In my last post, I talked about ion3, quite possibly the antithesis of “eye candy” on the *nix desktop; definitely more functional than pretty, but that rather Spartan apporach has its own appeal, especially to the more easily distracted amo — Oooh, shiny!

Ahem. Sorry ’bout that. Today, I’d like to go the opposite direction and say a few words about an X work environment that’s all about the eye candy.

If you’ve been keeping a close eye on new developments in desktop Linux over the past several months, chances are you’ve heard at least some hushed whispers of something called “Compiz” or “Xgl,” and how they make an X desktop look even better than the current king of flashy GUIs, MacOSX. Naturally I was skeptical, but it did get me curious enough to want to see what all the fuss was about, as such things usually do. So, I decided to take the necessary steps to install the latest development version and see if it could live up to the hype.

This is what I found.

First, a few words about what Xgl does and how it does it. Xgl is a new kind of X server that uses your video card’s 3D acceleration to draw your desktop, rather than putting the pressure on your CPU to do this. That doesn’t sound very interesting at first, granted - but it forms the key to unlocking the secrets behind the visual effects possible with it. When the windows and objects are being drawn in this manner, the video card “sees” them all as 3D polygons with a textured surface, just as it would inside of an FPS game. This means that performing otherwise complicated 3D visual effects (such as true window-over-window transparencies, windows that shrink or expand in real time, drop shadows, and even warping effects) are trivial tasks when they’re carried out by hardware that’s actually designed for this.

Compiz, meanwhile, is a window manager that’s designed to take full advantage of Xgl’s features. In GNOME it replaces the default Metacity WM, while in KDE it will take over from kwm. In both cases it provides a familiar look and feel, so in most cases this changeover will appear at first to be simply applying a new titlebar theme.

Getting this combo to work in Ubuntu took a little bit of work; as this is still experimental software there are no official Ubuntu packages for it. After some research, I found this guide to be the most helpful and straightforward aid in getting everything installed and running. About twenty minutes later, I was typing in “thefuture” in my terminal window, and it Just Worked.

At first it will not look like much has changed; your window titlebars look a bit different, but not radically so, and if you had apps running on multiple desktops, they all jump to your current one. But now, just for fun, try changing to another virtual desktop. Your screen should shrink onto a cube face, and the cube will then flip around to the desired desktop, at which point the cube zooms back in to fill up your screen. Neat, huh?

There’s more fun to be had. Now, try dragging a window around the desktop. If you followed the guide’s instructions exactly, as I did, you should see the window “wobble” as it’s being moved, as if it was made of rubber and floating in a pool of water as you drag it along. This is, of course, totally useless, but it’s a fun, eye-pleasing effect that will definitely catch the attention of your Windows-using friends.

And there’s more besides:

• Press Ctrl + Alt, then click and drag anywhere on the desktop. You can manually control the virtual-desktop “cube.”
• If you have a mousewheel, scrolling it while on the desktop will cycle through the available desktops. Quite a time-saver.
• If you suffer from a disorganized desktop, with many windows overlapping, this setup has a cure. Just move the mouse to the upper right-hand corner of the screen, or press F12. All non-minimized windows will appear in thumbnails, with no overlapping. You just click on the one you want, and everything returns to normal, save for the selected window now being in front. No more “lost” windows!
• If you haven’t already noticed, your windows shrink and expand in real-time when you minimize and restore them. Also, any windows not currently focused will gradually fade into dark grayscale, leaving only the focused window at full brightness and color.
• Try dragging a window across the left or right sides of the screen. The cube will flip to the appropriate desktop, taking the window with it.
• While in a window. hold down Alt and scroll the mousewheel down. The window will become transparent, revealing what’s underneath. Scrolling back up will restore its opacity, like a dimmer switch on some light fixtures.
• Finally, for something really useless and fun, press Shift and F9 together. Better bring your umbrella, it looks like rain! Press Shift+F9 again to call off the downpour.

So how does it look, I hear you ask? If you want to see what Compiz and Xgl conspire to do before you put it on your own system, here is a site where you can see some pictures and even some videos of this desktop in action.

Now, there are some drawbacks. Of course, Xgl absolutely requires you to have a card with working 3D acceleration; nVidia and ATI chipsets are supported, and the guide I linked to will help you set that up if you haven’t already. Also, this is still very much a “work in progress,” and although I personally find it stable enough for day-to-day use, YMMV; there are still some bugs and glitches that need to be ironed out. As with all development-level software, use at your own risk, and if you do use it be sure to file bug reports with the maintainers when (not if) something wonky happens.

Compiz and Xgl appear to be targeted toward impressing the pants right off of even the most stalwart Windows fans, the ones who see all the cool new visual effects in Vista and can’t wait to put that DRM-riddled, buggy, and bloated piece of malware masquerading as an OS on their box. Many of the same effects seen in Vista are possible with Xgl, and can be achieved on lesser hardware than Vista requires just to run. Keyboard commandos and CLI gurus may scoff at the “pocketfluff” features, but even the most useless “feature” serves a purpose if it turns heads and gets someone curious as to “Hey, what is this?” And hopefully they’ll stick around long enough to discover that there is very little one can do with a Windows OS that can’t also be done in Linux - more securely and almost totally malware-free, even - and the community’s always working on filling in those gaps!

Besides, it just plain looks cool. ^^;

If you liked that, try...

1. Linux Tip: ‘Embedded’ Terminal On Your Desktop
2. The ion3 Window Manager: Little, Not So Yellow, Different.
3. Feisty Fawn Impressions
4. MythBuster Advocates Linux
5. Mandriva Linux 2008 Ready For Download

1 Comment »

1. 
   Corvus
   August 28, 2006 at 6:48 am

   That does look cool. I suppose it proves that Linux can go in both directions at once — clean but simple functionality on low-end systems and holy crap functionality on the high end as well.

   “…that DRM-riddled, buggy, and bloated piece of malware masquerading as an OS…”? Tell us how you really feel!

   [Reply]

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