So last week has been pretty busy but that has not much to do with work…
On wednesday 22nd of february at 03h50 AM our second kid came in this world, Noelle spent 3 days at the hospital during which i had to watch after my daughter Zoe. I had a lot of fun with her and i’ll definitely miss her a lot tomorrow when going back to work. Leon is here now at home and it feels good being 4 in this house. He is 51,5 cms tall and 3,450kg.
During all the naps Zoe has been doing during those days i decided to try XGL on my home workstation. I upgraded to Dapper, installed XGL & compiz, followed some tutorials here and there, fought with gnome-session for at least 2 hours, been tricked by features shown in videos that are not available at all… But well finally i have it up and running.
One of my first goals was to make sure totem with GStreamer 0.10 works correctly there and it does. Well XVideo is still very experimental but it kind of works. I got pretty irritated at seeing all the demos being done with mplayer… Guys the exact same demos are doable with Totem + GStreamer 0.10 from Dapper default install !
My feedback is basically that i disabled the wobbly windows very quickly it’s not fluid enough to feel good (too much glitches), the cube is fun but not very usefull and that breaks the workspace switcher applet which sucks. The alt-tab replacement and F12 Expose feature is a real plus tough. I got a bit angry because the demonstration videos are showing a right click menu on window’s title to set opacity. That doesn’t exist, i ve searched in the code, the tutorials, the #xgl channel… nothing ! The only way is to use xbindkeys together with your wheel mouse to adjust opacity, that’s just marketing teasing !! bad ! bad ! 
So my final opinion on XGL for now : nice eyecandy, some useful features (Expose and Alt-tab), lot of not so usefull stuff (cube, zoom, wobbly, opacity, fading), some annoying issues (workspace applet broken, command line launcher broken, slow startup of the xgl server) but they should be easy to fix. So i think i ll keep it for sometimes it’s pleasant, nice work David. Oh one more thing, the application opening effect of metacity with the rectangle growing wider is very ugly compared to the rest of the eye candy, it would be nice to disable that somehow. (For the people who are going to claim that wobbly is not fluid because of my machine being slow : Pentium IV 3Ghz HT, 1Gig of RAM, Radeon 9800 Pro with fglrx…)
