You have to add Option "DesktopSetup" "single" to your ati’s Device section in xorg.conf otherwise Xgl will think you’ve got two screens if you’ve got two adapters even if you just use one (which is the case with my Thinkpad) and will miserably fail on the second unattached screen.
Tag: xgl
XGL take 2
I tried to get AIGLX to work on my Thinkpad yesterday. AIGLX is an API similar to XGL, but is a better implementation. Unfortunately AIGLX requires implementation by the video-card driver (which is good because it allows more performance), but the proprietary drivers of ati still doesn’t support it. (nvidia’s do, note to myself: get nvidia next time).
So I had to revert to XGL. A lot has changed since the last time I installed XGL. Other gentoo overlays, other windows managers, other hacks.
I used the gentoo-xeffects overlay to get Xgl.
Installing Xgl was a lot more straight forward and less of a problem than it used to be. An emerge and writing a simple startxgl script was enough.
The compiz-quinstorm patchset seems to have evolved to a proper branch of the compositing window manager, now called Beryl. It also includes a nice settings manager now.
Even hibernation and suspend finally seem to work. 🙂
A nice screenshot:
One thing left to do: integrate Xgl into xdm.
Xgl
After a long night wrestling with alfa source code, I’ve managed to install Xgl.
Xgl is a Xorg-X11 layer that uses openGL to achieve some nice stunning effects.
One of these is to be able to switch desktops by pressing ‘Ctrl+Alt’ and dragging your desktop-cube.
There are a lot of other things that I can’t show with screenshots. Take a look at the Xgl release post. These things include that all forms behave flexible. If I drag a form it’s like it’s made of rubber instead of concrete. Also every form pops up gently animated. There’s also a mac osX expose-clone, which is really helpfull.
If you want to install it yourself then the gentoo wiki article and hanno’s blog post should be very helpful.