Danny Baumann comes with some improvements for Compiz

Oct 2, 2007 08:25 GMT  ·  By

A new Compiz release was created by Danny Baumann, Compiz's main developer. Its release was announced yesterday and the new version is 0.6.0.

Since the 0.4.0 release some big changes have occurred. A better support for multiple X-screens was implemented and an extensible logging framework was born. Some major improvements to option initialization based on the new meta-data system (which uses XML as its basis) appeared. This fresh meta-data system will handle different meta-data types, like plugin description, default option values and more.

Now the plugins have their own plugins that make the adjusting and extending the behavior of existing ones possible. The more dynamic handling of the output devices now allows the output device's configuration to be changed between frames.

The Cube plugin for Compiz 0.6.0 has some new additions, like transparency and basic background support and the non-power-of-two skydome textures are now supported. Other plugins now have introspection, or offer the user multiple modes of resize drawing and the place plugin now supports multiple placement modes. Some new plugins were added since 0.4.0, like Glib, Ini, Fs (FUSE plugin) etc.

Gtk-window-decorator now allows the user to configure the button layout in metacity themes and lets him change the actions of middle and right mouse button. For kde-window-decorator was added UTF-8 support for window titles and a fixed display of maximized windows.

Danny Baumann discovered that this release, 0.6.0, contains a problem which could allow stacking desktop windows over normal windows at the moment when they are mapped. This could result in normal windows and/or panels not being visible when compiz is launched with the Gnome or KDE session until the desktop window is restacked once. This could be done by clicking on it, if the "Raise on click" option is enabled.

Baumann promises he will release a 0.6.2 version as soon as possible to fix the problem.

You can download Compiz 0.6.0 right now from Softpedia.