[Ubuntu]Installing XGL & Compiz

[imported_LoKe]

What is XGL?

Xgl is an X server started by David Reveman architecture layered on top of OpenGL via glitz. As of February 2005, it is at an early stage in development and a number of important pieces are still missing. Xglx is the only server yet that uses this architecture. It requires an already existing X server with GLX to run on top of, and is only intended for testing and development. In the future, Xgl is not intended to be run on top of an existing X server.

Source

I've found a video that shows what XGL is capable of, and I can attest to the fact that all of these features are easy to use, and they're just amazing to play with. In addition to the eye candy, XGL offers a performance boost, because your video card is being used to make all this work, rather than your processor.

Video

Ready to get going? Check out this thread.

This guide is for NVidia users, if you're looking for an ATi guide, check this one out. AMD64 users need to go here.

This could cause potential problems, if you're having some difficulties, refer to the original thread.

 

[IamDavid]

Been running them for around a month now, started a liitle before Ubuntu 6 was released.. Had a couple minor hicups during insal and the occasional glitch here and there but sofar I love it.. It's all eyecandy but I love it. Doesn't seem to slow machine down nearly as much as I thought it would. Not even noticable most the time. Everyone should check out the video..

 

[imported_LoKe]

Originally posted by: IamDavid
Been running them for around a month now, started a liitle before Ubuntu 6 was released.. Had a couple minor hicups during insal and the occasional glitch here and there but sofar I love it.. It's all eyecandy but I love it. Doesn't seem to slow machine down nearly as much as I thought it would. Not even noticable most the time. Everyone should check out the video..

A common misconception. XGL is promoted as eye candy, but in reality it offers some performance enhancements.

In addition to the eye candy, XGL offers a performance boost, because your video card is being used to make all this work, rather than your processor.

 

[P0ldy]

I run it just about all the time, but I am waiting for the functionality to kick in apart from just the prettiness...

 

[xtknight]

I'm not sure that XGL in 3D mode would draw standard items any faster than the regular accelerated 2D mode. Whatever the case, it didn't seem slow to me either. But, the wobbly plugin did stutter for me (as well as other people). If you have trouble starting compiz because it says your color depth is bad or you're missing an extension, try getting the compiz-vanilla* packages instead! That fixed everything for me. I just eschewed it once I found out VMware Tools didn't like it (it was in unaccelerated mode). It was cool though, just not worth the issues it caused with 3D applications like some games. I know indirect rendering can still provide acceleration, but it caused issues like making the whole 3D app white. Besides that, GTK themes aren't completely drawn right either.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: xtknight
I'm not sure that XGL in 3D mode would draw standard items any faster than the regular accelerated 2D mode.

It's got better potential.

Typically speaking the 2d acceleration portions of your video card remain mostly unchanged since Geforce 1 days (both ATI and Nvidia). The 3d specific portions of the GPU make up of more then 90-95% of the card and are much more sophisticated in speed and capabilities.

By using those to draw items you can get a serious performance boost if done correctly.

With Cairo vector based graphics in Gnome/GTK they have the ability to use a veriaty of backends to draw themselves... (KDE will have it's own stuff for KDE 4) For instance they can be drawn using normal 2d X Render acceleration or be drawn using a postscript/pdf back end for generating picture-perfect print outs and such (right now printing and display stuff use 2 entirely different code paths and it's difficult to make sure that printouts match what you see on the display) or they can be rendered on a glitz backend for opengl acceleration.

Supposeadly from some benchmarks I've seen a long long time ago cairo would offer a magnitude better performance on glitz backend then the normal X render stuff. But that was before a lot of optimization work and such was done. (they wanted to make it fast doing normal 2d acceleration before worrying to much about effective 3d-based acceleration.)

 

[SleepWalkerX]

You guys should see how easy it is to install XGL + Compiz in Suse. Its soo easy. Maybe we can have a consolidated thread on installing XGL + Compiz for different distros?