[SOLVED] Proper setup of XFCE with Compiz (fonts, cursors, tooltips)

PrettyFlower · 2011-12-19 14:59:25

Well I hate to keep bothering the good people of the forums with so many questions but I got such good information last time I can't help but ask how to solve some additional issues I've run into. I'm sure the information is out there somewhere, I just haven't been able to find it and I figure it can't hurt to ask.

1. Fonts. I initially ran yaourt cairo-ubuntu and copied some config info into /etc/fonts/conf.avail/51-local.conf. This made the fonts look great everywhere except the terminal, so to try and fix the terminal fonts I ran pacman -S ttf-ubuntu-font-family, then picked Ubuntu Mono as my terminal font of choice. Unfortunately, for some reason installing ttf-ubuntu-font-family has made the fonts everywhere else look very squished. What's the best way to resolve this?

2. After installing Vanilla-DMZ cursor theme, I went to Settings -> Mouse -> Theme to set it, but it doesn't seem to want to change, even after reboot. I'm guessing this is an issue with running compiz but I'm not sure how to fix it.

3. This seems to happen on all linux distributions when running compiz, so I assume its just a compiz bug but I figured I would ask if anyone had a solution. Sometimes when I put my cursor over something, a tooltip will try to pop up but it won't contain anything. Moving the cursor more seems to fix it sometimes but its pretty annoying. It also happens sometimes when I click the directory menu.

4. I have dual monitors and whenever I restart pidgin, the window never seems to go back to where I left it. It always seems to want to go to the top left of my second monitor, instead of the top right. Is there some option hiding somewhere I need to set in order to get this behavior?

Thanks for any help!

Last edited by PrettyFlower (2011-12-20 20:16:22)

PrettyFlower · 2011-12-19 18:58:27

Ok after some tinkering I did fix fonts at least. As it turns out, when I installed ttf-ubuntu-font-family, some applications seemed to default to using Cantarell instead of whatever they had been using before. So I went through and told lightdm, chrome, and qt-creator to use something pretty and less squishy.

bwat47 · 2011-12-19 20:00:04

The cursor issue is also an issue with gnome on arch, you can use this fix (works for me with gdm/gnome and lxdm/xfce):
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gn … 11_cursors

PrettyFlower · 2011-12-19 20:13:07

Yep, that fixed it alright. Thanks bwat! I don't know if any of the other fixes I tried were actually affecting anything, but adding that index.theme file was the first thing that gave me a result.

samuvuo · 2011-12-20 03:02:27

bwat47 wrote:

The cursor issue is also an issue with gnome on arch, you can use this fix (works for me with gdm/gnome and lxdm/xfce):
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gn … 11_cursors

I'm using lxdm + openbox (no DE) and the fix above didn't work. A symlink /usr/share/icons/default -> /usr/share/icons/Vanilla-DMZ did.

PrettyFlower · 2011-12-20 07:04:38

For issue 4:

According to the XFCE wiki, this is something that is either supported by the application or isn't. I would've thought Pidgin supported this as it has always behaved correctly for me in the past, but then again my previous desktop environment has always been Gnome 2. I'm not sure if this is a consistent issue on XFCE or if this only happens on Arch, since this is my first full setup for both Arch and XFCE, but I fixed it by installing devilspie from pacman, then creating $HOME/.devilspie/devilsPieConfig.ds

The file looks like:

(if (is (application_name) "Pidgin")
(begin
(if (is (window_role) "buddy_list")
(begin
(geometry "280x1024+2920+0")
)
)
)
)

where geometry is defined as "widthxheight+x+y" (who came up with that configuration scheme?!). Anyways since I have dual monitors, I'm basically saying make the window 280 px wide by 1024 tall (height of second monitor) at position 2920 x (first monitor width + second monitor width - window width) at 0 y.

This gives me the desired behavior, but I'm not entirely sure if its the best way to do it. On the plus side, there are some pretty cool configurations you can do with Devil's Pie that might be fun to play with! Going to mark as solved anyways, and probably mark the whole thread as solved soon since most of it works and the other one just seems to be an unsolvable Compiz bug. Maybe I should go post on their forums?

PrettyFlower · 2011-12-20 20:16:01

Giving up on Compiz entirely. Looking at their forums, they are full of spam and clearly aren't being maintained. From what I can tell, they are in the middle of a complete rewrite so bugs on the .8 version won't be a very high priority. Briefly tried using KWin as an alternative but (not surprisingly) it doesn't seem to work very well in XFCE. Just going to use xfwm4 for now and mark the thread as solved.

beardedlinuxgeek · 2012-09-18 16:36:33

The tooltips not showing up correctly is the most annoying. It's not even just the tooltips, drop down menus, anything that you hover to display doesn't show up half the time.

Solution: Enable animations! Now tooltips use the "fade" animation to display themselves and they work perfectly every time!

Hopefully this helps some random person googling "xfce compiz tooltips"

Arch Linux

#1 2011-12-19 14:59:25

[SOLVED] Proper setup of XFCE with Compiz (fonts, cursors, tooltips)

#2 2011-12-19 18:58:27

Re: [SOLVED] Proper setup of XFCE with Compiz (fonts, cursors, tooltips)

#3 2011-12-19 20:00:04

Re: [SOLVED] Proper setup of XFCE with Compiz (fonts, cursors, tooltips)

#4 2011-12-19 20:13:07

Re: [SOLVED] Proper setup of XFCE with Compiz (fonts, cursors, tooltips)

#5 2011-12-20 03:02:27

Re: [SOLVED] Proper setup of XFCE with Compiz (fonts, cursors, tooltips)

#6 2011-12-20 07:04:38

Re: [SOLVED] Proper setup of XFCE with Compiz (fonts, cursors, tooltips)

#7 2011-12-20 20:16:01

Re: [SOLVED] Proper setup of XFCE with Compiz (fonts, cursors, tooltips)

#8 2012-09-18 16:36:33

Re: [SOLVED] Proper setup of XFCE with Compiz (fonts, cursors, tooltips)

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