UPDATE: I finally got Compiz Fusion to work. The guides I found did not quite work, but they gave me some ideas where to look into, so I went deep into the lib folder, made intelligent guesses and created symbolic links around.

But I was very disappointed to find the special effects, and the entire computer, very, very sluggish. Effects were at most around 10fps, and even web surfing was a little of a chore.

Well at least its working. I think the effects are sluggish because they are no longer optimised by the graphics card. Shall take a rest for now. Perhaps spend tomorrow tweaking Ubuntu for better performance.

END OF UPDATE.


Another day of dirty work.

Today I tried to setup my graphics card, in order to get the infamous cube spinning on my computer, aka Compiz Fusion, the special effects which are way more cool than those on Vista.



Its one problem after another. The installation of all packages went fine, but the special effects did not come up, and worse my entire computer became very sluggish.

One thing good about Ubuntu is the large number of users, so there is bound to be someone who has the same problem as me. This time, unlike the SATA harddisk driver problem, I did not take long to find out what the problem is. Its quite a common problem.

Turned out ATI's proprietary drivers have no support for this new OpenGL extension, something which nVidia has done long ago =(. The solution is to either use ATI's open source drivers, or link up to Mesa's library.

I am taking a break now, hopefully I can solve it by tonight.