Well the honeymoon with Xgl is coming to an end. Not to say we won’t continue to have a happy relationship, but things aren’t perfect anymore.
On my laptop, window resizing is really slow. That can be kind of annoying.
Far more annoying is nested X sessions seem to crash Xgl. I have had this happen Vnc’ing to my Mac Mini and when trying to run Intellij Idea in Xnest. I don’t think it’s just the build of Xgl since this is happening both on my Fedora Box and SUSE box. Not really that big of a deal since Vnc still works to Linux and I don’t use Xnest much.
Which brings me to the really, really annoying problem. Xgl breaks a lot of Java swing apps. All that happens is the java app shows a blank grey screen. The odd thing is, you can click on where things should be (such as the top menu bar) and you’ll see what you’re supposed to. Overall, a really annoying problem if you are a java developer.This bug suggests the culprit is a missing event that compiz doesn’t provide to the jvm.
Thankfully, I’m a Java server side developer and the only java swing app I use is Idea. And, through the Ubuntu forums, I found a temporary work around while we wait for either compiz or jvm to be fixed. The idea is to launch metacity, launch the java app, then restart compiz. The commands:
metacity --replace &
start java app
compiz --replace gconf &
Your java app should work correctly from here on out. Not the greatest solution, but one that seems to work.
