The All-Singing, All-Dancing XCompMGR

[Jon Nettleton]

>
> I had at some point code to do this but it was some years ago and
> would take a bit finding it. I remember I was calling some of these
> calls through ctypes: http://linux.die.net/man/3/xcomposite Maybe just
> XCompositeRedirectSubwindows and XCompositeUnredirectSubwindows.

That could definitely work.  I would take a look at the work done by
the Cairo Composite Manager guys, http://cairo-compmgr.tuxfamily.org/
as well.  Their project is quite mature and could somehow be helpful
to Sugar as it has some cairo based pieces already.

Ultimately it would be great to see Sugar be able to exist as a WM
plugin to mutter like gnome-shell or moblin/meego but currently it
just takes too much horsepower to be a viable alternative.

Of course if you want to test the compositing performance/power usage
on the XO 1.5 you can do so from the GNOME environment.

gconftool-2 -s '/apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager' --type bool true

and then

gconftool-2 -s '/apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager' --type bool false

to turn it back off.  It generally works fine, however most the
acceleration options are falling back through to sofware acceleration
on the CPU.

Jon