Easy Compiz Tricks February 3rd, 2010

A while ago I tweaked Sam’s simple animations plug-in for Compiz, mainly so windows I minimized would slide away to match some of my other settings. This was to strike a balance between usability and performance, since none of these effects use alpha blending. During this time I made some jokes about a Spinner Rims plug-in to illustrate how people rev the Compiz engine when they first hop behind the wheel. Oddly enough, I’ve actually had others ask me for this plug-in and had Google Alerts on random forums about it – as if it was real, which perplexes me.

Sometimes applications don’t always (or can’t) describe a window correctly, which can make Compiz use a different animation. For example, when I drag a tab out of Google Chrome it uses my open animation for the window, which really disrupts the feel of drag and drop tabs that otherwise is very elegant. Another example is with generic frameworks like Adobe AIR or Java Swing, where all the widgets are treated the same. How do we work around this?

Luckily, Compiz is well equipped to handle this. You’ll need the Compiz Configuration Settings Manager (CCSM), which I think almost everyone has installed, and it should exist out-of-the-box so users can see how powerful the software really is. In the case of Google Chrome:

  1. Open CCSM (ALT+F2 ccsm or Preferences/Compiz Configuration Settings Manager)
  2. Click the Animations plugin
  3. Press the New button underneath the list
  4. Select None for the animation with the lowest possible duration
  5. Click the Add icon near the Window Match field
  6. Click the Grab button and target Chrome (it should give you class=Chromium-browser)

Make sure this is moved up the list so it overrides any other settings, since it’s specific to Chrome. You can later go back and click the Grab button again and add more windows to the blacklist. Now when you drag tabs in Chrome they won’t be so awkward. After getting used to no opening animation with one application, I ended up disabling them for all. I still use the other animations, but I’ve enjoyed not having any opening animations for non-decoration windows.

Intel Microphones in Ubuntu Linux (9.04) August 9th, 2009

If you want to use Skype or record audio with any other application you may have to slightly configure your microphone. This post isn’t an exhaustive list of all the possible ways to get your recording working Ubuntu, but really is targeted to anyone who has similar hardware or where the solution is the same.

Firstly, here is the hardware we are working with:

$ sudo lshw -C sound
  *-multimedia
       description: Audio device
       product: 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: 1b
       bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0
       version: 02
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
       configuration: driver=HDA Intel latency=0 module=snd_hda_intel

The PCI identifier of this specific model is 8086:284b. You can get this by lspci -n | grep "00:1b", but you’ll have to replace “00:1b” with your information from the previous lshw command. Thankfully getting this to work is rather simple, but involves fiddling with the track mixer and some switches. Needless to say it can take a while to figure out the right combination, but it involves 3 steps for my hardware. Read the rest of this entry »