Michael Dolan Dot Com

Tuesday, March 21st, 2006

XGL - KDE and Gnome Finally

Ok, so I’ve streamlined my XGL implementation and have it working with both Gnome and KDE. Have to admit the trickiest part was figuring out that you have to compile compiz with gnome support (even if using KDE) to get gnome-window-decorator to compile properly…. then figuring out the load order for compiz to load and then launch KDE/Gnome was fun. All in all not such a bad experience. This time it’s running MUCH faster than when I first got it running on KDE - not sure what the hangup was but I think it’s b/c I’m using a newer source. However, KDE is running slower than Gnome - I’ll chalk it up to XGL being closely tied to Gnome at this point.

With XGL Gnome is running at approx 0.7% - 7% CPU utilization while KDE runs at about 30-40% CPU utilization. Sounds like either a bug or a result of having to use gnome-window-decorator and not one derived from Qt.

I’ll post a walkthrough on how I got setup when I get a free minute (could be a while). Honestly the Gentoo XGL guide was ok… needs some touches. I still need to figure out why I can’t shutdown KDE/Gnome without X freezing…

XGL and KDE -> a rare combo it seems…