X.Org and the Composite Extension on Debian Sid

August 20, 2005 1-minute read

A friend of mine recently asked how to enable the new eye candy features from X.org in Debian Sid. The required package xcompmgr is currently not part of the official repository, therefore we have to add a new entry to our sources.list:

deb http://debian.linux-systeme.com sid main
deb-src http://debian.linux-systeme.com sid main

Afterwards we can install the already mentioned xcompmgr

apt-get update
apt-get install xcompmgr

To activate the extension we have to add an additionally line to our xorg.conf

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

After a restart of the X server the eye candy stuff can be enabled by simply running

xcompmgr
xcompmgr -c # with shadows, see the manpage for further options

On my cheap notebook at home the whole thing is just too slow and not very usable (even fluxbox starts to lag).