One of the first things my boyfriend and I wanted to check out on our new Dell Inspiron with Ubuntu was installing Compiz Fusion, which gives your Ubuntu system really cool 3-D desktop effects. Desktop effects are an "experimental feature" in Ubuntu, meaning that they may not work with all computers and could cause your system to, well, act up. Sure enough, that's what happened to us. First, check out the video above (sorry for the dark lighting) of the two effects we played around with, then read on to learn why you need to proceed with caution when installing 3-D effects.
We struggled a lot in the beginning to get the "Windows Wobble" and "Workspaces on a Cube" effects to work without crashing the OS. But when it did work, it was so much fun! Enabling "Windows Wobble" causes your windows to "wobble" when you click on them and move them around your screen. With "Workspaces on a Cube," your desktop becomes a virtual 3-D cube: You're able to move the cube around with your mouse by pressing Ctrl Alt on your keyboard.
So what exactly went wrong with enabling these desktop effects, and why do they cause your PC so much misery? Here's what happened:
The driver for our graphics card (that was installed by default in Ubuntu) did not allow us to use desktop effects; it was a "restricted driver" and it crashed our system when we tried to do so. Thankfully, nVidia provided a driver for the graphics card that's meant for Linux on the company web site. We installed it using the step-by-step directions on the nVidia site, which set up the driver on our system.
The next day after a restart, Ubuntu wouldn't work at all! We got a white screen. We discovered that when installing the new nVidia driver, it disabled the old one and also misconfigured the X Server (which tells the hardware which drivers to use).
It took four times to reinstall Ubuntu before figuring this out, and we had to reconfigure the X Server manually and disable the old driver manually by putting it in a "disabled list". Thankfully, it finally worked.
The desktop effects seemed to work smoothly after this fix; that is, until a couple of weeks later. For no reason at all, the "Cube" effect stopped working. After many restarts, shutdowns, and throwing things, it magically started to work again. How, we're not sure.
As you can see, this is the chance you take when you enable desktop effects on your Ubuntu system. Of course the easy solution would be to just disable them, but that's not the point. The point is that if you're going to use an operating system
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