[desktop-discuss] Eye Candy for Solaris's Desktop - Compiz on Solaris x86

[Erwann Chenede]

Hi Brian,

Brian Cameron wrote:

[...]
>
> Great stuff!  I just got this built and it looks great!  
cool. thanks for your comments !
See my responses below.

> I have found a
> number of issues with compiz, upgrading my Xserver, and with GTK+.
>
> Problems with building compiz
> =============================
>
> 1) You missing-stuff tarball for adding missing Xserver pieces does not
>    include the Xcomposite pc file or header files.  I was able to grab
>    the header files by grabbing the Xcomposite.h file from here:
>
> http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/X11R7.2/src/lib/libXcomposite-X11R7.2-0.3.1.tar.bz2 
>
>
>    And you also need to grab the composite.h and compositeproto.h files
>    from here (this took me forever to find):
>
> http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/proto/compositeproto-0.3.tar.bz2 
>
>
>    I attach these header files for those of you who are trying to build
>    compiz and don't want to have to dig around for them.
Strange these headers are installed by install SUNWxorg-headers on my 
version of Xorg 7.2.
Anyway I've added these headers and the pkgconfig  file to my 
missing-stuff tarball and updated my blog.
>
>    Once you put them in /usr/X11/include/X11/extensions, then you can
>    build compiz, though since I didn't have the pc file I had to hack
>    LDPATH to include "-lXcomposite" when making compiz as a hacky
>    workaround.
This is not needed when you have the pkgconfig file installed.
>
> 2) I found I also needed to move aside the old libXcomposite* and
>    libXrender* symlinks and make them point to the new libraries in
>    your missing-stuff tarball or I wasn't able to compile compbiz.
>    Specifically, I mean the libXcomposite.so, libXrender.so, and
>    libXrender.so.1 symlinks.
Yes, this is what I'm explaining in my blog.
>
> 3) compizsettings does not compile with Sun Studio (although compiz does
>    compile with it okay).  You might want to mention that you need to
>    make sure CC=gcc to build these.
This is false, with my patch for compiz-settings is compiling fine with 
Sun Studio.
>
> 4) On my system I didn't have an xorg.conf file so I had to run
>    /usr/X11/bin/Xorg -configure, then take the generated xorg.conf-new
>    file in the system root (/) directory and move it to /etc/xorg.conf
>    and then add the sections you mention.  Your steps weren't really
>    clear (at first I just tried to add an xorg.conf file with the text
>    you have on the webpage - and this made Xorg crash).  Might be nice
>    if you explained this.
Done :)
>
> 5) You blog links to the "SFE Repository" and says that the spec files
>    are there.  At first I thought that you meant that there were spec
>    files for compiz and compizsettings.  I think we should put these
>    modules into spec-files-extra and the patch so it applies when you
>    build via the CBE.  I think the blog steps could be a bit more clear
>    that you only need to build git if you want to access the code from
>    the repository.
I rephrased that.
>
>    At first I grabbed the SFEgit spec file and started building it
>    since you mention "git" in this section.  SFEgit has a lot of
>    dependencies and after building them I found compile problems trying
>    to build SFEgit.
Worked fine for me and Laca (at least). email us the compile problems.

>
>
> 6) Usability problems (for me anyway)
>
>    - When I run thunderbird and click on the "Compose" button or
>      respond to an email, the window that pops up is black and has
>      nothing in it - the window that comes up is useless.  It's not
>      really possible for me to run compiz all the time if I can't
>      write emails when running with it.
This might be bug in the nvidia driver. (I don't have that problem)
Try the latest driver.
>
>    - When I right click I get a neat zoom feature, but I can't seem
>      to get any right click menus, like the ones I often use when
>      using Thunderbird.  How do you get to the right-click menu?
Use compiz-settings and disable the Zoom plugin
>
>    - The animation when you move windows around makes me feel
>      seasink.  Which configuration option turns this off?
Disable the Wobbly plugin (with compiz-settings) and enjoy a seasickness 
free desktop ;)
>
>    - If you wanted compiz to run all the time without having to
>      "gtk-window-decorator --replace & compiz --replace gconf &"
>      all the time, how would you do so?  
Add it to your session instead of metacity but although I've been 
running it for a week
on one of my machine I wouldn't advise it.

    Thanks,

          Erwann

[...]

-- 
              Erwann Chénedé,
 Desktop Group, Sun Microsystems, Grenoble
[ I speak for myself, not for my employer ]