Planet Compiz Fusion

Compiz Fusion Sphere is here! Yay!

2008-05-12T18:27:33+00:00

All hail Desktop Sphere!

Finally, onestone has managed to code the desktop sphere many people were waiting for! He wrote about it on his blog. It's quite a neat plugin, and also merges the cubecaps plugin with the cube addon plugin, making for less plugins to worry about (the cubecaps plugin was sort of minor in the configurations, anyway).

Only available in git of course, but great to try out for those of us who have access to that ;)

And digg it too so others know: http://digg.com/linux_unix/Compiz_Fusion_Truly_Spherical_Desktop_View_Arrives

Blog post: http://dev.compiz-fusion.org/~onestone/blog/?p=10

Edit: sorry about messing up the planet, it's an annoying bug :(

Edit 2: To clarify, the sphere is available in the "Cubeaddon" plugin.

Simple-ccsm enhancements

2008-05-09T17:29:17+00:00

Thanks to Rodrigo’s work, simple-ccsm now has a switch to easily enable/disable Compiz.

On openSUSE 11.0 users will not have to fiddle with any commandline, hack scripts or xorg.conf to enable Compiz. AIGLX is enabled by default on all the supported hardwares, and as soon as ATI/NVIDIA drivers are installed via 1-click, so all that is required is launch simple-ccsm (Desktop Effects) application and enable compiz.

In case you are wondering what theme I am using, it is just the default openSUSE gilouch theme, greened just the way I like it. Download and drag and drop the tarball on “Appearence” caplet if you want it too.

Compiz Fusion Community News for May 7th, 2008: An edition of bling and subtlty (nice contrasts!)

2008-05-08T13:33:12+00:00

More CF news is down the tubes this week, major highlights being

A FULL sphere deformation mode for cubeaddon (rock on onestone! \o/)
A subtler static applications switcher
A subtler set a viewport switching plugins
New features for dodge, freewins, etc
Progress on a new decorator

Bug News

‘Deform only on manual rotate’ option fixed in cubeaddon
Option added to override windows that set the USPosition or PPosition hint in the place plugin
Fix ‘Grey and White windows of death’ on some cards by working around a bug in drivers
Windows which don’t have the minimize action set can now only be minimized externally by the same program if it is minimized (i.e gobby)
Only show the window menu if there isn’t a screengrab set to avoid screengrab deadlocks (freezes)
Optimised cube addons a little
The main plugin view in CCSM now updates when any plugin changes
Action conflicts are checked for when enabling a plugin, for example, having ring enabled with default settings then enabling shift will trigger a conflict
Wall now initiates when the switcher plugin is active (so if you switch to another window on another desktop, wall should now flip to that desktop while the switcher is active)
Options now change while the dodge plugin is active
Unmatched windows no longer moved in the ‘dodge’ animation
Inside cube plugins now deform with the cube when the cube is deformed (no more cylinder / sphere cube and square atlantis )
Wiimote plugin actually split into files
Simple-CCSM works without any ‘effects’ plugins installed

News in Features

The bling:

onestone has once again waved his openGL wand for us once again and has merged the cubecaps plugin into the cubeaddon plugin, so now we are able to deform the cube caps as well. Like most of his work, it’s only ever explainable with screenshots - here goes!

I apologise for some of the VSync issues I am experiencing. As you can see from the screenshots, the cube caps are rounded off as with the rest of the cube - so if you have a 4:3 screen, you will see a ’sphere’ - as for the rest of us .. we’ll see a 3D oval But still awesome nonetheless

Simpler Stuff

maniac has whipped up another simple-but-useful plugin this week too, called staticswitcher. Staticswitcher is a lot like the old switcher, but instead of rotating between thumbnails, it displays all thumbnails and the box selects each one. Below is a screenshot

User yogensha has created two simple viewport switching plugins which use subtle transitions instead of spinning cubes and sliding panes etc. The two plugins are called vpsswitch and vpsfade, the first just switching viewports whereas the second just fades windows between them. I’m really hoping that these two plugins can be the framework for more plugins like this to come, check out Mac OS X VirtueDesktops to see what I mean. The two plugins can be found here

New window decorator, codename JASPER

b0le has temporarily suspended work on the cubedbus plugin (which I intend to write the code to the GUI to my manager for) to work on a new window decorator, codenamed jasper. He is taking into consideration some of the considerations found in this thread to replace the aging emerald window decorator. It’s currently in a pre-alpha stage at the moment, I’ve found that it wont work for me on my nvidia card, so here is a hotlinked screenshot from b0le:

Jasper

If it displays properly, you’ll notice that there are tabs the come out of the window. The decoration is shaped so that only the tabs are clickable and not what would be the square border around them. It has full support for svg themes too, although the implementation is quite basic. More at b0le’s bl0g (sorry for the pun :/)

Installation instructions:

git-clone git://anongit.compiz-fusion.org/users/b0le/jasper
cd jasper
./build
./jasper –replace
(only need the second one if it doesn’t work first time)
./jasper –replace
Other improvements

Freewins has an ‘invert key’ hold down the key to invert the current rotation mode and toggle on/off snapping.
Dodge can now be activated with a screencorner

Tip of the Week

This sound rather lame, but if you are a newcomer and are eager to get in more on the bleeding edge of compiz, I would suggest heading down to the feature requests and plugin development. That is where most of the ideas and development start before things end up on gitweb

Conclusion

Well that’s it for this week’s edition of Compiz Fusion Community News. Keep an eye on those forums as there is a lot of new stuff coming up which will be good news material for next week

EDIT: Fixed link for b0le’s blog.

