Why it's a bad time to buy a laptop right now

Tisiphone is getting old and slightly cracked around the edges, so I thought it might be time for a replacement. After all, two major reasons to move to the US are cheap clothes (girls) and hardware (guys).
I don't want to indulge in product placement but the Asus U30Jc looked quite sexy to me: a moderately fast i3 processor, 13 inch, not too heavy, widescreen, 8-10 hours battery life, at least a partial aluminium case, hybrid graphics and significantly cheaper than a comparable MacBook Pro (and before daWuzzzz starts a war in the comments section: the hardware-optimised OS on the Mac is no good if you intend to run Linux...)
Ay, there's the rub: hybrid graphics on Linux is still in early development, and apparently the Nvidia Optimus technology (check out this Nvidia whitepaper for specs) would need a major Xorg makeover to function.
I'd consider just getting the machine and waiting for Xorg/driver updates, if I could at least use the Nvidia chip all the time or manually switch with a server reboot, but apparently one is confined to the Intel-on-board chip right now. Nvidia blames Xorg and has better things to do than work towards a solution and the Linux hybrid graphics hackers concentrate more on getting the conventional switching setup to work.
I really don't like settling on an older model just for compatibility reasons and I have forsworn ATI forever (don't start me on driver issues), so I'll see what transpires and in any case wait for the USB3-capable chipsets to become standard.
I think I'll have to go on a major frustration shopping spree now - in this town, it should be easy to spend the equivalent of a quite high-end notebook on shoes and handbags.
Update (7/26): There seems to be slight progress on the vga_switcheroo front with the nouveau drivers on an Asus N61 with an Optimus card according to the hybrid-graphics mailing list - they didn't specify the exact model (hopefully the N61Jq, it's the only one with Optimus).

Really, openSuSE!

Touchpad control - great!
Improved wireless handling - impressive!
No desktop effects without kernel tweaking - priceless.

The 11.3 installation report:

I love disper!

...and, if you use a laptop with nVidia graphics and want to extend/clone your screen output to an external monitor or projector, you will, too.
Disper is a python-based command line app and can be downloaded from here. I don't think there are any prerequisites except the nVidia packages and basic Python, and potentially xrandr. Install with make /sudo make install.
The beauty of disper is that it automatically and quite intelligently fits your screen resolution and panning to the detected displays.

Rotating my screen output

or: Who ate my xorg.conf?
Oh. SuSE did, as the xorg.conf file is deprecated for newer versions of Xorg. Right.
Which posed a bit of a problem, as I needed the file to make xrandr work. Xrandr is a console app able to flip your screen by multiples of 90° (actually, it can do a lot more) via
xrandr -o left #right, inverted, normal

openSuSE 11.1 on an Apple MacBook Pro

Meet polyhymnia, my new Apple MacBook Pro 13'' with standard processor and 2 GB RAM. For convenience, the first thing I did was exchanging the 160 GB harddrive against a 500 GB one. While installing MacOS X I already left 60 GB free for an openSuSE installation. If you want to install openSuSE as well and didn't do that, follow the hints on OpenSUSE.org.

Fusion icon and direct rendering

Compiz is working on both Xanthippe and Tisiphone for a change. The ATI 8.45 driver install on Xanthippe worked similarly to the 8.43 one, bless them, and is at least no worse than its predecessors (video still not working on top of compiz).
For compiz startup, one might use compiz-manager, which is an executable shell script in /usr/bin and can be installed via YaST. After some preliminary tests it starts compiz and fusion-icon, if the latter is present. Alternatively, just start fusion-icon with preselected compiz, this saves you one not entirely necessary compiz restart.
Apparently the newer nVidia drivers have problems with the libgl-indirect rendering, starting compiz in a shell without the "--no-libgl-fallback" option on Tisiphone results in a "No GLXFBConfig for default depth" error, and neither window borders nor keyboard input in X (here fusion-icon is invaluable to restart kwin). As fusion-icon doesn't seem to pass any options per default, it fails reloading compiz properly. So, one has to pass on all necessary compiz option to fusion icon and/or compiz-manager.

Modify (as root) /usr/bin/compiz-manager, add whatever options you deem necessary:

...
COMPIZ_OPTIONS="--no-libgl-fallback --ignore-desktop-hints --replace"
...

Do the same for /usr/lib(64)/python/site-packages/FusionIcon/data.py:

...
compiz_args = ['--replace', '--ignore-desktop-hints', '--no-libgl-fallback']
...

