Installing New Experimental Plugins for Compiz

A blog post after quite a few days (months)...Ouch!! I'm stiff :P

Three new experimental plugins for compiz-fusion have recently been released...

• Atlantis2: Adds an aquarium to the dekstop with customizable fish.
• Freewins: Lets you rotate and resize windows in 3D.
• Screensaver: Let's you rotate the cube or make the windows fly as a screensaver.

The Atlantis2 Plugin running on my desktop:



Here's a screenshot for screensaver with the "flying windows" animation. Although, somehow the animation isn't clean and there are a few graphic glitches.


And my personal favourite - screensaver with "rotating cube" animation ... very smooth, very clean, I can go idle just to watch this thing rotate away in it's full glory ;)


I will post a screenshot for the Freewins plugin as soon as I figure out how it works :) I'm kinda "bizzy" watching the cube rotate :D.

All three are available through a "git" download

To install these plugins make sure you have the following packages installed:

• compiz-bcop
• compiz-dev
• build-essential
• libtool
• libglu1-mesa-dev
• libxss-dev
• libcairo2-dev
• git-core

In Ubuntu, you can do this using the following command :

sudo apt-get install compiz-bcop compiz-dev build-essential libtool libglu1-mesa-dev libxss-dev libcairo2-dev git-core

Download the plugins from the terminal using the following commands, make a new directory to download these if you want to keep everything neat and clean :)


git clone git://anongit.compiz-fusion.org/users/metastability/atlantis2
git clone git://anongit.compiz-fusion.org/users/warlock/freewins
git clone git://anongit.compiz-fusion.org/users/pafy/screensaver

Each plugin will be downloaded to its individual directory...
go to each directory through the terminal and do

make && make install

Now, you can access the new plugins through System->Preferences->Compiz Config Settings Manager..

Cheers! :)