- SmSpillaz

Got my new laptop … Finally

2008-05-07T14:19:55+00:00

Finally got my XPS m1530. It was freed from vice-ta as iXce called it within 30 minutes. Runs compiz like a dream, A little hint would be to turn of anti-aliasing in nvidia-settings and turn on blur so that the built-in 8600GT clocks up to it’s best speed. You won’t believe the next screenshot:

I have yet to see any choppyness when I’ve got rain, blur, motion blur, tons of windows open, transparent cube & 3D, cube deformations and 3 videos and 4 redirected (beat that OasisGames) GL apps running.

Only problems I’ve run into so far with this laptop is the expresscard slot not being recognised, so I can’t watch TV, the internal mic not working, eject touch-button being locked and the fact that it is missing from the sleep whitelist, so it can’t sleep yet (it can hibernate though!)

Also, it runs at a nice and cool 40C when compiling software, so I wont have overheating wasting my time anymore (Juts a lot more drooling and gaming!)

Overall, I’d certainly recommend this laptop to linux users - runs like a dream!

A real sphere deformation!

2008-05-06T19:00:22+00:00

I’ve merged cubecaps into cubeaddon, to be able to transform the cube caps. With this functionality I was able to create a full sphere deformation of the cube. I’ve also fixed the rotate plugin to report proper progress for the inside cube mode to allow deformation in “inside cube”.

There you go…

2008-05-03T18:52:10+00:00

As response to the feedback you gave me in the comments, I updated the table. I also added some short descriptions to each profile.

Compiz: DRI2 is Awesome.

2008-05-02T23:34:56+00:00

So I recently updated my DRI2-enabled X server to see how things have progressed.
It's a lot less buggy, I will say that, but the biggest problem has yet to be fixed.
There are still some problems with various programs (3d Chess in particular, after you make a move it just... doesn't render anything.) and Compiz has its problems - Expo keeps crashing it. Alt+tab seems to be causing crashes as well, but that may have just been the same thing as above, as my entire server came down. I noticed a slight oddity: All of my menus and such seemed to be very clear when animating. This could just be that RGBA somehow worked when transformed rendering was being done, but I doubt it (they were REALLY clear, though it did just seem to be the backgrounds...)

Anyway, without further delay, I got Google Earth running:

It's a bit glitchy: doesn't seem to update all of the screen normally.
I also got Blender to actually render itself when I was messing around in Compiz - my last experience with Blender and DRI2 had it always rendering the root window's pixmap when it was transformed.
Obviously, DRI2 is not a finished product and needs a lot of polish before it'll be included, but damn if it isn't the most amazing thing I've ever gone and compiled just to look at.

Sliced sphere in compiz-fusion-git packages

2008-05-02T11:37:40+00:00

Here is one more of “cube” mode to make users of other OS jealous

openSUSE users grab compiz-fusion-git packages from home:cyberorg (experimental/unstable) repository. Wait till all the packages (except emerald*) are synced out to the mirrors and have the same version (080502).

Profiles and other random thoughts…

2008-05-01T21:56:08+00:00

Is it just me or did the last few weeks just pass like *that*? Strange how fast time can flow… Anyway.

Today I took some time to think about better values / names for the profiles provided in Simple-CCSM. And that is what I could come up with: Five profiles, one using default setting, two using Wall and two using Cube.

Here is a table which shows the exact settings in each profile:

Any suggestions on these?

BTW. I’m on vacation next week, so I won’t be available.

Compiz-Switch 0.4 released

2008-05-01T17:08:12+00:00

I have just released a new version of Compiz-Switch

The latest version is pretty much a rewrite of version 0.2
(I didn't release v0.3 publicly because the changes I made weren't implemented properly).

Features

Apart from switching Compiz on and off on a single click, Compiz-Switch has now additional features.

In addition to that, version 0.4 has now proper argument support – this way you can run

compiz-switch --help

to get a list of all options available.

Then you can use those arguments when running Compiz-Switch in the terminal or add them to your panel starter.

Kill and restore Screenlets along with Compiz

You can now quit all running Screenlets when switching off Compiz.

There are two options available how to restore them, when running Compiz again (use only one of them at a time, of course):

Restore exactly the Screenlets you were running before
Add the -s argument when using Comiz-Switch to use this:
```
compiz-switch -s
```
Restore only the Screenlets you added to you autostart programs
(using screenlets-manager) – the argument for that is -sa:
```
compiz-switch -sa
```

I have only tested this for the Screenlets version included in Haryd and the repository for Gutsy, so I can't guarantee it works for the very latest version maintained by Whise.

Use the icon as a status icon (experimental)

When adding the -c argument, the icon for Compiz-Switch will change according to the status of Compiz

compiz-switch -c

This seems to work only in the GNOME panel, if you stored a starter for Compiz-Switch there.

The whole thing was a PITA to implement and it seems to fail even for GNOME sometimes.
Honestly, I don't know if it's possible to implement any better. I guess to function properly it would have to be an applet – but then it won't be independent of the desktop environment in use anymore.