For all lazybones out there - link compiz-manager in the Autostart folder:
$ cd ~/.kde/Autostart
$ ln -s /usr/bin/compiz-manager or ln -s /usr/bin/fusion-icon

However, Xanthippe ist still behaving a bit weirdly: no Python tweaking whatever can induce her to start compiz properly with fusion-icon, whilst compiz-manager works perfectly. I wonder whether I really want to tackle that one...

Upgrade your nVidia drivers to the very latest version

This is sort of an addendum to my last post, since fixing the eyecandy suddenly made Pandora have resume and session switching issues. As it turns out, this is a bug in the nVidia drivers, which has fortunately been fixed in the latest version. Thanks to the folks at opencompositing.org for pointing this out! At the time of writing, this version (100.14.23) is not in the openSUSE repository yet, neither can it be found on nvidia.com - however, it's been hiding out on the German nVidia website since October, so go ahead and download it from there.

The following HowTo only applies if you used YaST to install your nVidia drivers. If you used the installer script before, I suppose you know how to do this already...

Now backup your xorg.conf if you haven't done so already - in fact, you should always have a backup of your working xorg.conf, it saves you soooooo much trouble!

> cd /etc/X11
> su
# cp xorg.conf xorg.conf.working

Revert your xorg.conf to a state prior to the installation of the proprietary drivers:

# cp xorg.conf.nvidia-postun xorg.conf

Uninstall the following packages via YaST or your favorite package management tool:

nvidia-gfxG01-kmp-kernelflavor
x11-video-nvidiaG01

Make sure you disable any startup scripts that start compiz by default. Restart your computer to check whether the uninstallation worked ok.

End your current session (not before you write down the following!). At the login prompt, go to "System" --> "Console login". Log in as root and change into the directory where you saved the installer.

# sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-100.14.23-pkg1.run -q

and follow the instructions. If you are an X-Phile like me, smile at the "Searching for conflicting X-files" bit :-) Once the installer has finished, run

# sax2 -r -m 0=nvidia (that's a zero, in case you are wondering)

Once that's all finished, restart your computer (shutdown -r now). If you had compiz running previously, simply replace your current xorg.conf with your backup file:

# cp xorg.conf.working xorg.conf

Restart your X server and enjoy!

Blurring my window decoration

As of today, I can finally use my favorite Emerald window decoration again (unblurred it looked really awful) so I guess now that I have my eyecandy working again, I have no excuse not to post anymore....

So without further ado, I present you my very first post, HowTo get compiz working with xorg and native nVidia drivers (and make sure your window decorations are blurred).

First of all, make sure you have the proprietary nVidia drivers installed - in openSUSE 10.3, this can easily be achieved via 1-click install.

Then, install the following packages:

compiz
compizconfig-settings-manager
compiz-emerald
compiz-emerald-themes
compiz-fusion-kde
compiz-fusion-plugins-extra
compiz-fusion-plugins-main
compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported
compiz-kde


Modify your xorg.conf:

Section "Module"

Make sure the following two lines are commented out if they exist:

# Load "dri"
# Load "GLcore"

Ad the following line:

Load "glx"


Section "Device"

Add the following lines below "Driver":

Option "RenderAccel" "true"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"


Section "Screen"

Make sure "DefaultDepth" is set to 24, if it isn't already, then add the following lines below "EndSubSection" or above the first "SubSection":

Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "true"
Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "true"


Restart your X server.


Open the Compiz Settings Manager (ccsm), go to the "Window Decoration" plugin and in "Command" enter the following:

"emerald --replace" if you want Emerald as your window decorator or

"kde-window-decorator --replace" if you want the classical KDE window decorator.


Use the following command to start compiz:

compiz --replace ccp &


If your window decorations are not blurred (which seems to be a problem with some nVidia cards), try the following:

Start the Emerald Theme Manager (emerald-theme-manager -i) and go to the "Emerald Settings" tab, and make sure "Compiz Decoration Blur Type" is set to "All decoration".

If your decorations still aren't blurred, start compiz with the following options:

compiz --replace --no-libgl-fallback ccp & .


To return to use the default KDE window manager, run: kwin --replace &


To make compiz automatically load upon login, create a file called compiz.sh in ~/.kde/Autostart, and into it paste the following:

::cut here::
#!/bin/sh

sleep 12

compiz --replace --no-libgl-fallback ccp &

::cut here::

Make the file executable:

# chmod +x compiz.sh