Thanks Slackware, you’ve served me well all these years. Farewell.

Finally got those nifty window managers to work on my Slackware computer! It runs pretty smoothly, despite my old graphic card (Nvidia GeForce FX 5200).

I still miss some features from KWin, but plugins such as Scale and cube goodness make Beryl worthwhile.

That’s right, I use Beryl instead of the new shiny Compiz Fusion. Why you ask? I actually started with the latter one, but there were many things that annoyed me. Now I’ve switched back to KWin, simply because I couldn’t live without some of its features. Anyway. If you prefer eyecandy, I suggest you to use Compiz Fusion rather than Beryl since the latter one is highly outdated.

Don’t expect me to describe how to get these eyecandy to work in Slackware 12 – there are already many guides. However, I can tell you which ones I used.

Compiz Fusion

1. First, you have to fix drivers for your graphic card and configure xorg.conf. Read more about it here.

2. Before installing Compiz Fusion, I removed the default Compiz version included in Slackware 12 with pkgtool. Then I installed Compiz Fusion using the Slackware packages here. I also installed pygobject, pygtk-2.10.6 and pycairo packages which you can get here.

For Slackware 12.1 users, you can find Compiz Fusion here. Make sure to have the following dependencies installed: orbit2, gconf, intltool, libsexy and sexypython.

3. Whisper a prayer and run the following command in a terminal:

compiz --ignore-desktop-hints --replace ccp &

If the window decorations don’t show up, try (if you use KDE)

kde-window-decorator &

Or you can install Fusion Icon. Then you only have to run

fusion-icon

Reference: Post from LinuxQuestions

Beryl

After using Compiz Fusion a while, I realized that I liked Beryl more (which I use on my Kubuntu laptop). So, next problem was to fix Beryl for Slackware. I was lucky to avoid dependency problems, but you might need some of the packages I mentioned in the Compiz Fusion section.

1. The same applies to Beryl; if you want to use it, you have to fix your drivers. Read more here.

2. To install the packages, I used this script. Download it, make it executable and let it do its magic.

3. Now you can run

beryl-manager

and hope for the best.

Wow, a post about Compiz Fusion and Beryl without screenshots? That’s unusual.

Updated on 2008-10-22: Fixed some links and also wrote briefly about Compiz for Slackware 12.1.