;

This guide will show you how to get compositing working with Xorg using an nVidia graphics card. This will give you access to a range of new features such as window transparency and fancy shadows.

The first thing you need to do is make sure that you have the latest nVidia drivers, the latest Xorg server and preferably a kernel version of 2.6.15 or later. The lastest Xorg server is 6.9.0 the latest nVidia drivers are 1.0.8178-1. The nVidia drivers aren't currently (2006-01-12) in unstable yet so you will need to get them from the unofficial nVidia driver repository

Once you have this lot together and playing nicely getting compositing to work shouldn't be that much of a problem. Open a console and become root then make a back up copy of the X configuration file:

cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.old

Add the following section to the bottom of the configuration file using your favourite text editor:

Section "Extensions"
	Option 	"Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

This, on it's own, will let you use compositing but it will be dog slow. To make it faster add these lines to the device section:

	Option 		"RenderAccel" 		"true"
	Option 		"AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"

These options will only work with nVidia cards. If you have an ATI card the options you require in the device section are the following (I don't have an ATI card so I can't check these work but other people report success with them):

	Option          "backingstore"              "true"
	Option 		"AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"

Now to turn on compositing. Open the KDE control center and go to "Desktop > Window Behaviour". Switch to the Translucency tab. Check the "Use Translucency and Shaddows" check box and have a fiddle with the settings (I found all but the "Effects > Fade In Speed" to have pretty good default settings).

Log out and then do Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to restart X with the new settings or reboot. Once X is restarted you should have transparent windows as shown in the image below.

Compositing with Xorg

I really like some of the special effects that are possible with compositing. The way dialogs fade in an out if very pleasing to the eye. Unfortunatly, I think this is more of a curiosity rather than a useful feature at the moment. The implimentation certainly works but it feels like it lacks polish. Switching between desktops is not quite quick enough and, for some reason, a different desktop is often drawn first. I'm sure once all the quirks are worked out this will be a must have feature.