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

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.

The tide is turning on Microsoft

I was reading an interesting article over at Techcrunch about Microsoft’s launch of LiveMesh. In a nutshell, LiveMesh will bring even better setup for an online virtual desktop and easier file sharing between computers and devices. As we move to a lot of “cloud” computing applications, it’s good to see Microsoft not behind the curve on this one. However, I still have to take issue with one thing brought up.

I understand why this will only allow you to sync devices that run Windows clients. However, especially with Microsoft Vista’s lukewarm (to put it nicely) reception, a lot more people are looking at Apple’s OS X and even Linux. They can’t just support Windows anymore. I plan to buy an Apple Macbook Pro next, and I already use Ubuntu Linux 8.04 at home and professionally a good deal. I will still have to deal with Windows as my wife will not leave Windows, so chances are I will have all 3 operating systems running just at my home.

I will give credit where credit is due, and Windows XP is a fantastic operating system. Too bad I will never only use Windows again after XP is finally dead.