So I'll just leave it this way. After all, it's just a gimmick.

Get Compiz-Switch at http://forlong.blogage.de/article/pages/Compiz-Switch
There is an Ubuntu deb package available that should be suitable for any architecture now.

Thoughts on ‘The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment’

2008-04-30T23:18:21+00:00

In The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment a man runs his girlfriend through a series of seemingly common tasks and sees how she does with Ubuntu. The bit about downloading an album online seems a bit sketchy (use amazon, not bittorrent) but the main one I want to talk about concerns, of course, Compiz.

In the ninth task he asks his girlfriend to change her screen resolution and she of course picks the first one in the list, which is far too small and the Screen Resolution tool no longer fits on the screen. He then complains about the fact that he cannot make the window smaller (application problem) and cannot move the window past the top of the screen (Compiz problem). A ‘fix’ in either one would solve this problem but a fix in the application would fix it the best.

However, it is interesting to think about how to fix this problem in Compiz. First of all, you could just turn off the option that prevents you from moving windows past the top of the screen but then you’ll have problems losing windows off the top of the screen and having to use Alt-Button1 to move them back down. So clearly this option has a reason for existing and being turned on by default, but it isn’t always what you want.

My solution to this problem is to make it possible to move a window past the top of the screen if and only if the window is larger than the screen height. In this situation you’re screwed either way so stopping you from doing this gains nothing. However, you still need to be somewhat of a power user to know you can use Alt-Button1 to move a window in such a way as you cannot grab the titlebar to move it that far up. I can’t think of how to make this easier to figure out though and it is better than nothing.

Can anyone think of a better way to solve this problem in Compiz? Like I said, obviously the correct answer is to solve it in the application and leave Compiz alone but it is not realistic to expect every application to work in 640×480 or 720×400.

Plans for Compiz in Ubuntu 8.10

2008-04-30T16:39:16+00:00

It’s that time again. Time to plan for a new release of Ubuntu, I mean. There are some rather large things in this list and so I doubt all of them will be implemented in time but it is always better to dream big and get as much done as possible. Otherwise we’ll have everything done in a month and be left with nothing else to do (except fix bugs, of course). Before I start, let me remind you that none of this is official, I am not getting paid to do any of this, and this relies on other people getting things done too. If none of this happens, don’t be surprised.

Move as many Ubuntu patches upstream as possible

This is a basic package maintenance chore and shouldn’t really need to be on this list. However, we have not really done this since Ubuntu 7.04 and we have quite a few patches that have built up. Many of them are rather hacky and will not be accepted upstream so I’ll have to figure out a proper way to do them or keep them in our packages. This is the main priority and the one that has the best chance of being completed.

Fix major usability ‘regressions’ from Metacity

There are still some big things that work differently when you use Compiz versus using Metacity. In Compiz itself we have the Show Desktop and Application Switcher features. These are when you click the button in the bottom left corner of your screen and press Alt-Tab, respectively. I don’t think there is anything wrong with how these work but they don’t work like many people expect so it violates the Don’t Make Me Think rule of usability as you have to consider what mode you’re using (Compiz on or off) when you use these tools.

The other main problem in this area is libwnck and gnome-panel. Specifically, the Workspace Switcher applet on your panel does not work the same way when Compiz is enabled. These problems range from cosmetic issues to missing features. I have submitted patches to GNOME for some of the missing features so the only big one missing is a lack of drag-and-drop support. After that were are some issues with how windows are colored on non-active viewports in the switcher. I’m sure I’m missing some things here but I’m also sure someone will file a bug about them if they haven’t already.

This is the most important item on the list as far as users are concerned and I hope to get at least the Workspace Switcher and Show Desktop problems fixed but the Application Switcher changes will depend on the next item on this list so is much less likely.

New decorator using GTK+ and SVG themes

Here we go, the big one. For some time now we’ve wanted to break away from using plain Metacity themes and come up with our own system. This is what Emerald was supposed to be but it was way over-the-top, slow, and hard to work on. I hope to avoid these problems by starting from scratch with a clean design using GTK+ and librsvg. And, because the decorator is actually responsible for drawing the Application Switcher, with this I can also fix the problems people have with that at the same time. This is all in the planning stages right now and is not likely to be considered ready (or done at all) by the Ubuntu 8.10 release unless I get help or get paid to do it so I don’t have to worry about a regular job.

Another goal with this decorator is to have two modes: reparenting and non-reparenting. The non-reparenting mode is how decorators in Compiz work now, the decoration is not actually a part of the window but just floats around it and relies on compositing to keep the two in sync. The reparenting mode is how other windows managers work, the decoration makes the window a child and the two stick together no matter what. This will be important when we eventually (hopefully) make Compiz work as a regular window manager without compositing for computers that cannot run all the fancy effects. This is also the reason we can stop worrying about Metacity theme compatibility; in this scenario Compiz is always running, even if you set Visual Effects to None.

