Web Technologies, Linux, Tips, Tricks and my Life
I recently made a video clip to capture a bug with Compiz in Ubuntu that has irritated me as long as I’ve used it.
Now that Ubuntu 10.04 is getting a new and polished theme, it would make sense to polish the visual flaws that this “Wobby Windows” plugin still presents.
I also opened a thread for further discussion about this. You can also view the bug report and mark it as affecting you as well.
The title of this article, well just the Ubuntu part, is a bit too specific, but I decided to use that to try to grab the Ubuntu communities attention and the fact that I’ll be showing this in Ubuntu. Also, I’m not writing this for anything other than Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 at the moment. If you are using anything else and want to try to follow this then please keep that in mind.
This guide actually came about because I recieved an email from a curious reader asking for tips or steps to do this. Since I didn’t have any idea myself, I turned to my trusty friend Google and did quite a bit of searching before I finally came across a solution that was spread over several pages. Now I’ve put it all together here.
The steps to get this working in Ubuntu are surprisingly simple. However, to achieve this effect you must be willing to sacrifice your Desktop icons. 
Basically, you obviously still have a background, but the icons will not appear there anymore. To view your desktop and icons you can always still use the Nautilus file browser and just navigate to your Desktop folder. You also lose the right click menu on the desktop, but the only time I ever use that is to change the background. After following these steps you won’t be changing your wallpaper that way anymore, but instead using the CompizConfig Settings Manager.
While Gnome is currently working towards fixing this bug that requires you to disable, they have clearly missed their projected goal of working the fix into Gnome 2.24 (as I’m using 2.24.1 in Ubuntu currently). A fix may still come in an updated 2.24.x build, but only time will tell. Coincidentally, the duplicate bug that it was matched to is marked as “Resolved.”
Please realize that I am in no way responsible for what you decide to do to your own installation after reading the following information.
The basic steps consist of the following:
Now you should be finished with all of the whole setup process. The only thing left to do is to log out and log back in or simply restart X by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Backspace once.
After logging back in, you should notice something like the following (depending on the artwork that you chose).
Hopefully these help, but if I were you I would wait until this feature is implemented correctly. Also, I will update this page when this feature is indeed implemented correctly and isn’t really just a hack anymore.
This is one of the many things that I have come to love about Ubuntu. Although Ubuntu is not the only Linux distro that comes with Compiz-Fusion, it is one of the most user friendly ones!
Ubuntu has impressed me for a long time and working with Workspaces in Linux has made my occasional returning experiences with Windows a complete nightmare.
I’ve been testing Ubuntu 8.10, code named Intrepid Ibex, for a while now. Well, since Alpha 1 was releasedback in late June of this year. If you want to follow the release schedule then you can find it here.
The current latest stable version of Ubuntu is 8.04, code named Hardy Heron, and while it is a very stable and strong version it’s just not the latest and greatest…which is what I demand out of the software that I use.
I just wanted to share some screenshots that I took today to show off some of the eye candy that Ubuntu has to offer. This time it’s only dealing with Workspaces and how Ubuntu can handle these in a three-dimensional way very well with the aid of Compiz-Fusion.
Here are some screenshots of the different effects that can be selected when navigating between workspaces. They are in the following order: cylinder, sphere, cube (option is entitled none, for deformations)
It’s neat eye candy like this that attracts attention, but it’s performance and reliability that attracts users. What impresses me is that I can have all of this eye candy and all of the software that I need running at any given moment and still only be using ~600mb of ram!
Now you try to run the bare minimum in WIndows Vista and see how close you are to 600mb of ram. With Aero enabled in Vista and all of the normal applications opened I typically use around 900mb. It’s not a major problem considering that’s not even half of the ram that I have available for Vista to consume, however, it is disappointing once you realize that Vista isn’t even offering any eye candy other than “Window Decoration” that is fancier than Windows XP.
Window Decoration is one of the many features that is easily customizable in Ubuntu to the extent that you can have Ubuntu mimic Vista in appearance and behavior if you wanted or even Mac OS X with an application dock.
If you haven’t tried Ubuntu yet then be prepared to give it a test drive when Ubuntu 8.10 is released on October 30th! Installing Ubuntu is easy and it even lets you pick between starting in Windows (or Mac if you’re installing with Mac already installed) and Ubuntu. So you can keep Windows if you already have it and start your computer in either Ubuntu or Windows when you first turn it on!
Maybe I can find some more eye candy and benefits to using Ubuntu over others.
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