I am a sucker for eye candy, and when I saw that Fedora Core 3 Test 2 had Xorgs 6.8 included I thought that this would be a good chance to see the new Shadow and Transparency extensions that came with xorg. Well, it has been quite an event.
First off, I installed FC3t2 and ran update to get all the new updated RPMS that were new since the release , and that included the xorg 6.8 final. Then I found some postings that told you how to get it running.
Add this to your xorg.conf file:
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection
Then when you restart X you should be able to open a terminal and type:
xcompmgr -c &
…to start the Shadows. I found that Metacity apparently doesn’t like this at all, and as far as I can see Metacity segfaults on me. I see it come and go a few times (My window borders come and go) and then it dies. I read somewhere that someone got Metacity 2.8.3 working without a problem, but 2.8.4 comes with FC3t2. Turns out that Metacity has some kind of a compositing manager included in it, and that was causing the conflict. I basically got the source rpm, and modified the configure.in to not enable the compositor and made a new RPM. No go there either.
Finally I said screw it. (I guess I am starting to learn to stop while I am ahead.) I installed xfwm4 and started that up instead of Metacity, and then got my shadows up and running.
It looks great, except it is a little slower moving windows.
My workstation here has a Intel i810 video card. It’s good but not great. I bet it would perform better on my Nvidia card at home.