: 0.28, 0.43, 0.36