Forward all relevant bugs upstream

Since I’ve been ordering these items by priority it might seem odd to have this one at the bottom. After all, the more bugs upstream knows about the more they can fix which makes Compiz better for everyone. However, this work can be done by many people and it is not a huge loss if this doesn’t get completely done by the Ubuntu 8.10 release. Also, this work can be done easily alongside the other items in this list. The only big work here will be when I go through every currently reported bug at the beginning of the development cycle (I’ll probably do this next week) and then go through them again sometime around the Beta release. Putting that all together we have a task which is more like icing on the cake instead of a major thing to focus on.

Putting this all together if I can even get the first two items completed this will be a very nice release that makes our packages easier to maintain and solves several real issues every user deals with. We should also have DRI2 support for at least the Intel driver (and hopefully the ATI one as well) which fixes our problems with using OpenGL applications with Compiz. This all makes me feel somewhat sorry for people who will choose to stick with the Ubuntu 8.04 release due to its LTS status as they will have a vastly inferior Compiz experience and none of this is small enough to backport for them. Oh well, they’ll get to see it all in Ubuntu 10.04 or whenever the next LTS release is.

Introducing Compiz-Check – a script to test and troubleshoot your Compiz install

2008-04-28T21:00:48+00:00

I wrote a script called Compiz-Check over the past weeks that will test if Compiz is able to run on your system/setup.
If not, it will (hopefully) tell you the reason why.

Additionally you can use the output of the script to look for support in the Compiz Fusion forums or the mailing list / forum of your distribution, which will make it much easier to locate your problem.

Here's how it looks like:

Gathering information about your system...

 Distribution:          Ubuntu 8.04
 Desktop environment:   GNOME
 Graphics chip:         ATI Technologies Inc RV350 AR [Radeon 9600]
 Driver in use:         radeon
 Rendering method:      AIGLX

Checking if it's possible to run Compiz on your system...

 Checking for texture_from_pixmap...               [ OK ]
 Checking for non power of two support...          [ OK ]
 Checking for composite extension...               [ OK ]
 Checking for FBConfig...                          [ OK ]
 Checking for hardware/setup problems...           [ OK ]

The last check is probably the most interesting one.
The script checks there if

there's a driver in use, that is known to work with Compiz
an older version of the fglrx driver is in use that needs Xgl
(and checks for that as well)
the resolution in use is not too large
Metacity's compositing manager is disabled
a possibly blacklisted PCI ID is in use
a laptop with the ati/radeon driver is in use (Hardy only)
the path to the compiz binary could be detected (Ubuntu only)
a Nvidia card is in use and if it has enough memory

To each of those (possible) fails is an error message available that describes the problem as clear and short as possible.

Some setup related problems (like the one with Metacity) will be even offered to fix by the script.

A brief history of Compiz-Check

There were many reasons why I started this project, those are the three main ones:

First of all, there's the constant lack of info given by the people that are looking for support in forums like forum.compiz-fusion.org or ubuntuforums.org

Then there's the output Compiz (or rather compiz-manager) produces when running in the terminal, which tends to confuse people more than it clears things up.
Particularly the recurring confusion whether Xgl is something fundamental important or not – because Compiz seems to "need" it (it looks for it twice, so it has to be important!).

Last but not least, there was the realization Ubuntu won't be doing something about Bug #152271 for Hardy:

"Desktop effects could not be enabled" – that is all you ever get to know, when Compiz fails to run.
No info what went wrong and if there's something you can do about it.
Not even a hint to run Compiz in a terminal.

Anyway... I decided I'm done with complaining and put my money where my mouth is.
So I wrote this script in order to kill two birds with one stone.

Get Compiz-Check at http://forlong.blogage.de/article/pages/Compiz-Check

Please let me know if you encounter any problems.
The script has been tested to work by myself on Ubuntu Hardy, Gutsy and Feisty (all GNOME) and Arch Linux (GNOME and KDE) so far.

Compiz White & Black Frozen screen fix

2008-04-27T08:32:21+00:00

Hi,

If you are getting a freeze and black & white screen ever since the latest compiz-git, just issue a:

git revert 0c1fc202acbfdc66751b97a59d3a962ed66579b9

in your compiz sources directory.

EDIT: onestone has added a workaround. Just update compiz.

If you are not experiencing this issue, IGNORE this post.

- SmSpillaz

Compiz Fusion Community News for Friday April 25th, 2008: Sphere-like cubes cairo-text!

2008-04-27T05:19:10+00:00

Hello!

More and more improvements to the Compiz Fusion codebase this week, some highlights including: Sphere-like cube deformation, cairo text backgrounds and workspace naming.

News in Bugs

CCSM now checks for action conflicts when you enable a plugin, instead of just checking when a binding a changed
Fix ‘rotating cube’ mode not working in the screensaver plugin
Fix lighting with cube cylinder deformation
Fix occasional animation not progressing and trails when using the cube cylinder deformation
Avoid unnecessary queries to texture targets in core
Plane plugin removed. Please use wall
Cube background painting removed. Used the wallpaper plugin
Temporary fix for display issues with freewins and cubeaddon
Fix jumpy animation with slow-mo and the freewins reset and movement animations
Fix all possible freezes in animation for good
Fix Compiz-Fusion-Settings and Simple-CCSM for new CCM API

News in Features

Cube Addon ‘Sphere Like’ mode

Well onestone has added another deformation to the to the Cube Addons plugin, called ‘Sphere-like’ due to popular request to have a sphere. The reason why this is not a sphere is because of the way drawing of cube-caps are handled in the cube plugin. Below are some screenshots:

