Tuesday, October 30, 2007

How I set up Gutsy Gibbon with KDE/Compiz on Nvidia

I was psyched for the new Ubuntu 7.10 release, Gutsy Gibbon, but I'm a KDE user and I had a lot of problems upgrading Feisty/Kubuntu to Gutsy. I followed the instructions using AdeptI had some minor successes, but I was unable to get the upgrade, and KDE and Compiz to work in combination. In the end, here's a rough overview of what I wound up doing:

1. Clean install of Gutsy Ubuntu (Gnome)

2. Go into restricted driver manager and enable restricted drivers for nVidia (Compiz worked right off!)

3. Using Synaptic package manager, add the Advanced Desktop Effects Manager (CompizConfig Settings Manager)

4. Now there is a new button "Custom" when you configure your desktop settings

5. Stop to play around with adding desktop effects. Remember to turn your vertical desktop size to 1 and horizontal to 4. Otherwise you will have a plane instead of a cube.

6. Back to Synaptic. Add "kubuntu-desktop". Wait a long time for lots of packages to download/install

7. Select KDE as the default environment

8. Wait some more. Reboot the machine when everything is finished.

9. The machine will come up in KDM. Go over to the little picture of a drop down, click, and select Session Type->"KDE", instead of "Default (previous)"

10. Log in and wait for desktop to come up

11. Compiz will be disabled. Don't panic: go to the KDE menu and select Settings->GL Desktop

12. Enable GL Desktop

13. Configure Compiz as desired using Settings->Advance Desktop Effets Settings

I won't bother going into any more details for now. Feel free to post comments if you have any questions

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