Fixing Compiz Fusion on ATI Radeon Mobility 9800 Under Ubuntu Hardy (8.04)

**** OK, this works–but it’s not feasible. I found xserver-xgl to be VERY slow and had screen rendering issues. ****

Take this for what it’s worth–and that does not seem to be much.

When I originally installed Ubuntu Hardy on my HP Pavillion zt3000 laptop Compiz worked perfectly. Much to my dismay, after I re-installed, Compiz Fusion would not re-enable, even though I had the restricted drivers installed and enabled. (Selecting System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects -> Extra returned a “Desktop effects could not be enabled” error.)

I tried running “compiz” from the command line and one line of the output caught my eye:

checking for xgl not present

That gave me enough search terms to search on Google and hit paydirt on UbuntuForums.

The solution was simple: Go to System -> Administration -> Synaptics Package Manager and install “xserver-xgl.”

After I logged back out and back in, I enabled Compiz ( System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects -> Extra) and everything worked.

Tackling Scalability Issues

If you a techie kind of person and if you have ever had ambitions to build a large-scale website, you have thought to yourself “how can I make this scale really big?”

Well, the guys at YouTube have been through the drill. Here is a great video by Cuong Do, one of the founders of YouTube and the guy in charge of making YouTube scale, about how they managed to scale YouTube.

Yeah, there are some architectural decisions you can make up-front that will make scaling a website easier, but, after watching this video about the scalability challenges YouTube faced, I realized that:

1. Scalability is all about managing bottlenecks. You watch for them forming, you deal with them before they become a problem.
2. Improving performance in parts of the system that are not bottlenecks does very little good.
3. The problems you get are almost never the problems you plan for.
4. Plan, but don’t over plan. See what happens and adapt.

I have become a huge fan of the Google Tech Talk videos and tech videos in general on Google Video and YouTube. I have started to download them and load them on to my iPhone (how to do that is a future blog post itself) and I find myself watching them whenever I am in the subway, in a taxi or have a few minutes to kill. They are a great way to get a healthy dose of new knowledge fast and if you have them on the iPhone, you can get that dose in those random periods of downtime that would otherwise be wasted time.