U810 Xorg Munging Part 1

Xorg is going to need quite a bit of work so first of all lets just get it working at the right resolution with compiz-fusion (I'm assuming you know what this is and want it!). The installer does a reasonable job of autodetecting except that it gets hung up on 1024x768 instead of 1024x600 - you can set it right with SaX2 but there are another couple of places that need prodding to get the resolution to stick for good without resorting to 915resolution.

1. boot/grub/menu.lst - ensure that the boot parameters say vga=normal so we don't get the framebuffer in a silly mode
   
2. /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager - change the line at the end of the file to DISPLAYMANAGER_RANDR_MODE_auto=
   "1024x600 48.96 1024 1064 1168 1312 600 601 604 622 -HSync -VSync"
   

Now for compiz-fusion, first of all we need to get the Intel Xorg driver into AIGLX mode, then install compiz-fusion. Sathya Says has an explanation that pretty much matches what I did although I didn't have to do the one-click-install of compiz-manager - that seemed to come with the compiz-fusion install anyway.

The final bit is to start compiz-manager automatically - for some reason, Settings|KDE Components|Session Manager won't let me change the preferred windows manager from kwin. For each user you thus need to:

1. cd ~/.kde/Autostart
2. ln -s /usr/bin/compiz-manager
   

Now go and play!

A couple of gotchas...

• Updating the system has once resulted in the reversion of the displaymanager edit above.
• Running SaX2 seems to nobble the AIGLX setting in xorg.conf
• In /usr/bin/compiz-manager my COMPIZ_OPTIONS were prepended by -- rather than - so I went along with that.