Latest Fedora Xorg and the compositor

[Olivier Fourdan]

On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 21:31 +0200, Nikolas Arend wrote:
> although my main question was not about speed, I will check the hardware 
> acceleration of my card (ATI Radeon).

It doesn't seem so :/

> I understand from your mail that the compositor is not actually 
> configurable itself but only sort of a link between X and the desktop/
> window manager in the sense of "composing" what features X is providing. 
> So to change the look'n'feel of the desktop (transparencies,
> shadows, support for accessibility applications, etc) I would have to 
> modify the X server settings, is that correct? Or do the applications
> must make use of and support the new xorg features natively (and if they 
> don't I won't see those)?

The compositing manager is really just a piece of software, like the
window manager (in xfwm4, it's embedded)

The compositing extensions in X do'nt know nothing about shadows,
transparency etc. They just give hooks so that one can implement a
compositing manager, but that's all in compositing manager.

In other terms, ther earen't any option in X to configure the
compositing manager because it's really not X that does it.

Like any software, the compositor can be made configurable or not. I
choose to make it not configurable because I prefer to have it like that
(by design it's just my choice to do so).

If you want a highly configurable compisotor, you may want to try
xcompmgr (only available from freedesktop.org CVS AFAIK) - That
compositing manager can run sperately from the WM, so you can run it
with any WM including xfwm4 if you disable its internal compositing
manager.

xcompmgr has various side effects though, YMMV.

I hope all that makes sense ;)

Cheers,
OlivieR.