Compiz Fusion, never again.
I just tried to get compiz-fusion working on my second computer (the one with the good graphics card) in Arch and, well, it didn’t. I followed, to the letter, all the guides on the Arch wiki about installing the drivers for my graphics card, and then about installing compiz-fusion. I had a number of problems with each step.
Firstly, aticonfig decided to break my xorg.conf. Before running aticonfig, I had a nice vesa set up. After running aticonfig, I had out of range errors and blinking screens. That was a little irritating, as I had spent a while reading up on the exact parameters I would need to feed to aticonfig. So, I had to fix it by editing my xorg.conf a little.
Secondly, after my graphics card was working and everything was installed, compiz just wouldn’t start. Running fusion-icon and compiz –replace gave me the same error message: Something along the lines of "Another window manager is running. Instead of replacing it I’m gonna restart Xorg! Ha!". Of course, I even got this error in plain Xorg with no window manager, which made it all the more confusing. After reading a few troubleshooting guides and help sites, I just gave up. I reverted back to the vesa drivers, removed all the ATI and compiz fusion stuff, and am back to plain Openbox.
Compiz fusion worked perfectly on that machine in Ubuntu. Now, I don’t particularly want to have to install another distro just to make it look nice, as I like Arch, but I may end up doing just that. That machine was going to be my "wow, Linux looks good" machine, hence my need for compiz fusion, which I would normally avoid at all costs as it isn’t the fastest of programs…
