August 29, 2007 Archives

Since yesterday, I've been encountering problems with "black windows" that occurred months earlier with Beryl. For reasons that I did not explore, Beryl and Compiz would only show a black background, and start painting windows in black when a certain number of windows have been opened (generally expanded to cover 2 or 3 full screens of 1280x800). My graphics card is a NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400, on a Dell XPS m1210.

I remembered that using the beryl-manager icon, we could select the rendering option to AIGLX. There are two GUI for changing the Compiz configuration: CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm) and GL Desktop (gnome-compiz-preferences). Neither however provide any means to change it, yet. The former's config seems to be used by the system when firing up the Gnome Windows Manager, although I am not clear as to whether any config file is written in the user's home (I presume that it is done through gconf somehow).

The option to use on the command-line with compiz is "--indirect-rendering", but the simplest way to tell the system to use indirect rendering (ie AIGLX) is to edit the /usr/bin/compiz executable, which is in fact a shell script. Here is my edited copy of the compiz file, where line 55 has been changed from a "no" to a "yes".