Why is it so hard for me to get XGL installed and working?

[Disillusion]

Am I the only one who has NEVER been able to make XGL work in Ubuntu? I have an ATI card in my laptop and installed the fglrx card and the driver worked fine. Then I tried a tutorial and everything seemed to install fine. Then, I added something to the Xorg.conf to prevent lock ups with my X300 card, rebooted, and now X won't ****ing start. I tried to go into recovery mode and gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf but it says it won't work because it's not GUI or some ****. Well, I can't run gui because something in that file is screwed up and it won't let me edit it back to normal!

 

[The General]

The ATi card is what is making it difficult, the ATi Linux drivers are a huge pain in the arse. Which "how to" were you following? My friend got xgl/compiz to work on his MacBook Pro w/ an ATi Radeon X1600 using this tutorial.
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=131253

 

[Disillusion]

Well, I managed to get the GUI to run in recovery mode and using the root account in the terminal, I repaired the xorg.conf so I'm back to normal again.

General, I followed that exact same How To you just posted.

 

[Disillusion]

One problem that I'm having is installing compiz. My synaptic package manager says I installed it. I even tried reinstalling it once. Then, the config editor says it's not there. So I can't even configure it.

 

[The General]

sudo dpkg -P compiz

 

[Disillusion]

Hmm...I just read a how to saying that if I type in glxinfo and it says direct rendering: no. That means XGL and Compiz won't even work on my system.

That just doesn't make sense to me. I have a Dell i9300 with a ATI Mobility X300 video card. Shouldn't it work?

 

[TheRecluse]

btw you can't use gedit in a text mode.. you have to use a text based editor like "joe" or something.

better than trying to edit your xorg.conf after you messed it up is to just back it up. after you make a copy of it (such as xorg.conf_backup) just mv it over

 

[Greg]

btw you can't use gedit in a text mode.

Whaa? I use it all the time to edit my xorg.conf...

But yes, making a backup of your xorg.conf is important, it saves a lot of time.

 

[The General]

No, what he means is that you can't use gedit unless X is running.

 

[Disillusion]

Well, here's a little update. I got XGL + Beryl (new compiz name) working on both the desktop and the laptop. Runs better on the desktop though because of the nVIDIA card. I think ATIs drivers suck *** for Linux.

I used this tutorial for the desktop.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=268036

This one (same thread) for the laptop with the ATI card.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1561758&postcount=26

Great How To's. Worked perfect for me the first time, no problems.