Enabling Compiz on the Aspire One

So, you now have the ability to do what you please with Linpus, you’ve seen those videos of people turning linux desktops into a cube, having wobbly windows, and much more…

 

Compiz actually runs quite nice on the One, although there are some problems with streaming video (well, any video actually), it lags, but I think that’s just a driver problem.

 

Anyway it’s simple to activate, yep, not install, but activate. Since Linpus is based of Fedora 8, it’s actually intergrated into the operating system itself, just not turned on. The only thing you have to do is install one app and you’re set. This app is called “Fusion-Icon”.

 

The first step to doing this is to open up terminal either via right click or ALT+F2. After this, type in the following “sudo -y yum install fusion-icon”, for those who don’t know, Yum is the installation program that is used in RPM based system, it’s no the best, but it works. The -y parameter is just saying “Say yes to everything”, I would suggest you use this if you know what you’re installing!

 

After this is done, just launch Fusion-Icon via Alt+F2, it’ll activate compiz and you’ll be spinning the desktop in no time.

 

Oh, and if you want more themes for Emerald (the window decorator), in terminal just type “sudo yum install emerald-themes”, this will get you a nice amount of themes to choose from, I recommend Minimal for a great space saver, there’s is a thinner title bar theme, but I found it a tad to small for me.

 

Thing is though, due to the lack of access to the session manager, at least to my knowledge (I don’t usually use this environment, if you can access a session manager, please email me with the details and I’ll update the guide, or make a comment of course! ) you can’t easily launch Fusion-Icon on each startup, which if you’re like me that really annoys you, >.<.

 

The best thing to do is knock out 2 birds with one stone, that is, killing the startup of the desktop search bar and also allowing Fusion-Icon to start upon, well, startup.

 

The key to this is in the launch script for acer-search-desktop itself, which is located in “/usr/share/search-bar/start-search_bar.sh”. This file looks like this on default.

 

 

#!/bin/sh

#resolution=`xrandr |grep \*|awk ‘{print $1}’`

resolution=`xrandr |grep current|awk -F”current” ‘{print $2}’|awk -F”,” ‘{print $1}’|sed ‘s/\ //g’`

 

if [ $resolution = "1280x800" ];then

acer-search-desktop –x=650 –y=90 –width=490 –height=31

elif [ $resolution = "1024x600" ];then

acer-search-desktop –x=510 –y=65 –width=490 –height=31

else

acer-search-desktop

fi

 

 

Now, to take out the booting of the search bar, simply comment the lines that have “acer-search-desktop”, then after doing that, before the if statement asking for resolution size add “fusion-icon”.

 

#!/bin/sh

#resolution=`xrandr |grep \*|awk ‘{print $1}’`

resolution=`xrandr |grep current|awk -F”current” ‘{print $2}’|awk -F”,” ‘{print $1}’|sed ‘s/\ //g’`

 

fusion-icon

 

if [ $resolution = "1280x800" ];then

# acer-search-desktop –x=650 –y=90 –width=490 –height=31

elif [ $resolution = "1024x600" ];then

# acer-search-desktop –x=510 –y=65 –width=490 –height=31

else

# acer-search-desktop

fi

 

 

Remember though, keep an empty line at the end of the file!

 

And that’s it, you’re done, you’ve taken out the booting of the pesky desktop search bar as well as booting compiz, give yourself a pat on the back, .

 

 

 

Thanks for reading, remember to comment, oh, and as usual, don’t forget to email any ideas for posts, may it be Digg posts, hot topics, or just ideas for how-to guides to my email address: ghostinterface@gmail.com.