Enabling Desktop Effects

Installing and Enabling Compiz Fusion

Compiz Fusion is an application for your Linux desktop to enable certain desktop effects such as Wobbly Windows and animations while switching desktops.

Compiz Fusion is only available for certain video cards using certain video drivers (programs that allow the OS, Fedora in this case, to talk to your video card) To see if your computer is able to use Compiz Fusion, we need to open the Terminal.
To open the Terminal, navigate to Applications, then the System Tools submenu, then click on Terminal.
The terminal allows text-based access to your computer. This is quite often used for administrative tasks.

To run the Compiz-Check application, we first must download it directly from the website, which we will do with a program called wget.

Once you have opened the Terminal, you should be presented with a line like so...
[aj@ajf11 ~]$

This is the command prompt. We can type our commands here to perform tasks on our computer that may not be available in the graphical portion of the operating system.

The first thing that we want to type into our command prompt to install Compiz-Check is the following:

wget http://blogage.de/files/9124/download -O compiz-check

This will tell the "wget" program to download the compiz-check file from http://blogage.de

Next, we have to make the file executable. By default, programs like this are not executable for security reasons. To make the file executable, type the following:

chmod +x compiz-check

This tells the "chmod" program to add the executable flag to the file "compiz-check"

And finally, we will run compiz-check. You can do so by doing the following.

./compiz-check

If the program says you can run compiz, then we will continue to the following steps. If not, you will have to resolve the problem. There is a lot of information available on this topic on Google.

If the test succeeds, we will install the compiz applications.
In the Terminal, type the following

su

This will ask you for the root password and change to the root user. The root user has access to everything on the system. It's usage should be as restricted as possible.

Then, run the following command.

yum install ccsm emerald-themes compizconfig-backend-gconf fusion-icon-gtk emerald compiz-fusion compiz-fusion-gnome libcompizconfig compiz-gnome compiz-bcop compiz compizconfig-python compiz-fusion-extras compiz-fusion-extras-gnome

This tells the "yum" program (the Fedora installer) to install the packages listed in the command. Once the install succeeds, we can activate desktop effects. The terminal can be closed at this point.
Now, to activate Desktop Effects, navigate to the System Menu, then then Preferences sub-menu, the click on Desktop Effects. You can check either of the options presented to you (I suggest both, out of coolness factor) and then click Desktop Effects. And there you are, compiz is activated and installed.

That should get you well and on your way to the world of customization and being truly free to do whatever you wish with your operating system! For further reading, please check the Amazon links below. To support me and writers like me, please buy through the Amazon links on our pages.