You are not logged in.

#1 2009-04-28 17:55:23

LeoSolaris
Member
From: South Carolina
Registered: 2008-03-30
Posts: 354

Compiz + Fusion icon + Any other WM = fun times!

I had a thought while I was taking some screenshots of my trial Compiz standalone set up. (I have to say I rather like it, all of the glitz, 1/3 the weight!) I already had Openbox established on my main user. Fusion Icon allows me to select Window Managers....   Well  good news!

It works on the Compiz side! It swaps between them easily and without a show stopping fuss. I get the Openbox menu... All of the neat things any of the WM's can do, and if I want to switch back, poof, it all goes right back to Compiz with a flick of the switch. It even has a transparent tint2. Urxvt however does not go transparent in the OB transition from Compiz. In fact the transparency that Urxvt is supposed to have causes some oddball artifacts.

The bad news....    It flat refuses to work on my standard user's established Openbox setup. Worse than that, it makes an Xorg fault that restarts the Xserver. It's a little freaky looking, and it will not allow xcompmanagr to resume if I sign back in to the openbox side.  Very strange.

I wonder why the Compiz devs do not strive to make Compiz a fully standalone WM. All it needs it a built in menu like one of the Boxes, an autostart function, and a less hackish way of sticking it in the ~/.xinitrc. On the bright side, the script used to make the compiz-session.sh for ~/.xinitrc serves nicely as an autostart.sh (to use OB terms). Compiz-deskmenu is alright... but the windows list and viewport switcher are a little funky.



By the way, in Compiz I have noticed that Firefox has stopped spell checking my text...   Now this is annoying. I need to check to see if it is just as stopped in the Openbox user.


I keep getting distracted from my webserver project...

huh? oooh...  shiny!

Offline

#2 2009-04-28 21:40:26

pogeymanz
Member
Registered: 2008-03-11
Posts: 1,020

Re: Compiz + Fusion icon + Any other WM = fun times!

I agree. I would love to see Compiz become a fully standalone WM. It's already pretty close, but it's slightly buggy when I use it alone, and deskmenu is slow and slightly awkward.

Offline

#3 2009-04-28 22:04:08

moljac024
Member
From: Serbia
Registered: 2008-01-29
Posts: 2,676

Re: Compiz + Fusion icon + Any other WM = fun times!

Well, since any means of exiting the window manager are absent that has to mean they're really not trying to make it stand-alone, which is a damn shame.

Also, fusion-icon doesn't work for you simply because you are starting an openbox session and when you try to change the window manager with fusion-icon it has to kill openbox first, which causes your X session to end. You can put exec fusion-icon in your .xinitrc and you will be able to change WMs.


The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck, is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But if they tell you that I've lost my mind, maybe it's not gone just a little hard to find...

Offline

#4 2009-04-28 22:37:38

LeoSolaris
Member
From: South Carolina
Registered: 2008-03-30
Posts: 354

Re: Compiz + Fusion icon + Any other WM = fun times!

moljac024 wrote:

Well, since any means of exiting the window manager are absent that has to mean they're really not trying to make it stand-alone, which is a damn shame.

Also, fusion-icon doesn't work for you simply because you are starting an openbox session and when you try to change the window manager with fusion-icon it has to kill openbox first, which causes your X session to end. You can put exec fusion-icon in your .xinitrc and you will be able to change WMs.

Oh!    I was not aware of that, makes sense though, when I think about it, that when OB is killed it ends X, too. Interestingly enough, the spell checking still works in OB, so it is some configuration error in the Compiz user's side that is keeping me from having a nicely spelling error free post.

I suppose that a swift swap over to OB from Compiz provides a nice exit strategy. Cumbersome, but workable. Add to that that a shut down, and a reboot are not that hard to add to deskmenu. Perhaps a

sudo killall compiz && sudo killall fusion-icon

would reset back to login manager or the console. I'll have to give it a whirl when I have some more time.


It is a damn shame that compiz is not structured to be a standalone. It is beautiful and fairly light by itself. (Ok not as light as other WM's but lighter than DE's)


I keep getting distracted from my webserver project...

huh? oooh...  shiny!

Offline

#5 2009-04-29 03:14:24

Odysseus
Member
Registered: 2009-02-15
Posts: 141

Re: Compiz + Fusion icon + Any other WM = fun times!

I did compiz standalone a while back.  Didn't bother with whatever fusion-icon is.  Just executed compiz and emerald directly from my .xinitrc.  Compiz actually works great stand alone, but nothing about it is preconfigured.  You even have to explicity turn on window decorations (titlebar, buttons, and handles).

Last edited by Odysseus (2009-04-29 03:14:39)


I'm the type to fling myself headlong through the magical wardrobe, and then incinerate the ornate mahogany portal behind me with a Molotov cocktail.

Offline

#6 2009-04-29 04:00:46

fuscia
Member
Registered: 2008-04-21
Posts: 398

Re: Compiz + Fusion icon + Any other WM = fun times!

pogeymanz wrote:

I agree. I would love to see Compiz become a fully standalone WM. It's already pretty close, but it's slightly buggy when I use it alone, and deskmenu is slow and slightly awkward.

i'd like to see it, as well.

us gmrun instead of deskmenu. gmrun rocks, deskmenu is poo (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Offline

#7 2009-04-29 15:21:57

LeoSolaris
Member
From: South Carolina
Registered: 2008-03-30
Posts: 354

Re: Compiz + Fusion icon + Any other WM = fun times!

fuscia wrote:
pogeymanz wrote:

I agree. I would love to see Compiz become a fully standalone WM. It's already pretty close, but it's slightly buggy when I use it alone, and deskmenu is slow and slightly awkward.

i'd like to see it, as well.

us gmrun instead of deskmenu. gmrun rocks, deskmenu is poo (not that there's anything wrong with that).

gmrun...   I just pulled that in to try out, rather nice actually, very minimalistic!  I may configure that one in rather than deskmenu. Or just use them both and keep deskmenu attached to the bottom left corner. I have tried out apwall as an alternative menu style, and it might be interesting for the blingy Compiz.

Thanks, I did not know about gmrun, and it fits in nicely with my Openbox user.


I keep getting distracted from my webserver project...

huh? oooh...  shiny!

Offline

#8 2009-04-29 17:02:33

jack.mitchell
Member
From: Ely, Cambridgeshire, UK
Registered: 2008-08-28
Posts: 156
Website

Re: Compiz + Fusion icon + Any other WM = fun times!

It is a crying shame that Compiz doesn't strive a bit more to be a standalone window manager. I've thought about trying it before but it seems amazingly hackish and dirty to get it to play right, and therefore feels as if it's clogging up my system, which plays against the KISS principles that I run this distibution for. I'm not sure how standards complient compiz is but if I were to harbour a guess I would say that at least some of the code must be a bit sketchy with specific gnome/kde/xfce workarounds built in, hence it would take a fair amount of work to bring it close to the sort of standards that the *boxes live by.

Jack.

Offline

Board footer

Powered by FluxBB