Xgl

[Apollo]

Well, I searched and was amazed when there were not threads related to XGL on this website. So, I figured I might as well start one myself. XGL is an addition to Xorg and is quite the piece of eye candy for the desktop, both KDE and Gnome. It lets you have 4 desktops. Not like in KDE, but you cna actually swtich desktop, so that you spin a cube around to get to your desktop. You can zoom, fade in fade out, windows wobbles while being moved, alt tab through desktop, and split windows between 2 desktops and view the window like looking at a cube with its 90 degree angle facing you. A good live Cd to try this out on is Kororaa and I strongly recommend you give this a try. This is something Windows users may never have and it sure beats the desktop of the yet again delayed Vista. Heres a link to Kororaa's Homepage. http://kororaa.org/

[Zelmo]

There was a thread earlier, but I guess it didn't mention XGL by name. I'm going to second your recommendation to try the Kororaa live CD, it's pretty darn cool! I especially liked how ridiculously easy it is to change window transparency on the fly--I can see myself using that quite a bit.

On the subject of Vista, doesn't their Glass window manager do a lot of the same stuff?

[Apollo]

On the subject of Vista, doesn't their Glass window manager do a lot of the same stuff?

Its quite possible, yes. I do not follow Windows releases at all, although I think I may start, just to see how they are doing. The problem for Vista is that it isn't to be released until early 2007 from what I have heard. Just imagine how more advanced and popular Xgl will be by then.

[d38dm8nw81k1ng]

no, vista does nothing of the sort. vista only has the "glass" feature (transparency). tbh it's pretty pathetic and another nail in the coffin for those who see linux GUIs as primitive. ah well, we get the more innovative and useful products

[AlexK]

The kororaa livecd is great, note that it is a bit of a memory hog, and you might want to force it to use some swap space on your hard drive. Just do a swapon /dev/hdaX to enable the swap space as it doesn't do it by default.

Also another nail in the coffin for vista is that it will require some decent graphics cards to get glass and stuff like that, but I can get same effects and more using Xgl on my primitive Geforce 2 card.

Other than that, you can check out my experience with it here

[djhobo9]

I did some conversion with some SuSE rpms and managed to get Xgl running quite well on Debian testing/unstable (using it right now). By quite well, though, I mean no cube and no transparency . But the window-drag effects, the new alt-tab menu, and the expose-like feature are enough to make me very anxious for a true release into the Deb experimental repos. In the meantime I just can't abandon my Debian no matter how appealing some parts of Arch look .

Good article, though!

[bryansmith]

I got it working fairly well on a Frugalware install. It was slow (hooray for integrated graphics) but performed as advertised.

Bryan