XGL Demo and howto's

Nice demonstration of Kubuntu running XGL.
Xgl is an X server architecture designed to take advantage of modern graphics cards via their OpenGL drivers, layered on top of OpenGL via glitz. It supports hardware acceleration of all X, OpenGL and XVideo applications and graphical effects by a compositing window manager such as Compiz or Beryl. There is lots of good howto's for setting up XGL on your Linux box, so I will not try to write my own. Here is a bunch of links to some of the most popular distributions.


Fedora http://fedoraxgl.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Installation_en
Novell (SuSE) http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/17174.html
Ubuntu https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompositeManager/Xgl
Gentoo http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_XGL
Debian Etch http://sonique54.free.fr/xgl/xgl.htm

Check out on of many XGL demo's from Youtube.



Supported hardware

* Intel
All intel graphics chips need the newest packages of Xgl and compiz for running flawlessly.
o i915, i945
Accelerated XVideo is broken on these cards. See Troubleshooting.
o compiz --replace will most likely crash the Xserver due to a long standing DRI bug.
* NVidia
All NVIDIA cards need the proprietary driver for running Xgl. Currently you will need to uninstall and reinstall the xgl rpm after installing the proprietary NVidia driver.
o GeForce 4xxx series
XVideo is not accelerated on these cards.
o GeForce FX 5xxx series, Quadro FX series
Accelerated XVideo is hitting a slow path on these cards, it is under investigation.
o GeForce 6xxx series
o GeForce 7xxx series (GeForce 7600 = not all effects are available but mostly working)
* ATI
o Mobility Radeon 9700 SE: Xgl running with proprietary fglrx driver 8.23
o Radeon X300: Xgl running with proprietary fglrx driver 8.23
o Firegl 5200 and 5250 (T60p): Xgl running with proprietary fglrx driver 8.32 and Xorg 7.2