Okay, first things first, my computer is a prebuilt Dell Inspiron 531s
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+
ATI Radeon HD2400 Pro
2 Gigs of ram
plenty of disk space
I started off by installing the proprietary ATI drivers and got them working without a hitch. I was noticing tearing with videos, and I was experiencing problems with flash. I tried many different video players and tried different video output settings (including recommended settings for Compiz). Nothing solved the window & video tearing. Any time I'd view a video on youtube, it would play correctly until I would go to full screen. My display would cut out and only the top 5% of my screen would display anything and it was all squashed together. I'd have to hard reset to get the video working again.
As far as what I did to fix these issues, I consulted the all knowing google and set to work. I started by reinstalling the open source ATI drivers, no dice. I used 3 different versions of flash (and finally settled on the "square" release), still no dice. I had tried editing every setting that had been recommended as a fix and still found nothing to fix the problem. The last idea I found was to install Mutter (thereby replacing Compiz as the window manager I'd assume) and suddenly everything is working absolutely perfect and a bit snappier as well. No more video tearing and full screen flash.
I edited .gnomerc and now I'm running Mutter on login. Was this a good option, and is anyone else using Mutter instead of Compiz?Is there an issue with Compiz compositing and ATI cards/OpenGL? I frankly don't know a whole lot about Compiz or DEs & WMs in general, but I was curious as to why this occurred. Maybe a more well-versed Linux user can chime in with his/her expertise or ideas? Hopefully my plight can help someone who is experiencing the same issue.
Thanks.
