Tyler McManus .com

A friend was asking how to set up Compiz and the desktop cube rotation effects on the latest version of Ubuntu, so here’s the quick rundown.

1. Make sure your graphics card supports direct rendering with OpenGL. Without it, you can’t run Compiz. In the terminal:

$ glxinfo | grep rendering

The result should be:

direct rendering: Yes

If its not, you’ll need to either install OpenGL or change your graphics card.

2. On the Panel, click Applications > Add/Remove.

3. Search for ‘Compiz’.

4. Check the box next to ‘Advanced Desktop Effects Settings’ . Click ‘Apply Changes’ to install.

5. Once installed, in the Panel, click System > Preferences > Advanced Desktop Effects Settings.

6. In General Options > Desktop Size, use these settings:

Horizontal Virtual Size: 4
Vertical Virtual Size: 1
Number of Desktops: 1

7. Click Back and go to the Desktop options. Check the boxes for ‘Desktop Cube’ and ‘Rotate Cube’.

That’s it. A couple things that make it look even better:

8. Under Effects, check the box ‘Cube Reflection’.

9. Under Utility, check the box for ‘Cube Caps’.

To see the cube rotation effect, press CTRL+ALT while click and dragging with your mouse in any direction. Have fun!

So on Black Friday, I picked up a new graphics cards since my previous didn’t fit in my new machine. The one I got was the NVidia GeForce 6200 LE ($50 with a $50 mail-in rebate = free graphics card. sweet). I went with this one as opposed to an ATI card since the majority of information I found online indicates that overall Linux support for NVidia is good, while support for ATI kind of sux0rz. To be fair, as I understand it, the reason for the lack of consistent ATI support is on the part of the ATI development team, not on the Linux community side (newbie disclaimer). So anyway, I installed the card and booted straight into Ubuntu (I’ll install the Vista drivers later. Maybe). Though instead of the GUI, I boot into the command line telling me very sexily:

(EE) no devices detected.
fatal server error:
no screens found

which of course is awesome like command-line sudoku. And even though I realize its telling me ‘No screens found’ because it can’t find the device listed in my xorg.conf file, I still find it humorous that its giving me this error message on one of the screens it can’t find lol. Well I tried a few things, but in the end, the below steps are what worked for me.

1. Reconfigure x (the desktop environment), like this:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

2. Once thats completed, restart x:

$ startx

3. Once in, head to synaptic to install the correct drivers: Applications / ‘Add/Remove’.

4. Search for ‘drivers’ and check the box for ‘Restricted Drivers Manager’. Apply Changes.

5. Once installed, go there: System / Administration / Restricted Drivers Manager.

6. Check the box next to the NVidia drivers it found to enable them. You will be prompted to log out or reboot (this was the first time I’ve ever been prompted to reboot in linux).

Once you log out or reboot you should be good.

7. You may want to adjust your screen resolution: System / Preferences / Screen Resolution.

8. You may also want to verify that openGL is installed. For me, this is a necessary component for both Compiz and World of Warcraft via Wine.

$ glxinfo | grep rendering

If openGL is installed (which it should be if everything else ran correctly), it will say:

direct rendering: Yes

or maybe direct rendering: woohoo! on some machines (jk). Good luck.