Finally Got 3D Desktop Effects in My Ubuntu Gutsy (ATI Hardware)

Yesterday’s sad revelation : VMWare Guest Tools don’t work with Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. And I was thinking earlier that it might be one of the quirks of the RC version of Gutsy and was hoping that it will all work well when the final version gets released but no such luck.

So I decided to install it on the real hardware. To get something more out of my efforts, I decided to also try out Gutsy’s support for the Compiz desktop effects. The installation itself went smoothly in typical Ubuntu installation method.

As soon as Ubuntu gutsy was installed, it prompted me if I want the restricted drivers to be installed. I graciously accepted the offer but received an error in response saying “xorg-driver-glrx is not enabled.”

When I had installed Ubuntu Gutsy RC1, it had automatically prompted me to enable certain repositories, took me to “Software Sources” dialog box, and after I had enabled the repositories(and refreshed the package list), it had continued installing the restricted drivers. It was a seamless process – everything was handled automatically and I only had to just keep clicking the “OK” buttons.

I don’t know what has changed between RC1 and the final release but I had to dismiss the above mentioned error window, manually go to Administration -> Software Sources and enable the repositories listed there.

It failed to refresh the packages and I realised that Internet is actually not working on the Gutsy yet. So I looked around a bit, changed Password Type in Network Settings from “WEP Text” to “WEP Personal” and felt relieved to finally be able to load the Google in the web browser. After successfully refreshing the package contents this time, the restricted drivers got installed without giving me any more errors.

The desktop effects were still absent though. I checked System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects and tried to select something like “Normal” or “Extra” effects there, but got the error “The composite extension is not available” on both the occasions. I then checked the output of ‘compiz ––replace’ which indicated to me that I probably need to install the xserver-xgl drivers, so went ahead and installed it from the command line:

And while I was at it, installed the compiz configuration tools too:

In summary, the following command now informs me that everything is already there and nothing needs to be installed:

As you can see, everything is already installed. Now I went to System -> Preferences -> Appearance and selected the “Normal” radio button. Success! So I went ahead and selected “Custom” radio button this time and started playing with different settings by going to System -> Preferences -> Advanced Desktop Effects Settings.

Where to go from here? If you get lucky like me with your ATI hardware(my graphics card is ATI Mobility Radeon X300), you can learn more about Compiz by going to Desktop Effects with Compiz

If you are unable to get the 3D effects enabled even after installing the xserver-sgl driver, first try this ATI thread on Ubuntu forums, and in case you don’t find any success there, you can search the web for your ATI card or try asking for help on Launchpad Answers, Ubuntu Forums or Ubuntu IRC channel(#ubuntu at irc.freenode.net). I recommend you keep the output of the following commands handy with you when asking for help:

lspci | grep VGA
compiz ––replace
glxinfo | grep direct
cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf | grep Composite

Update: Here is a nice how-to by Ubuntu Forums member michael37 on how to get 3D Desktop effects for ATI cards for fresh Gutsy installation or an upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy.

Another ATI success story I came across: Compiz for ATI X1950XT