Pioneer Mind

Firefox and Compiz-Fusion

After installing compiz on my debian lenny, I found that while running compiz, Firefox rendering consumes a lot of processing resources. It was a strange effect. After a lot of search specially in compiz related forums I found that it has something to do with my xorg.conf. And a little bit more search made me found that not only by running compiz but also with metacity I have problems with my graphical processes. The problem fixed with a line in my xorg. I added this line to xorg.conf under the ‘Device’ section:

Option        "AccelMethod"    "XAA"

But becareful as I told in previous post my graphic card is Intel Integrated. So it may vary due to your graphic hardware and even your distro.

I recently installed compiz-fusion on my Inspiron 1520 laptop. I decided to write a how to of the installation I did. My laptop is using ‘Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller’. I made a lot of search to find what’s the best installation for my hardware and ditro. I also use linux kernel 2.6.24 on Debian lenny. So there is no guarantee that this installation guide work on all distros and platforms. Besides it can be a very unstable installation because it uses the latest development repository of compiz-fusion.  First of all you should add the following installation repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames/debian-lenny/desktopfx/unstable/ ./

Then:

# apt-get update

If you have any error related to gpg keys use:

# wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames/A42A6CF5.gpg -O- | apt-key add -

And now it’s time to install compiz it self:

# apt-get update && apt-get install compiz-fusion-gnome fusion-icon

Surely it’s for Gnome desktop environment. It’s also possible to download tarballs of the source or even install it using your official packages of your distro. But the problem which I face with this method was that, after updating my debian repository many incompatibilities happened between compiz packages. So I prefer to use the above installation.

Now this part is for those who have the same graphical card as mine. We have to customize our xorg.conf to work probobly with our hardware configurations. I prefer to redirect you the main page of this article in compiz-fusion offical wiki, because it’s much more nicer explained. To read this article click here.