[feisty] desktop effects problem (ATI)

I forgot to mention that I am using the radeon driver.

I don't either have out-of-the-box desktop effects with my Radeon X800 in Ubuntu (window border disappear when enabling desktop effects, and no effects actually appear), but I'm quite certain it's a not a problem in xserver-xorg-video-ati, but in Ubuntu's compiz / desktop-effects / something.

I'm writing this from a Fedora 7 test 2 live CD I just burned, and here I do have everything working fluently by just enabling System / Preferences / Desktop Effects, despite the fact the xserver-xorg-video-ati is the same version as in feisty (6.6.3), as well as same X.org (7.2), Mesa (6.5.2) etc. Compiz is "0.3.6-2.fc7".

I reassign this bug to compiz...

I think it's somehow just that compiz has not yet been really much configured by default. Or is it that it happens to work with eg. NVIDIA's proprietary driver out-of-the-box?

I'm now typing this with compiz enabled, and found that eg. the gconf compiz/general/allscreen/options/active_plugins was missing several very important things, including "decorator" without which no window borders are even draw. I added a few more, and I now have some fading effects etc. There are a lot of big "pauses" in the rendering, ie. small hangs. I hope Ubuntu can put some effort to have relatively working out-of-the-box functionality, as the Desktop Effects application is available anyway.

Using Radeon X800 GTO on an amd64 machine. If I install beryl from unofficial repositories, it works very fluently and without any problems too, so I'd make a conclusion that this really has not that much to do with the drivers (beryl works), but with compiz tweaking (as fedora works also with compiz).

Sorry for adding so much noise, but it's hard to pinpoint these problems exactly. Booting from a daily cd, it seems that the gconf configuration of compiz looks reasonable out of the box, so I have to back my words on that. My installation had probably some problems with that.

The real issues out of the box are the halts and blank windows without special xorg.conf settings. If someone comes up with the perfect combintation of xorg.conf settings, please tell - and please check that each of the settings are actually _required_ for the smooth operation, do not add irrelevant ones.

At least EXA seems something that generally is not yet recommendable to be enabled.

Anyway, it's hard to say which problems are because of compiz and which are because of display driver, or display driver settings.

Hmm, I couldn't figure out how to start a console on the live-CD, it seems as those are not enabled. And thus, I was not able to change X settings on the fly and test new ones. But back on the amd64 installation, I tried out beryl again and noticed that indeed it was not with default settings that it worked. I then removed Beryl, rebooted and checked that yes, _this_ is the setting that is required for compiz/beryl to work on at least Radeon X800:
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps"
under the Device section in xorg.conf. Not even the often mentioned AddARGBGLXVisuals is needed. I still get random pauses, usually when switching windows, when using compiz, but at least it works so it's demoable.

However, when I booted from the Fedora's Live-CD again, I found no mention of such setting in their xorg.conf, only Device "radeon" and nothing more in the Device section. I wonder if they have patched the 6.6.3 xserver-xorg-video-ati driver somehow that Ubuntu's driver is not?

probably just 107_fedora_dont_backfill_bg_none.patch which got dropped for xorg-server-1.2.0 since I was advised that it won't get upstream. After looking at the situation a bit closer it seems that the patch should at least make the performance a bit better, maybe even help with this.

Did not help with the fact that XAANoOffscreenPixmaps is needed to correctly render windows with compiz or beryl enabled. Potentially did help to reduce the random pauses.

Note that desktop effects as such should work, my only problem is that if I don't specify the no off screen pixmaps -option, most created windows are blank white.

If you've used feisty for a long while, it might also be your configuration is messed, so I'd suggest anyone to try out the Beta Live-CD - you should have acceleration, and be able to enable desktop effects. It's just that you probably face the same problem as I do with the default xorg.conf options.

This should be now fixed with xorg-server (2:1.2.0-3ubuntu5)