Following the steps here will give you stable composite effects, like drop shadows and transparency effects and gives the desktop a new feel, like being able to move items to another workspace simply by dragging them to the side of the screen. and window opacity changing when moving and resizing windows.[B] Parts of this were taken from different howto's that i've used and all credit goes there writers for there hard work.[/B] Enabling the composite manager http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=75527&highlight=transset posted by poofyhairguy & Replace metacity with xfwm4 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=88393&highlight=xfwm4 posted by theine
step1: change the default WM to xfwm4 first install the required packages.
sudo apt-get install xfwm4 xfce4-mcs-manager openbox
next add an entry for xfwm4 to the usr/bin/gnome-wm file.
sudo sed -i "s/openbox)/openbox|xfwm4)/" /usr/bin/gnome-wm
set the default window manager to xfwm4.
echo export WINDOW_MANAGER=/usr/bin/xfwm4 >> ~/.gnomerc
create an icon in System/Preferences menu to change the window manager themes and settings.
sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/xfwm4-themes.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=xfwm4 themes
Type=Application
Exec=xfce-setting-show xfwm4
Terminal=false
Icon=xfwm4
Categories=GNOME;Application;Settings;
OnlyShowIn=GNOME;
step2: now enable the composite extension in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file like this
sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection
For Nvidia cards:
look through the file. Find the section called “device.” Add these two lines to that section:
Option "RenderAccel" "true"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
It should look something like this:
Section "Device"
Identifier "NVIDIA Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000 AGP 8x]"
Driver "nvidia"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "RenderAccel" "true"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
EndSection
Note: for ATI & other video cards, i don't know what options to use for them so assuming if you can get xcompmgr to work by following poofy's excellent guide then this should work just fine but i can't say for sure.
next xcompmgr and xfwm4 both suffer from the same bug in gnome, when you click on the logout button, it seems to freeze but what happens is the logout_prompt just isn't visible. a work around that is go into Applications/SystemsTools/Configuration editor. now navigate to apps/gnome-session/options rightclick on logout_option, click on edit key and set it to "logout" if it's already set to logout just skip this step, now uncheck the logout_prompt box and close the configuration editor. now when you click on the logout button it takes you to gdm instead of seeming to freeze up the system.
and finaly the lastthing were going to make some changes to our default xfwm4 WM theme by going into the /usr/share/themes dir find the current theme were using and add these lines to the bottom of the "themerc" file.
resize_opacity=100
move_opacity=60
popup_opacity=90
show_frame_shadow=true
show_popup_shadow=true
save the file and exit, you must logout and back in for the changes to take affect. this will add transparency effects to your WM theme so when you move, drag, resize your windows, the opacity will change to the value you set in the "themerc" file. for those of you that don't want to edit your "themerc" file i've attached a theme that has already been modified. guys trust me the screenshots don't do it justice but i tried..