Enabling Compiz in Mate

[mark1mint]

Hi ,I'm trying Mint Debian mostly using the Mate desktop (Cinnamon is proving to be too buggy at the moment on my computer),I have the fglrx driver installed through synaptic,and Compiz plugins also installed,but no matter what effect I select in the Compiz control panel,I get nothing,no wobbly windows,no desktop expo,nothing .Clearly I must be missing something stupid,can you please point me in the right direction?

[Darcy]

try entering this in a Terminal Window, then try compiz.

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compiz --replace

[deviceguru]

I tried that suggestion and, although it does enable compiz, CPU utilization immediately jumps to about 70 percent from less than 10 percent when compiz starts.

[Nuts2u]

Open a terminal and type the following command:

killall -9 marco

Then press the enter key. This will allow your cpu utilization to drop down quite a bit.

[mark1mint]

try entering this in a Terminal Window, then try compiz.

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compiz --replace

That half worked,as compiz was started as window manager,and its effects kinda worked,but the terminal got stuck on some operation while enabling plugins or something like that,and the new settings didn't stick:upon logging out and then back in,or rebooting,compiz was disabled again.
I kinda fixed it following this advice

in a terminal type “mateconf-editor”
When the editor opens:
Go to /desktop/mate/session/required_components/windowmanager and replace "marco" with "compiz".

from this tutorial http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/919
now things work reasonably well,apart from the fact that Alt+Tab and Ctrl+Alt+Tab no longer work:any ideas on how can I fix that? Hopefully is something silly that I am overlooking,like setting the correct key bindings or something.

[Honest Mistake]

Check your Compiz settings - maybe Application Switcher plugin is turned off?

[mark1mint]

Check your Compiz settings - maybe Application Switcher plugin is turned off?

Sure,it was turned off indeed thank you very much for the heads up.

But,in the meantime I've discovered that Compiz doesn't stick not even if it's specified as the default window manager with Configuration Editor,meaning I still have to call it with

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 compiz --replace

and still the terminal windows hangs on something like

Setting Update "active_plugins"

-any ideas on how to straighten this?

[Honest Mistake]

But,in the meantime I've discovered that Compiz doesn't stick not even if it's specified as the default window manager with Configuration Editor,meaning I still have to call it with

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 compiz --replace

and still the terminal windows hangs on something like

Setting Update "active_plugins"

-any ideas on how to straighten this?

Unless I'm misunderstanding your post, I think I know what is wrong. Running "compiz --replace" in the terminal does not actually hang. The problem is that you should be running "compiz --replace &" to make the new process independent from the terminal. Without that the process continues to run in the terminal and will terminate when you close the terminal.

But if you want to run compiz at startup, you should just put "compiz --replace" in your startup applications. Changing the window manager setting to compiz in the mateconf-editor does not actually start compiz (don't ask me why) - it just makes sure that marco window manager doesn't start as well (marco doesn't play well with compiz).

[mark1mint]

Once again,thanks a lot That did the trick,now Compiz is working and stays enabled as the preferred windows manager in Mate.
On a side note,I still think that either more detailed instructions on how to enable and run properly Compiz in Mint (when choosing the Mate desktop) should go in the release notes,or these tweaks should be more automated once one installs the Compiz plugins package from repository.

[Brahim]

For better results do the following:

1- Install "compizconfig-settings-manager" and "compiz-fusion-plugins-extra"

2- In terminal run "compiz --replace"

3- Go to Startup Applications click on add and in the name field write "compiz" and in the command field enter "compiz --replace"(without the punctuation) click on Add again then Close. This is to make compiz start automatically on next logins.

4- To stop that high CPU usage run in terminal “mateconf-editor”. When the editor opens go to /desktop/mate/session/required_components/windowmanager and replace "marco" with "compiz".

5- To change window decorations install gconf-editor then run it (In terminal run "gconf-editor"). Navigate to /apps/metacity/general/theme and set the value to your Metacity theme name. Mint’s default is Mint-X.

There you go!!!!!!

[Brahim]

In case you lose window decoration after installing another desktop environment, simply run:

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sudo apt-get install compiz-gnome


and

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gtk-window-decorator --replace&


That's it