[7933] in testers
Re: Compiz
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Fri Mar 13 18:34:58 2009
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LRH.2.00.0903131810470.14955@oliver.mit.edu>
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Cc: testers@mit.edu, Geoffrey Thomas <geofft@mit.edu>
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From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:33:51 -0400
To: Michael Khusid <mkhusid@mit.edu>
I'm also going to chime in on this issue. Because of recent findings
with regard to 3d operation with the radeon driver used on the Dell
Optiplex 745 systems.
On the Dell 755's we kludge cluster systems to use the radeon_hd driver.
I'm not sure what we run on the HPs, but both it and the radeon_hd do
3d with a software emulation of OpenGL.
The Dell 745s are using the radeon driver (which is a subtly
different code base from the radeon_hd driver.) It has some 3d
support implemented, but it's done in such a way that several third
part apps (gaussian, maya, and ac3d) do not work. Apparently the
driver over-reached, and opted for fast sometimes-correct operation
instead of slow always-correct operation.
Going forward, we expect the radeon driver to subsume the radeon_hd
driver and to be MUCH more functional when Jaunty comes out, and gets
integrated into Debathena.
All this is a very detailed way of saying, 3d doesn't work
everywhere. And we know.
-Bill Cattey
On Mar 13, 2009, at 6:15 PM, Geoffrey Thomas wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Mar 2009, Michael Khusid wrote:
>
>> Just noticed that the drivers for the public workstation video
>> cards support 3D acceleration. Took me less than 5 minutes to get
>> compiz running and the desktop cube spinning. Hello wobbly
>> windows :)
>>
>> I don't know if it should be the default behavior, but it surely
>> looks cooler than plain ole' Athena 9.
>
> We've made Compiz not the default on the beta, because there's a
> bug involving Compiz, zwgc, and the screensaver that causes your
> windows to be visible if you receive a zephyr.
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/336932
>
> Compiz works just fine if you disable zwgc (or are okay with the
> privacy issue), and don't have other applets like IM clients that
> can create windows when you're running the screen saver. Hopefully
> by the summer release we will have figured this out, and it will be
> the default again.
>
> --
> Geoffrey Thomas
> geofft@mit.edu
