Compiz Fusion and ATI

By Richard A. Johnson on Published: July 7, 2007 at 11:28 pm

Well, don’t get to excited first off. I have finally gotten my Radeon 9700 (which reports as a 9550, something tells me I got ripped off) to work with AIGLX using the Radeon drivers (the open source drivers, not the FGLRX binary drivers). I have pieced together howtos from any place imaginable. However…Compiz starts, but doesn’t draw any frames or borders on windows, and I haven’t messed with any effects because this has annoyed me. It has something to do with an outdated CCP plugin. I have tried all of the –replace this and that, and it still doesn’t work.

But anyways, here are the settings you want to add to your/etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

Make sure you have the following options under yourSection “Module”:

Load "dri"
Load "dbe"
Load "glx"

Make sure you have the following options under yourSection “Device”:

driver "radeon"
option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps"
option "AGPMode" "4"  #if you have 8, you can try it
option "AGPFastWrite" "true" #enable in bios as well
option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "true"
option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "true"
option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
option "EnablePageFlip" "true"

Make sure you have the following options under yourSection “ServerLayout”:

option "AIGLX" "true"

If you don’t have aSection “DRI”, add it and make sure it looks like this:

Section "DRI"
     Mode 0666
EndSection

Add the following if you don’t have aSection “Extensions”:

Section "Extensions"
     option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

If you have an idea on how to fix the CCP plugin issue with Compiz, I would greatly appreciate it. As for installing Compiz, I followed https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompositeManager/CompizFusion.

http://blog.cooperteam.net Chris Halse Rogers
It’s quite hard to keep all the various howtos straight .
There are a bunch of things here which are unnecessary.
These options:
option “DisableGLXRootClipping” “true”
option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “true”
option “AllowGLXWithComposite” “true”
are only used by the proprietary nVidia drivers, and hence are useless for you, and both
Section “Extensions”
option “Composite” “Enable”
EndSection
and
option “AIGLX” “true”
are enabled by default in recent (>= Dapper, I believe) Ubuntu X servers.
http://www.mantistechs.com/ Mario Young
I get a X1650 series but I can’t have compiz or beryl or with the FGLRX driver,
Is this imposible?
http://zamber.net/ Zamber
Neither the less it works better than my default setup
Thanks!
http://zamber.net/ Zamber
zamber@rtfm:~$ cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep WW
…
(WW) RADEON(0): Option “DisableGLXRootClipping” is not used
(WW) RADEON(0): Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” is not used
(WW) RADEON(0): Option “AllowGLXWithComposite” is not used
…
I have a few of this stupid warnings but anyway Chris was right .
http://www.fooishbar.org daniels
option “XAANoOffscreenPixmaps”
You shouldn’t need this one; it destroys performance.
option “AGPMode” “4″ #if you have 8, you can try it
This is always (really, always) autodetected. Putting it in the config only increases the scope for things to go wrong.
option “AGPFastWrite” “true” #enable in bios as well
Given that this option caused basically every machine ever on the planet to hardlock, it has been short-circuited to do literally nothing whatsoever. (Note the first results on Google for AGPFastWrite.)
option “EnablePageFlip” “true”
When it’s safe to enable, this will be enabled by default.
bert
To fix the window border problem I installed emerald and emerald-themes and started compiz using “compiz –replace -c emerald”
http://mighmos.org Adam Petaccia
I have an nVidia card, but I had similar symptoms related to ccp. “git pull” on the ccp … thingy and a make install worked wonders.
http://seriously-this-is-not-worth-reading.blogspot.com Warbo
Just on the graphics card numbering issue, you haven’t been ripped off any more than everyone else with those cards. Graphics cards (especially from the Radeon 9XXX era) are usually made as generic boards, which are then configured with different amounts of RAM and different clock speeds and given different names. It is actually very common for the only difference between two cards to be the clock speed, which is why graphics card overclocking tools are made by hackers. One of my friends bought a Radeon 9550 specifically so he could overclock it to be a 9700 and save a bit of cash.
This is a big reason vendors don’t like making Vista drivers. At the moment there is one driver download from eg. Nvidia and AMD which supports all of their cards. However, with Vista, and especially for graphics cards due to their involvement with displaying HD DRM-filled content, Microsoft has its killswitch to remotely disable any drivers which might be used to compromise their protected media path. This, combined with the mandated ability for drivers to identify each specific card exactly (to stop anyone building their own DRM-breaking card which is compatible with an already approved driver) means every single individual type and configuration of card needs its own driver, and needs to be able to be uniquely identifiable by a driver. Not only does this make users’ lives harder (there isn’t just one driver anymore), but it makes driver developers’ lives harder since they have to make each driver unique, and it makes the company’s lives harder because they can’t use generic boards like the 9550, since each needs to be uniquely identifiable (and this ultimately drives up the cost of the cards). But, of course, if they DON’T support HD video on Vista then they’ll be waving goodbye to their business. Gotta love them monopolies.

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