XGL/Compiz customizations on Ubuntu

So I’ve got XGL/Compiz up and running and, I must say, it is hot. See the full entry for screenshots of what I’ve done so far.


That’s the cube as I’m rotating it. That’s a photo of the city of Baltimore in the background with the capital dome on top of the cube.

That’s the result of hitting Alt-Tab to choose which window I want to use. You can see the nice transparency I’ve got going on.

That’s the Expose-like feature, for you OS X fans, that allows me to see all the windows on that desktop and take my pick of which one I want.

That’s an example of Firefox being on top of some other windows but with its opacity decreased so that I could see them. This was actually very useful when I wanted a full-screen browser but also wanted to keep up with how a command was running in a term behind it. I decreased FF’s opacity just slightly so I could read both easily.

What can’t be pictured are the following, since they involve motion and I can’t capture successfully in a screenshot:

1. When a tooltip pops up, it zooms in from nothing and then disappears back to nothing, very smoothly;
2. When menus pop up, they do the same thing;
3. When I drag a window around, the sides jiggle as though the whole window is made of a sheet of rubbery plastic.

CGWD Themer was used to adjust the look of the window decorations, and gconf-editor was used to change the images on the top and bottom of the cube as well as to put up the background behind the cube. In gconf-editor, to change the cube’s top and bottom images, I went to / > apps > compiz > plugins > cube > screen0 > options and changed ‘images_bottom’ and ‘images_top’. I enabled ’skydome’ to get the image behind the cube and changed ’skydome_image’ to set which image to use.

I followed this Compiz.net tutorial, the second version.