Sunday, January 6, 2008

Compiz-Fusion on Thinkpad

I've had my Thinkpad R61 laptop for two months now, and tried to enable my 3D desktop with no success. I thought that my video card does not support it so I gave in to the harsh reality of having to work using a 2D desktop :-(

Anyway, last night, I was installing Linux on a friend's laptop, and he has the Thinkpad T61 which I am sure has a video card that supports compiz-fusion. Yet when you try to turn it on, it refuses.

Apparently, the problem is not with the video card, but with the motherboard chipset. The i965 chipset is blacklisted because it does not support something that is required (didnt' bother with reading, so don't know the exact details).

The good news is that you can force compiz to run :-D. You simply need to create a simple file that contains the following two lines
#!/bin/sh
SKIP_CHECKS=yes compiz --replace

Save the file, and run it, or add it to your startup programs and you'll have compiz-fusion running on your i965 motherboard machine. Now my colleagues envy me on my awesome 3D desktop. It kicks ass :-D

1 comments:

7usam said...

i have a T60 and its working just fine :)