blackleafmedia

I Still Hate ATI, or How To Enable Composite Rendering in Gnome

10.11.08 - 10:57am

ATI, god I hate you people with a passion. ATI is notoriously bad at not only sucking wind when it comes out to helping the Linux community, but probably making our lives harder. The desktop I have Ubuntu running on has a geriatric X300 graphics card, so you’d figure they would have the drivers nailed down.

So to make a long story short, just about any ATI card has horrific drivers for Linux. As I only run Windows in a virtualized environment 99% of the time, the compatibility issues are of great importance to me now. One of the cool things you can do with the proper drivers is run Compiz Fusion. The best way to describe this is that it is like Aero on Windows Vista, or just the general look of Apple’s OS X. The bad thing about Compiz Fusion is it takes a much beefier video card to run it well. Compiz also has problems rendering over certain resolutions. I have two 1280×1024 monitors. Compiz Fusion will not run in dual head mode in this configuration. Finally, even if the stars are aligned, Compiz Fusion is still tricky to run correctly a lot of the time, and it has come a long way in that regard.

Last night after coding my butt off, I decided to take a look around at some new programs to install and noticed someone making a reference to composited Metacity. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t even the slightest but aware of it. Here is how you enable it:

• Run gconf-editor from the terminal.
• Go to Apps > Metacity > General.
• Enable “Compositing Manager“.

That’s it! None of the goofy looking Compiz Fusion themes (you can use your normal Metacity themes) and none of the useless eye candy garbage from Compiz Fusion. As you can see, much easier to set up.

Category: Random, Tutorials, linux | Tags: