Bling!

[Ray Strode]

Hi,

As some of you may know, Soeren Sandmann, Kristian Hogsberg, Adam
Jackson, and Kevin Martin have been working on getting special effects
into the desktop.  While all their work is in CVS, it's a little hard to
set up, so I thought I'd make packages for people who have wanted to try
the stuff but haven't wanted to spend a lot of time recompiling
everything.

Note it's still takes some effort to get a workable setup and for a lot
of people things won't work at all.  

Testing has been mostly done on radeon 7500 (r100) cards.  Other cards
probably won't work (but you can still try!).

Steps to test:

1) get the packages from http://people.redhat.com/rstrode/bling
If you point yum to it by creating a repo file in /etc/yum.repos.d, you
should be able to do something like: 

yum install mesa-libGL xorg-x11-server-Xair spififity

This will install a specially compiled version of Xorg that supports
accelerated indirect rendering which is the key to making the
compositing manager have a reasonable frame rate.  Eventually these
changes will go into the main Xorg package.

The above yum install command will also install a version of metacity
with its compositing manager code turned on.  I called the package
spififity so that we can parallel install it with the non-compositing
manager version of metacity.

2) Configure gdm to use the accelerated indirect compiled version of
Xorg. You can probably do something like:

sed -i -e 's/Xorg/Xair/g' /usr/share/gdm/config/gdm.conf-custom

to make that happen.

3) Configure your X server to not use offscreen pixmaps.  Strictly
speaking this step is optional, but it should dramatically increase
performance. You can do that by adding 
  Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps"
to the "Device" section of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.  Some people
have reported that this option actually breaks things for them, so you
may have to try it with and without.

4) Configure your X server to enable the composite extension. You can do
that by adding

Section "Extensions"
    Option "Composite"
EndSection

to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf

5) restart gdm.  

6) Log into GNOME, press alt-f2 to get a run dialog to come up and then
type spififity --replace and press enter.

At this point you may see drops shadows, fading menus and wobbly
minimization effects or your system may freeze or one followed by the
other.

If you see drop shadows and a bunch of solid white windows, you probably
aren't running the right X server.  Make sure you're running Xair and
not Xorg.

If after using things for a while all your window borders disappear, you
may have better luck by setting the METACITY_SYNC environment variable
to 1 and rerunning spififity.  Setting the environment variable incurs a
minor performance hit, but it will also mask a lingering bug in the
compositing manager code.

Things are still quite raw, so expect things to crash, your system to
lock up, effects to be unpolished, etc.

--Ray