Due to a harddrive failure, I was forced to reinstall Linux on my aging laptop.  Previously, I had been running Gentoo which was built completely from source (if you want to learn about linux, building your own Gentoo installation from source is a great way).  Gentoo ran pretty fast on my old laptop since the only packages installed were the ones I had taken the time to build using Portage.  However, upgrades were always a pain since every package had to be built from source.  Yea yea yea, I know you can install pre-compiled packages from Portage, but what’s the fun in that, right?  Anyways, I’ve been running Debian on a home server and it’s pretty stable with no frills.  Ubuntu, being a quasi-derivative of Debian seemed like an attractive choice for a laptop.  Wow, is it ever.

As a derivative of Debian, Ubuntu uses the APT package handling utility and the Synaptic Package Manager graphical frontend.  I’d heard great things about the Compiz Fusion window manager and I’d always wanted to try it out (Look up Compiz on YouTube if you’re unfamiliar). With Ubuntu installed, I finally had the chance. It was a piece of cake to download and install the necessary packages using Synaptic, and here’s a list of the packages I installed to get it working:

1. compiz_0.7.4-0ubuntu6_all.deb
2. compiz-core_0.7.4-0ubuntu6_i386.deb
3. compiz-gnome_0.7.4-0ubuntu6_i386.deb
4. compiz-plugins_0.7.4-0ubuntu6_i386.deb
5. emerald_0.7.2-0ubuntu2_i386.deb
6. libdecoration0_0.7.4-0ubuntu6_i386.deb
7. libemeraldengine0_0.7.2-0ubuntu2_i386.deb
8. compiz-fusion-plugins-extra_0.7.4-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
9. compiz-fusion-plugins-main_0.7.4-0ubuntu5_i386.deb
10. compizconfig-backend-gconf_0.7.4-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
11. compizconfig-settings-manager_0.7.4-0ubuntu2_all.deb
12. fusion-icon_0.0.0+git20071028-2ubuntu2_all.deb
13. libcompizconfig0_0.7.4-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
14. python-compizconfig_0.7.4-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

I’m sorry if I missed any. You can find these by simply searching for “Compiz” in Synaptic. This list of packages includes all of the graphical configuration frontends which are useful in configuring the multitude of compiz options. You can tweak just about everything. I’m a big fan of the popular Cube desktop. Using a laptop with limited screen real estate is so much easier with hot keys which can rotate the cube in any direction to other (hopefully uncluttered) desktops. Also, if you’ve been thinking about trying Compiz but were worried that your graphics card wasn’t up to the task, don’t be. My laptop has a built-in intel graphics chip (using the i915 module I believe) and the Compiz cube desktop with flame effects and wobbly windows runs flawlessly. It even shows video while rotating the cube. Really awesome stuff.

Edit: I’ve noticed that this post has been somewhat popular, so I thought I’d point out that you can install compiz-fusion in the Synaptic Package Manager by selecting really only a few packages and the rest will be installed as dependencies.  These few are:

1. emerald_0.7.2-0ubuntu2_i386.deb
2. compizconfig-settings-manager_0.7.4-0ubuntu2_all.deb
3. fusion-icon_0.0.0+git20071028-2ubuntu2_all.deb

If the plugins packages aren’t installed, then they might have to be selected separately.  I believe all the other packages will be installed as dependencies of the three above.  Once that’s done, a fusion icon will appear in the system menu I believe, and you can access the compiz configuration GUI from there, as well as the emerald theme manager which lets you mess with window themes.  There are also options in there for metacity, but I ignored those and know little about them.