Having heard that this combo resulted in superior eye candy I decided to give it a try. As usual the Ubuntu forums had agreat howto, so it looked as though it wouldn’t be too complex. Following through the howto it all seemed to progress as it should. The system is amd64 and the graphics card is nVidia, so there didn’t appear to be any problems there. Getting the Xgl server running rather than Xorg took a few tries, but I got there.
Then I tried running compiz. Sadly it didn’t quite work as predicted 
david@drakh:~$ gnome-window-decorator & [1] 5940 david@drakh:~$ compiz --replace gconf decoration wobbly fade minimize cube rotate zoom scale move resize place switcher water & [2] 5943 david@drakh:~$ compiz.real: No XKB extension compiz.real: No GLXFBConfig for default depth, this isn't going to work. compiz.real: Failed to manage screen: 0 compiz.real: No managable screens found on display :0.0 [2]+ Done compiz --replace gconf decoration wobbly fade minimize cube rotate zoom scale move resize place switcher water
I have no title bars and a lot of the usual nicities of Gnome have stopped working. Logging out is the only way to fix it. So far none of my searches have rsulted in a solution, so I guess I’ll go back to plain old Xorg until I can find a solution.
I did eventually get it to work on amd64, don’t remember what I did differently.
You’re not missing out on anything. The eye candy is nice for the first day or two, until you notice how horribly slow it has made your system run.
I had the same problem until I added -depth 24 to my Xserver startup which now looks like
Xgl :1 -fullscreen -depth 24 -br -ac -accel glx:pbuffer -accel xv:pbuffer
hope this helps
Andy
If you have a fast machine like I do, it’s definitely worth running. It kicks ass. It’s not like you’re rendering shit in the background 24/7 – Most of the time, you’re processor is taking a nap anyway. The eye candy is very sweet, especially the controlled rotation of your desktop to your second desktop. Check youtube to see what I’m talking about. I have a dual core amd64 running compiz/xgl and I fucking love it. I have flash, quicktime (including HD), avi, and all other plugins working. I have some issues with wmv and asf files, but I can live with that. I am never going back to windoze again. I tried Vista. Fuck Vista.
oh and I think you were close. I remember having to go through a stage where all my toolbars on gnome disappeared. It was part of the process. The packages offered here will work, but there are updated packages as well. If you install using the old ones and upgrade from synaptic, you will lose your toolbars again. There was some kind of work around.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=133427
Check out my screenshot.
http://iyeo.com/Screenshot.png
50% cpu using all those “memory intensive” gdesklets (I got 2 gigs), and streaming “the protector” in HD (720p) while doing a controlled spin (Cntl-Alt-1) of my desktop. Notice the transparencies and shadows on the edge of windows thanks to compiz. I believe Xgl (what I have to use becaues of nvidia) isn’t fully hardware accelerated so the eye candy effects do tax your system when it happens. It’s not happening all the time, so I’m fine with the cpu(s) doing some more work. If this was a render box, I probably won’t even be running an X environment unless I needed to. This is my normal desktop and I like it being sweet. Ubuntu with all the options is way better than Vista. The only thing bad I can say about MacOS is that it’s not open source and they won’t let you run it on everything, but otherwise, it’s pretty sweet too. If MacOS was open source (if I wanted Darwin, I’d run FreeBSD) and I can install it on a PC, I’d probably switch. But for now, I am happiest with Ubuntu +compiz/xgl. And soon they’ll have aiglx working for nvidia on ubuntu so we can get full hardware acceleration. I believe the next version of gnome will incorporate all this stuff officially. To be fair, before installing ubuntu, I installed the latest fedora core and managed to get xgl/compiz working there too, AND it seemed faster (probably more updated drivers), but not significantly enough for me to reinstall a different os again. I’m really happy with ubuntu so far and do not plan to switch any time soon.
try this:
http://ubuntu.moshen.de/dists/dapper/eyecandy/