Upgrade Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, plus ATI and Compiz

I decided to upgrade from Ubuntu Edgy Eft to Feisty Fawn. First impression is good. I had only to reconfigure VMware Server. There’s also some disturbing property in Gaim 2.0beta6; it’s still downloading old Gmail friends list. But new feature, mail notification, is very cool, so no harm done :-).

To upgrade your Ubuntu distribution type (in terminal):

sudo update-manager -c -d

Click here and there, wait a bit of time (mine upgrade took about 2h, with downloading). Important thing is to answer some questions whether to keep or overwrite configuration files of some services. Usually it is better to keep your old confs. And thats it! How do you like your new operating system? :-)

With ATI/Compiz it took me some time to get it all working. First I followed some tutorials. But it only messed with my xorg.conf. So I loaded oldest conf (from first installation I think) and started from scratch.

Step-by-step (or better cmd-after-cmd :-)):

Just in case:

sudo modprobe -r fglrx

Then:

sudo apt-get remove xorg-driver-fglrx

You probably already have it, but:

sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri

OK, now edit your xorg.conf:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Find Section “Device”, and edit, so it look like this:

Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Technologies, Inc. RV350 AS [Radeon 9600]"
Driver "radeon"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps"
Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "AGPFastWrite" "true"
Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "true"
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "true"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "true"
EndSection

Yeah, I know I mentioned in other post that I have 9550 but I’ve done some kinky tweaks on my graphic card and it’s now 9600 (rv350), even PRO :-).

In Section “Screen” I’ve left only one resolution, It’s good choice for me, because I never change it. My LCD gives best view on max resolution, wich is 1280×1024.

There are two more things to do. In Section “ServerLayout” add this line:

Option "AIGLX" "true"

From what I know it has to be on top of other entries in this section.

And the last step is to add two more sections:

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

Instead of Enable you can put 1 (one).To make the changes take effect, you have to restart your X server. Do this by rebooting your computer or simply by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.

Voila!

Now you should go to System->Preferences->Desktop Effects and enable Composite manager (Compiz by default). You can try and play with more feature-based Beryl, but I do, really, not recommend it. It’s highly unstable. Maybe with Nvidia cards it works better, but if you have ATI – stay away.

Optionally add some compiz packages through Synaptic.

TIP! I encountered a very annoying problem after first enabling Compiz. I’ve lost my left mouse button functinality, LOL! It was really funny when I tried to click something and all I could get was another screenshot#.png file on my desktop. It wasn’t hard to google answer. It is reported on launchpad.net under Bug #90918. Quick how-to:
Open gconf-editor, and navigate to apps/compiz/plugins/screenshot/allscreens/options. Disable initiate_button.

Uff. Have a nice day.