Trying to get Xgl working

After a good Foss-Ed event and having met the 3/4 of the people who were founders' or co-founders' of LAMP stack, I was ready to get back to dangerous life living on the bleeding edge.

What better way to start it off by trying to install the highly experimental Xgl server. If you haven't already heard about Xgl, I'd recommend you run! to novell's site and download the awesome videos.

In a nutshell, Xgl will bring the cool, slick MacOSX desktop effects to GNU/Linux. Actually it will even be better than the MacOSX desktop and will most probably be superior to the upcoming Vista desktop. Check out the videos, as words simply can't describe it.

So I set off trying to get it installed on Gentoo. As a first step I removed the current stable molothic X, in favor for the unstable and hard masked modular Xorg as described in the Gentoo XGL Howto. This wasn't at all easy has it sounds. After unmasking a couple of dozen packages, some that weren't even mentioned in the Howto, I managed to get X working again with one glitch -- no keyboard support. After a bit of resting and googling, I managed to find the problem. The path of the XKeysymDB had changed in the new installation but X was still looking at the old location. Creating a symlink and additionally adding some keymapping entries to the xorg.conf file fixed that.


ln -s /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB /usr/lib/X11/XKeysymDB



Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Next up was getting the latest port overlays that had the glx and compiz packages which makes all this magic possible. Unfortunately at the moment kde isn't supported and I didn't have the latest gnome packages. As a result emerging compiz didn't generate the gnome-window-decorator which is required to wrap around a gtk app to provide the gui eye candy.

So it looks like I need to emerge more gnome stuff that I've been keeping away for a long time, if I'm going to see anything at all. Just started re-emerging cairo, gtk+ and pango to discover I needed more - gnome control-center and libwnck.

But it's late already, 1AM. Since I have a class tomorrow, looks like I'm gonna have to postpone this to tomorrow.

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