Customizable Workspace names

maniac has created a new plugin which allows you to assign a name workspace and have that name displayed when the workspace changes. Below is a screenshot:

In related news, iXce has added mode to text rendering to render much smoother backgrounds on the text. You will notice this in all plugins that use text rendering such as ring, shift, prompt, workspacenames, scalefilter and scaleaddon

CCSM relayout

Due to the increasing number of plugins, the layout of the CCSM main page has been modified slightly to become more compact, so the window does not take up so much space on screen and you don’t have to scroll as much. Below is a screenshot:

Added customizable border and size configurations for viewport previews in wall
Dodge plugin now on git
Progress on the freewins re-write for input redirection and trackball rotation

Cairo-Dock improvements:

More improvements to cairo-dock again, this time it now supports reflections!

You can get it by using

svn co http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/cairo-dock/trunk

Don’t use the install script as it is broken. Instead use the following command in the build directory:

autoreconf -isvf && ./configure && make && sudo make install

Fyda has created a script to install the modules and plugins hosted here (Disclaimer: It’s hacky)

Tip of the Week

Want to preview your screensaver configuration in the screensaver plugin without having to wait for the screensaver to initiate? Just set a keybinding for CCSM->Screensaver->Bindings->Initiate

Well that’s it for this week. Go checkout the git sources now!

(Digg, Digg!)

How to set up Compiz Fusion 0.7.4 (included in Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron)

2008-04-26T20:04:02+00:00

Many people requested an update of my set up guide to the version of Compiz Fusion found in Ubuntu's latest release "Hardy Heron".

From the beginning I was reluctant to do that, because the official current stable release is still Compiz 0.6.2 / Compiz Fusion 0.6.0.

So I decided to start from scratch... well not really, most of the new guide is based on the content of the "old" one.
But I decided it was time for a complete makeover. I hope it's even more easy to follow now:

How to set up Compiz Fusion 0.7.4

P.S. The reason for this separate blog entry here is I didn't want to expose the whole guide to the planets my blog is aggregated on, because it's way too long. I hope you will enjoy it anyway

Update: sorry, I noticed the guide got forwarded to ubuntuweblogs.org nonetheless. Fixed it.

New Cubeaddon deformation “Sphere like”

2008-04-24T16:55:21+00:00

A lot of people asked for a sphere deformation of the cube. I can’t realize a full sphere, due to limitations how the cube caps are painted, but maybe I will find a solution for this in a FAR future. I’ve also haven’t found a better name, so that the new deformation is called “Sphere like”.

As we have to do most of the transformation on the CPU, it should be clear that these effects have a heavy impact on the FPS and CPU load.

fglrx breaking upgrades to 8.04

2008-04-23T12:49:26+00:00

It seems AMD’s scripts to build an Ubuntu package for 7.10 include a diversion for /etc/xdg/compiz/compiz-manager so they can add fglrx to the list of supported drivers. The problem is that they don’t remove this diversion on upgrade/uninstall so when you upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 the /etc/xdg/compiz/compiz-manager file will no longer exist and compiz will not start.

The fix is pretty simple, just run this:
sudo dpkg-divert --rename --remove /etc/xdg/compiz/compiz-manager

Yay, compiz works again. Remember, this is why you should only install such drivers from Ubuntu. The latest version is not worth a broken upgrade.

Compiz, etc: It's my birthday!

2008-04-20T20:23:33+00:00

Well, today, April 20th, is my 18th birthday! I got a Wacom Bamboo - which I love - and a "Nyko Wireless Sensor Bar" (horribly named as it is...), the final piece in my evil plot to create a truly 3d desktop. Testing is not going well - apparently SmSpillaz broke something in Wiimote or the CWiiD devs broke something in CWiiD or some other random problem. Anyway, hopefully I'll get that all working soon and show Sam how to really use Wiitrack.

Discuss this news post here.

A call for feedback :)

2008-04-17T21:40:11+00:00

NOTE: Comments have been closed... please go to the post in the forums instead so we have one thread instead of two! Thanks a lot! :)

Hey, according to the poll on the top right of this blog, a LOT of you liked this recent episode! Thanks a lot for letting me know your opinions (and if you didn't like it feel free to voice that view as well).

I was reviewing the episode just now, (since I made it around midnight and want to make sure I didn't make any horrible slipups, and that kind of thing happens around then), and I was thinking maybe I should post the music info near the beginning of the video as in a music video (and some austrian ads I've seen).

That got me into thinking that I don't nearly get as much feedback as I should. I would really like to know how you think I could make this better. Seems you guys liked the animation at the beginning and the more-smooth syncing with the beat at the beginning.

However, in my current style, I don't really have too much to videoblog about between big visual updates like the cylinder. I just make a video demonstrating the latest and greatest coming out of the great minds of our Compiz Fusion coders. I can't make a videocast about every bugfix, of course.

But I get the feeling that people don't like these long gaps... a videocast should be more regular, it seems. Should I post solutions to common problems? Configuration tutorials? Perhaps other recent developments in the world of Linux awesomeness? Please... let me know via the forum post.

(speaking of which, I hadn't realized that you needed a google account to post a comment with my settings, and have since changed that... all are now welcome as long as they get past the CAPTCHA!)

