Just Installed!

[DaCalebMan]

Hey guys, just installed Ubuntu latest.

Really cool stuff, love the two desktop function...

Anyway, I have Intel extreme graphics 2 installed... I want to get Visual effects working, but it just says: Visual effects can't be enabled...

Anyone know what's up???

~Caleb

[devils casper]

Execute this

sudo lspci | grep -i vga

Post output here.

[DaCalebMan]

Here's what I got...

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82865G Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)

Thanks for the reply

~Caleb

[Drunk_Mexican]

Hey guys, just installed Ubuntu latest.

Really cool stuff, love the two desktop function...

Anyway, I have Intel extreme graphics 2 installed... I want to get Visual effects working, but it just says: Visual effects can't be enabled...

Anyone know what's up???

~Caleb

You probably need to get your graphics card working. The easiest way I know how to do this is by following this link.

Forlong's Blog - Compiz-Check

To get all the cool visual effects you need to run a program called compiz-fusion and to get compiz-fusion to work you need your graghics card working.

You will need to open up a terminal and copy paste some commands.

On the site that link send you when you scroll down there is some highlighted commands.
Put this copy/paste in your terminal.

wget http://blogage.de/files/9124/download -O compiz-check

After that is finished....run this

chmod +x compiz-check

then finally run this in terminal

./compiz-check

Post the output here, and if it asks for more information type 'y', if it asks to search for a driver type 'y' as well.

You might get a little screen that shows you a list of drivers with a recommended one, if you do select the recommended one.

After this is done we can get compiz-fusion (cool 3-d desktop effects working).

It will not take long to do all this if you just copy/paste...but you will need to reboot after the system finds your driver.

[DaCalebMan]

Thanks Drunk Mexican,

I had already tried that, but I got an error in one of the checks...
After some serious searching, I realised that Ubuntu is not very compatible with Intel graphics cards. Sadly I made a dumb mistake in not checking graphic compatibility first! I think I'll upgrade my graphics card to a better Linux compatible one...

Is this a good idea? OR is there an extremely simple way.

~Caleb...

[bigtomrodney]

It's really just bad timing, Intel chips work really well with Compiz generally speaking. In fact you don't even need to install compiz fusion as desktop effects is essentially Compiz plus a selection of stable plugins.

Intel are in the process of changing to the new UXA acceleration architecture. Unfortunately Xorg hasn't yet moved over fully to UXA/Gem so the driver is somewhat unstable. You can force it to work if you wish but you will be prone to lockups. The 9.10 release in October should resolve these issues. I've run Compiz on Intel 945 chips with excellent performance so it's certainly viable - just unfortunate timing as I said. If you google "intel jaunty workaround" you should get some good tutorials on how to proceed if you still want to enable it.

Good luck