Hi, As some of you may know, Soeren Sandmann, Kristian Hogsberg, Adam Jackson, and Kevin Martin have been working on getting special effects into the desktop. While all their work is in CVS, it's a little hard to set up, so I thought I'd make packages for people who have wanted to try the stuff but haven't wanted to spend a lot of time recompiling everything. Note it's still takes some effort to get a workable setup and for a lot of people things won't work at all. Testing has been mostly done on radeon 7500 (r100) cards. Other cards probably won't work (but you can still try!). Steps to test: 1) get the packages from http://people.redhat.com/rstrode/bling If you point yum to it by creating a repo file in /etc/yum.repos.d, you should be able to do something like: yum install mesa-libGL xorg-x11-server-Xair spififity This will install a specially compiled version of Xorg that supports accelerated indirect rendering which is the key to making the compositing manager have a reasonable frame rate. Eventually these changes will go into the main Xorg package. The above yum install command will also install a version of metacity with its compositing manager code turned on. I called the package spififity so that we can parallel install it with the non-compositing manager version of metacity. 2) Configure gdm to use the accelerated indirect compiled version of Xorg. You can probably do something like: sed -i -e 's/Xorg/Xair/g' /usr/share/gdm/config/gdm.conf-custom to make that happen. 3) Configure your X server to not use offscreen pixmaps. Strictly speaking this step is optional, but it should dramatically increase performance. You can do that by adding Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" to the "Device" section of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Some people have reported that this option actually breaks things for them, so you may have to try it with and without. 4) Configure your X server to enable the composite extension. You can do that by adding Section "Extensions" Option "Composite" EndSection to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf 5) restart gdm. 6) Log into GNOME, press alt-f2 to get a run dialog to come up and then type spififity --replace and press enter. At this point you may see drops shadows, fading menus and wobbly minimization effects or your system may freeze or one followed by the other. If you see drop shadows and a bunch of solid white windows, you probably aren't running the right X server. Make sure you're running Xair and not Xorg. If after using things for a while all your window borders disappear, you may have better luck by setting the METACITY_SYNC environment variable to 1 and rerunning spififity. Setting the environment variable incurs a minor performance hit, but it will also mask a lingering bug in the compositing manager code. Things are still quite raw, so expect things to crash, your system to lock up, effects to be unpolished, etc. --Ray -- fedora-test-list mailing list fedora-test-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-test-list