Linux: fun with X.org 6.8.1

Monday, November 15, 2004, at 03:13PM

By Eric Richardson

I messed around a little today with X.org 6.8.1. That probably means nothing to most of you. If talk of x servers and xinerama just leaves you confused, feel free to click the screenshot link and then move on. Sometimes I need to do a little talking about Linux, as much for me to go back and look at later as for your benefit.

Getting the server itself up and running was no problem. I compiled it yesterday and just ran make install today. It plays well with the nvidia drivers. Getting xcompmgr going was similarly no problem, though it's definitely a little flakier -- when I first go to a desktop it'll be all garbled and I'll have to drag a window around to clear things up. But after that things seem to mostly work.

Right now the drop-shadows and transparency you can see in the screenshot only work on the root desktop, not on virtual desks (in e16 terms "multiple desks"). The drop shadow does work on tooltip-style popups on all desks, though, and looks really nice on things like the firefox auto-complete url drop-down.

Obviously the real fun starts when people start integrating support for this into window managers and apps.

The one problem that was almost a show-stopper was some conflict between Xorg's xinerama support and mplayer. When playing a widescreen movie mplayer would throw part onto the other screen instead of making full-size only one screen. My solution for now? Switch to xine.