Compiz Fusion Community News for April 17, 2008

2008-04-17T05:22:42+00:00

I’m back!

Alright, it seems like a very long time since I’ve written this and over the past couple of days I’ve been itching to write something about all the cool new features, bugfixes and community plugins out there over the past month or so. All the web themes and stuff are now up too, Huge thanks to iXce and the Web Team for that - now Compiz-Fusion.org has a more integrated look to it.

Highlights for this entry are The new and wonderful Cube Cylinder deformation, More and More improvements to Freely Transformable Windows with a good roadmap ahead of us, The beginnings of a Compiz Fusion Live CD and the springy and fun Dodge Window plugin.

News in Bugfixes

Fixed High CPU Usage during Expo
Fixed inactive viewport brightness / saturation not being restored after expo mode exits
Fixed crash in simple-ccsm due to new CCM API
Fixed 3D plugin not working correctly with Cube Cylinder deformation (But 3D depth will not work however)
Fix window placement with certain toolkits not setting USPosition properly
Prevented the switcher window from appearing when the switcher is not active
Fix Rotate plugin not rotating ‘all the way’ on auto-rotate
Fix text not appearing straight away in prompt plugin

News in Features

Cube-Addon Cylinder Deformation

I know that this report is probably a bit to late as it seems that everyone has been raving about it, but I thought I would be best to jump on the bandwagon for this one too :). So yeah, here it is, the absolutely amazing cube cylinder deformation plugin by onestone.

Cube Cylinder with Cube Reflection in all it’s glory

The Cube Cylinder hamburger wants to eat you!

It works with 3D Windows, but not with 3D Window Depth

I wouldn’t suggest using without transparency on certain cards however, as it does have some culling issues

The cube can be deformed on both manual and auto rotation, or just manual
The cube caps are not deformed to maintain thier aspect ratio, but you can fill the remaining bits of the caps with a solid colour
Cube Reflection has been merged into this new Cube Addon plugin, please update your repositories (already done in plugins-*)

Vast Improvements to Freewins

Well the Freewins plugin has received a bit more attention from myself and warlock and we now have a couple more feature and bugfixes to show off. I will be making a video of this soon.

Added Customizable rotation axis’ selection.
- It’s possible to rotate around the axis of where you clicked, so for example, if you click on the top edge of the window and pull back, the window will rotate around that edge instead of around the center
- It’s also possible to rotate around to the point opposite to where you clicked, see before on how it works
- Finally, you can still always rotate around the center if you choose
Different Rotation Modes added
- Always 2D ensures that the window never has any 3D rotation
- Always 3D ensures that the window always has 3D rotation, but cannot rotate clockwise and counter clockwise
- Determine on click works with 3D rotation area percentage to determine if you want to rotate in 3D (If you click in the center) or in 2D if you click on the edges
- Interchangable is a bit bugged, but tries to rotate more in 3D are you approach the center and more in 2D as you approach the edges
Rotation Auto-Zooming added so that windows do not appear ‘bloated’ when rotating them in 3D
Immediate Moves option added to prevent having to constantly redraw the screen with wobbly enabled and wobbly’s ‘off’ behaviour when the rotation is changed
Input Prevention changes:
- Move windows by clicking and dragging them
- Resize windows by right clicking them and dragging (buggy)
- Focus follows mouse works correctly
- Ensure that IPW’s are always on the same viewport as the window
Two different scaling modes
- ‘To Center’ scales to the center of the window like Freely Transformable Windows always has
- ‘To Opposite corner’ tries to scale the window to the opposite corner
Our roadmap currently stands at:
- Fake input redirection by capturing clicks on the Input Prevention window
- True 2D->3D trackball rotation

Compiz Live CD

OasisGames and other members of the community are preparing a Compiz Fusion Live CD for others to try out Compiz Fusion. For more information on the theming and information on the Live CD, see this wiki page

Dodge Plugin

A new plugin by user rcxdude allows you to set a window (default stick and above windows) to be pushed away by the cursor with a variety of cool effects to do so. It’s hard to explain so a video will be coming soon!

Atlantis - New and sleek fishies

The Cube Atlantis 2 Plugin has been updated once again with some sleeker fishes. I’m not able to run the plugin due to hardware constraints, but check it out for yourself.

Other Various Improvements

Advanced search re-write in CCSM, now shows a progress bar and the search is a lot faster
Timeout for edge actions added so accidentally hitting edges will no longer trigger actions
Buildsystem improvements with CMake, meaning it will take less time to add plugins to plugins-*

Compiz 0.7.4 Release

Congrats to the Team for the recent 0.7.4 release which includes

Bicubic filtering in Cube
Curved Expo
Simple CCSM improvements

Tip of the Entry

Recovering from a Freewins Crash

Did Compiz Crash or freeze up while you had windows rotated and scaled using Freewins and now you can’t interact with the windows? Simple select the windows with scale, manually rotate them with a keybinding or use the shelf plugin, reset the window and it’s input will be restored.

Well, that’s pretty much it for this entry. I’ll be putting videos up for those other plugins ASAP.

- SmSpillaz

New effects plugin in compiz-fusion *-git packages

2008-04-15T13:23:35+00:00

Compiz Fusion Git packages got updated in home:cyberorg repository, this time it has a cool new effect “Cube Cylinder” from onestone. This picture would tell more.

