Since my previous post about the horrors of Vista, I've been thinking a lot about compiz fusion and it got me rather interested in getting it to work on my laptop.  I wanted to step in to try and see how I like this thing, not knowing all the troubles that I will be facing as you'll soon find out.  Since I wanted to try out Ubuntu, I had a choice to make between Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu.  As you can guess by now, I've chosen to stick with Xubuntu, why?

I've always been a big advocate for speed, I love computers that are fast, I love shortcut keys, and I love the command line.  Because of this reason, I've opted to go with Xubuntu because it is the most lightweight of the three flavors.  Since Ubuntu and Kubuntu uses Gnome and KDE respectively, they are both bloated.  I know this does not make much of a difference, but that's just me.

I did a complete partition backup of my beloved Vista, and proceeded with the installation of Ubuntu.  It was a pain in the butt at first because I opted to create partitions manually.  Because of the way I had setup my partitions before, I ended up using gparted to resize one of the partitions.  The first run through, it said that it'll take 1hr30 minutes!  I thought, well I can do many non-computer things in that hour and a half, so why not?  I proceeded to do it, came back in 2 hours and the time left gives me a figure of 5 hours!  What had happened was the first time through, it did a read only test.  That's what I get for not reading huh?  Still, how annoying?

After getting 8 hours, my partitions were setup.  The rest of the installation proceeded painlessly.  Logging into Xubuntu for the first time, it felt snappy!  I haven't felt this much speed in a while since my Vista days.  I did the usual thing of course upon the first login, and that's to setup the wireless.  The installation took care of the wireless driver for me, I didn't have to do anything but give the WPA key.  I then went into Synaptic Package manager to add repositories (universe, restricted and multiverse) and reloaded it.  Since the M1330 came with the Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS, I had to go to nvidia.com to download their linux driver for the card.  That installation went painlessly also, I believe I had to install libc packages to get the installation working.

Once I have the repositories setup and the video card properly installed, it was time to install compiz.  Essentially, I read around in forums and I got all the names of the necessary packages.  Essentially, here's the command to install all the files you need to get compiz working nicely with your M1330:

Do NOT install xserver-xgl, it will not work and you will get a white screen.  It took me several hours to figure this out because I kept on getting a blank screen when trying to run compiz.  Anyway, after installing these packages, you should be able to go and start setting up compiz at Applications->Settings->Advanced Desktop Effects Settings.  First thing first, find Window Decoration and edit it's command setting.  Where it says "Command", put in "gtk-window-decorator".  Now you can do Alt+F2 and run "compiz –replace".

If all goes well, you should have compiz running!  If you want to make compiz your default, you should read this post.  It's where I got some of my information, and he has pictures too.  Easier to follow along than my ramblings.  If you read that page, you probably realized that I didn't include emerald for the  installation, but I replaced it with compiz-gnome.  This is because there's a bug with the Nvidia drivers and compiz, a Google search for "nvidia compiz slow" will come up with a lot of results for this.  It happens that the Nvidia video card on the M1330 falls in this category.

Some of the effects, like minimize and maximize was very slow.  It also makes some of the screen black, and very ugly!  The other bug with the Nvidia driver when used with emerald, xfwm4, or metacity is that switching between tabs in Firefox is very slow!  There's a 1 - 2 seconds delay when you switch among the tabs.  The only window decorator that this bug does not affect that I know of is gtk-window-decorator packaged with compiz-gnome.  The time that it took me for this process?  12 hours total!  If you do decide to install Ubuntu, I hope this post will help cut some of that time off for you.