xcompmgr and the composite extension?

Eric Anholt anholt at FreeBSD.org
Thu Dec 23 19:31:15 PST 2004


On Thu, 2004-12-23 at 22:16 -0500, Adam Weinberger wrote:
> Eric -
> 
> I have a default x11/xorg installation, and I installed xcompmgr. But
> when I try to start X, I get the following:
> 
> No composite extension
> 
> waiting for X server to shut down
> 
> 
> How does one load the composite extension? Do users have to do something
> special to enable it, or did I likely screw up along the way?

(Forwarding to x11@, since this will be asked frequently)

You need to add the following section to your xorg.conf:

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

You do *not* need to have Option "RENDER" "Enable" as you might hear on
gentoo forums or other places that that rumor has spread to.

Note that just "xcompmgr" won't change things much (can you identify
what's different?  It's acutally the most important change to me :) ).
xcompmgr -c gets you shadows.  xcompmgr -f gets you fades in/out.  To
make a window transparent, get and install transset from
xapps.freedesktop.org.  Yes, it's only in CVS currently.

And the next thing you'll say is "wow, this is so slow!"  Yes.  It is.
Enabling DRI can help you a bit.  Latest X.Org CVS can help more if
you've got a Radeon.  If you've got NVIDIA, adding Options "RenderAccel"
"Yes" to your device section with the NVIDIA driver can help even more,
if you're willing to see things explode if you're unlucky.

To fix the slowness, we (X.Org) need to scrap the XFree86 Acceleration
Architecture and put something designed for hardware from the last 5
years in.  That's going to be a lot of work.

-- 
Eric Anholt                                eta at lclark.edu          
http://people.freebsd.org/~anholt/         anholt at FreeBSD.org


More information about the freebsd-x11 mailing list