Notice the details on the fishes, atlantis has received a lot of love too. Use compiz-git-all 1-click to get it. Note that these are unstable packages meant for testers and developers use only.

In other news, I went at the client’s place today for OpenOffice.org training, the lab setup that I required was not available, they had windows machine with OpenOffice.org installed which do not have all the goodies that Novell Edition that is available on openSUSE has.

So in a minute we converted one openSUSE 10.3 machine into a KIWI-LTSP server, PXE booted all the 10 clients from the server and the training session was safely conducted on that

Fusioncast Episode IV

2008-04-14T22:18:34+00:00

(if you are seeing this from the planet, without the youtube video, visit the actual blog post to see this episode)

Yes, you read that right! It's another episode of Fusioncast, this time reviewing:

Cube cylinder
Mag plugin
Showmouse
The new expo curve
Updates to atlantis
An excerpt about the wii head tracking plugin

Notes:

You will have to compile compiz fusion from source to get the cylinder and other new plugins. Some plugins may already be available in the Hardy beta, however.

I don't have a Wii controller, so I took a segment from Smspillaz's video (see below). Learn more at his blog.

Since everyone always asks about my theme, I'll just let you all know right now: This time, it's the Ubuntu Hardy "Human-Murrine" with customized colors (I like that they finally included this option for the Human theme!). The wallpaper is linked below. Using the "Glossy" metacity theme. Running Hardy Heron beta.

I'm also (as usual) using Kiba-Dock, SVN version. It's extremely alpha software, and quite buggy since it's not a release (I'm not complaining), but I like to run it for fun (and because it looks so cool).

I used Blender to make the little 3d compiz-cube, and I will upload the source files soon. Patience, guys. I intend to upload all the source videos and files as well for your tinkering benefit. It's coming.

EDIT: Sorry for forgetting to mention the video editor! I use kdenlive (as in the other fusioncasts). It's a little improved in the Hardy repos, but still extremely buggy. I'm waiting for all those MLT bugs to get fixed, guys!!

Please comment if I've forgotten to mention something. I'll set it aright.

Links:

Wallpaper
Dock on the bottom of the screen
Link to the website of the amazing cute movie with the rabbit (it's an open source movie!)
The original Wii head tracking video by Johnny Lee
Wii head tracking with compiz fusion by Smspillaz
Where the cool music came from

Kdenlive

Original video file + all source files coming soon!

Please email me at fusioncast at gmail dot com!
I am on IRC occasionally under the nick of gavintlgold.
Also, comment by clicking on the link below.

Cleaning up TO DO list

2008-04-13T16:25:17+00:00

As you might have noticed, Simple-CCSM has changed a lot since my last blog post. Sorry for not keeping you up to date. I admit, I was a little bit too lazy to blog.

First of all, the interface. Well thanks to Mirco “MacSlow” Müller, who pointed me into the right direction, the UI now looks much more Gnome like.

The zoom page (aka accessibility page) was a little bit extended. You are now also able to configure ‘mag’ (aka area zoom).

There is now also an option for enabling ‘expo’ on the effects page.

Probably one of the most wanted change should be the global screen edge widget. At least I enjoy it not needing to start CCSM and searching my way through the settings for changing a few edge key bindings. Sadly this widget might have slowed the Simple-CCSM startup a bit down.

In order to clean my TO DO list up even further, I would like to get some suggestions for the profiles Simple-CCSM should provide. What profiles would you like to have? What should be activated, what disabled? Any suggestions for their names?

You can comment here or just send me an email to marex a_t opencompositing d_o_t org.

Busy week

2008-04-10T18:42:26+00:00

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday tried building Compiz Fusion git packages, compiz-fusion-plugins-git packages, that has new cmake build system, are broken in home:cyberorg repo

Thursday getting everything organised for Symposium on Open Source Software this Saturday and Sunday

Phew!

Cubereflex rename to Cubeaddon with new effect “CYLINDER”

2008-04-09T03:06:00+00:00

After a lot of preparations in the last weeks, that resulted also in the “curve” expo mode, I’ve finally finished my idea to implement a cylinder deformation for the cube plugin. The code is in the cubeaddon plugin, that is the cubereflex plugin with this new feature.

Ugh

2008-04-06T14:53:21+00:00

Dear Interwobs

Can someone give me a pre-compiled for SUSE 10.3 version of the X Server with DRI2. My laptop overheats the minute I try to compile anything :/

Compiz and Compiz Fusion 0.7.4 released

2008-04-04T10:17:13+00:00

Dennis “onestone” Kasprzyk announced the release of Compiz 0.7.4 followed by an announcement of Compiz Fusion 0.7.4 release from Guillaume “iXce” Seguin.

Here is the major changes in Compiz from the last release:

Configurable handling of overlapping output devices.
Enhanced focus stealing prevention with configurable amount of focus stealing prevention.
Added configurable, optional delay for edge actions to prevent accidental invocation.
Generalized vertex system to improve plugin compatibility.
Optimized Gaussian blur shader to support more hardware.

