I have no idea what I'm doing.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Compiz Fusion and Virtual Box 3.10 playing together

Unlike VMware Workstation 7, Virtual Box can enable Compiz Fusion right out the box.  I'm impressed.  Shouldn't this have been on VMware's list?  I think they focused too hard on Windows 7 and Direct X support.  I think they're missing the boat on this one... not to mention Virtual Box is free!  VirtualBox

After a little more testing, I notice slight delays when working with windows that are semi-transparent or fade in/out of some level of transparency.  As with most things in Linux, there's probably a setting to enable/disable window transparencies.

[UPDATE]  I've tried increasing the resources, memory and cpu, but I'm still noticing a slight delays in window painting, menu refreshes, etc.  With Compiz Fusion turned off, performance is great.  Adding additional CPUs to the VM was a bit tricky.  When I attempted to start a VM with more that one CPU, I'd get an error, "vt-x is not available".  After some googling I found four setting in the BIOS that needed to be configured:
    * Security > Execute Disable (set to On)
    * Performance > Virtualization (set to On)
    * Performance > VT for Direct I/O Access (set to On)
    * Performance > Trusted Execution (set to Off)
I found the information here:  http://www.shnake.com/blog/?p=419

[UPDATE Jan 11, 2010] Fixed performance problems, see my latest post here:
http://orsontyrell.blogspot.com/2010/01/better-performance-with-compiz-fusion.html

4 comments:

  1. Thank you! I've been waiting for compiz fusion to be available via vmware/virtual box for quite some time... This is awesome! :)

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  2. I don't know why VMware is dragging their feet on this... too bad. Workstation 7 has some nice features, but this is a show stopper for fancy linux desktops :(

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  3. Not working at all on latest Virtual Box with 10.04 RC :-/ Screen freezes after login if 3D acceleration is enabled.

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  4. kazounet, There have been some reported problems with 10.04, specifically related to booting.
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/29/ubuntu_10_04_bug_delay/
    ...not sure if that's your problem, but worth checking out.

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