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Now that I have all main things up and running I’m going after the small stuff… like these eye candy effects called “desktop effects” in system menu.

Well, I tried them right after I got the nvidia card working properly, but I was experiencing the following problems:

1. application windows got stuck to the desktop
2. no way to turn the cube around

As usual, I googled this issue and I found out some useful posts on ubuntuforums.org and ubuntugeek.com.

Here is what I did (assuming that you have the nvidia drivers installed and running):

I opened a terminal session and typed

sudo nvidia-xconfig –add-argb-glx-visuals

then I enabled the desktop effects (both the wobbling windows and the cube) via system menu and went back to the terminal

gconftool-2 –type int –set /apps/compiz/general/screen0/options/hsize 4

gconftool-2 –type int –set /apps/compiz/general/screen0/options/number_of_desktops 1

You actually need these last two commands only if you want to enable the cube. Now restart the X-server pressing CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE and check out if the windows are wobbling and if you have 1 or 4 workspaces.

Indeed the cube needs 2 or more workspaces to show-up. In case you still have problems open the editor typing

gconf-editor

and drill down the tree structure apps>compiz>general>screen0>options and set to 4 the hsize value. Quit and try holding down CTRL+ALT left-clicking and moving the mouse. The cube should appear. At least it worked for me… AIN’T NO VISTA BABE!

I attach here below some screenshots for those of you who still don’t have Ubuntu and prefer old stuff like XP or heavy stuff like Vista (try to do this with Vista if you can!)

Two screenshots of the “cube”. Please note that the video keeps playing!

A screenshot of the wobbling windows (unfortunately it’s not extremely good) and of the ALT+TAB application manager:

Interesting, isn’t it?

Few days ago I installed Feisty on my computer. Even though I’m a big Ubuntu fan, my new computer was new to Ubuntu.

I have a AMD X2 3800, a 2 GB RAM DDR2 800MHz, a 150 GB WD 10000 rpm Raptor Hard Disk and a Nvidia 6600 GT with 256MB DDR3.

It’s not the fastest computer on earth, but still fast enough for me. On the other hand, I couldn’t stand how miserable it looked with XP Professional as OS. In 6 months of normal use XP patches etc. made it so slow! So I decided to go for Feisty as soon as it came available.

The installation went quite smooth, even though initially few errors occured (I guess due to some USB WiFi and BT adapters, which I have now removed). I resized the existing partion and created a new one using GParted from the Live CD. Than I completed the installation.

Everything in its right place! Well… no. I have a nice ACER AL2021 LCD monitor which can run at 1600×1200. But I could not find the resolution among those available. I googled for days, trashed the X-server 4 times, I tried Envy, I tried everything but essentially I got my job done doing the following:

in order to recover the xorg.conf settings I ran from the console

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

setting myself:

• the horizontal and vertical sync frequency, as the autodetection feature used to set too low values
• the resolutions I wanted to use

(note that in case you want only to set the resolutions you can type “sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg”)

Then I typed in

sudo aptitude install nvidia-glx-new

sudo nvidia-glx-config enable

After rebooting the xserver, all the screen resolutions were available in the list you get from System>Screen Resolution!