Highlight of Compiz Fusion release are:

Expo has a new transformation mode: “Curve”
New plugin: bicubic, which adds shader based bicubic filtering to improve the quality of scaled textures
CCSM got Improved look of edge and button selector widgets and Advanced Search rewrite
simple-ccsm got little enhancements: Added expo plugin to effects page, widget to configure global edge settings, and ed ‘mag’ plugin as ‘area zoom’ to zoom page

As always packages for openSUSE are available via 1-click install from the openSUSE Build Service X11:XGL replository, for more information of how to install or set everything up, see http://en.opensuse.org/Compiz_Fusion

Compiz Fusion 0.7.4 out

2008-04-03T22:26:39+00:00

We have just released Compiz Fusion 0.7.4, based on Compiz 0.7.4. This is a new development release, featuring a good bunch of bugfixes and a new plugin providing bicubic filtering through shaders.

The official announcement is available in Compiz Fusion Community list archives.

Compiz fusion & CMake

2008-04-03T21:46:30+00:00

I’ve committed the first version of a generic Compiz plugin CMake macro into the universal Makefile repository. This macro makes it really easy to write CMakeLists.txt files to build a plugin with CMake. The macro implements the same functionality that is currently implemented in the universal Makefile and the code that is needed in the CMakeLists.txt file is as simple as the code of the plugin.info file.

With CMake we get various benefits compared to the universal Makefile:

Out of tree build support to keep the checkout clean
Combine the build of multiple plugins into one big build (much faster than using yags/Makefile)
It doesn’t use libtool. This makes the build faster
Multi core compiling (something that is pretty broken with yags/Makefile)
…

We also consider to switch the build system of our merged plugin repositories to CMake. Guillaume (iXce) has already created a test CMake build system in the plugins-main repository. We will keep both build systems in the repository, until we are sure that CMake provides everything we need. Maybe we will also switch to use the generic CMake macro in the merged repositories, but this would definitely kill the autoconf/automake build system because of the needed change of the structures in the repository. Something like this won’t happen before 0.8.0 is released.

Why CMake?
Because it’s easy. You can learn to create a complex and individual build system in hours with CMake, instead of days (years) with autoconf/automake.

Compiz blur changes for the future (and today)

2008-04-03T21:41:32+00:00

Compiz 0.7.4 is out and it contains improved shaders in the blur plugin. I’ve made changes to the gaussian blur shader, so that it should work on more cards. The blur plugin will work on a lot of radeon/intel cards once support for framebuffer objects and accelerated glCopySubTexImage is implemented in the drivers.

I will not commit (or publish) my patch that replaces the framebuffer object code with glCopySubTexImage, because it results in a very bad performance due to the slow copy operation (5 fps with an intel i915). The drivers will get accelerated glCopySubTexImage and frambuffer objects at the same time, because both need the same changes to the texture management.

Only fglrx users can currently benefit from the changes. They should see a nice performance boost if the new “Independent texture fetch” option is enabled.

Compiz: DRI2 Works on Intel!

2008-04-03T02:09:57+00:00

On March 30th, KRH committed the last few bits of major DRI2 stuff to the intel-batchbuffer branch of the XF86-video-intel driver. Seeing as how yesterday was April Fools day, it would have been a very inappropriate day for people to go around posting about DRI2 working. So, a day or two late though it is, we give you DRI2!

Here's a pic from iXce

I too got it running, but was unable to take a picture because I'm ADD and was too busy messing with things... and then my X server crashed. And then I repeated the process. I'll get some pics later, some amazing things happen with OpenGL apps that you'll definitely want to see. I may even get a vid if I can.

Check it out straight from Kristian himself!

Discuss this news post here.

compiz-fusion.org – new design!

2008-03-31T23:32:31+00:00

Finally, the long-awaited site layout for compiz-fusion.org has been launched!

RYX did a wonderful job with the design and iXce implemented it.

Thank you, guys!

Compiz Fusion websites themes: they are here, at least!

2008-03-31T22:00:12+00:00

Bah, it took so much time to get them, while it was just a matter of finding one or two dozens of hours to make them all

Well, I’m too lazy to do any screenshot now, so just check them out by yourselves

Freewins

2008-03-31T13:53:39+00:00

So I’ve been working on Freewins over the past few days.

Basically, here is a nice little changelog for you:

Input prevention that actually works (Unlike the previous broken method which had some problems regarding initial window size), Thanks to Danny Baumann and Kristian Lyngstol for making this an example in the shelf plugin - which is largely what most of this work is based on.
A more fluid animation.
Auto-Zooming

TODO List:

Window Hover-Over info
Resize on input-prevented windows

- SmSpillaz

Desktop Effects on openSUSE 11.0

2008-03-29T14:41:10+00:00

Last week openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 3 was released, very early development release of what is to come in form of openSUSE 11.0 just a couple of months later.

On 11.0 release there is a plenty of choice for desktop effects, there is Compiz with all Compiz Fusion enhancements, there is KWin4 a composited window manager for KDE. To enable users to easily get their window manager of choice activated, openSUSE’s Stefan Dirsch and xorg team have worked to enable AIGLX by default on supported hardwares, and upon the installation of 1-click for binary blob drivers.

To enable Compiz, Rodrigo is working on “Desktop Effects” tab in gnome’s control-center “Appearance” caplet that would make it really easy to turn on effects. He is also working on getting something that is usable by all distributions in upstream gnome.