Important

Firstly, Compiz Fusion is a radically changing beta software for the GNU/Linux desktop. We seriously recommend that you make backups of all important data before installing and note that we recommend that you do not install this on important production machines such as Servers or Always-On Business Workstations as there is a fairly high chance of Compiz Fusion crashing, or locking up your system at least once while you use it. It is, however suitable for normal desktop use.

Different ways of obtaining the software

Currently there are three different ways to obtain Compiz Fusion

• Use the distribution's packages. We recommend this approach as most packagers will use builds that are unbroken and fairly stable.
• Use the source tarballs for the most recent release. This requires some technical experience in installing compile-time dependencies as well as compiling C source code with make.
• Use the most up-to-date Git version. The Compiz Fusion team will try to keep this as break-free as possible, although there may be sometimes when Compiz Fusion is completely broken. This is not recommended unless you are a packager, or must-have the absolute bleeding-edge version.

You may use each of these methods to obtain Compiz Fusion and each will have a different success rate and positives and negatives.

Distribution Packages

Note to Readers : Because I am only using one distribution, I can only write installation instructions for that distribution. Please edit this page and add more instructions. Thanks

Ubuntu

• Visit [http://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompositeManager/CompizFusion here (English)] or [http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Baustelle/Compiz_Fusion here (German)] for instructions

openSUSE:

• Head over to [http://opensuse.org/Compiz_Fusion openSUSE.org/Compiz_Fusion] for up-to-date instructions.

Fedora 7:

• Go to [http://wiki.kagesenshi.org/moin.fcgi/CategoryPackages/CompizFusion] for instructions.

Gentoo:

• Instructions can be found at [http://wiki.gentoo-xeffects.org/Compiz_Fusion]

Installing from source tarball

This method will work on every distribution, as long as you have satisfied the dependencies required to compile Compiz Fusion which are:

build-essential libxcomposite-dev libpng-dev libsm-dev libxrandr-dev libxdamage-dev libxinerama-dev libstartup-notification0-dev libgconf2-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libmetacity-dev librsvg2-dev libdbus-1-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libgnome-desktop-dev libgnome-window-settings-dev gitweb curl autoconf automake automake1.9 libtool intltool libxslt1-dev xsltproc

Once these are installed, you can obtain the source tarball from [http://releases.compiz-fusion.org/ here]

To compile the source tarballs, extract every tarball, then execute

./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local

make

• sudo make install

Installing From Git

This is not recommended unless you want the absolute bleeding-edge version or are a developer. Because Git is divided into many different repositories, we recommend using a script to download and build all the components for you. You can check these out by using:

• git clone git://git.compiz-fusion.org/users/kristian/compiz-scripts
• git clone git://anongit.compiz-fusion.org/fusion/misc/yags

The 'get-git' script will clone and update all Compiz Fusion related modules such as libcompizconfig, compiz and emerald and the 'YAGS' script will clone all plugin repositories. Using yags is fairly simple, just execute './yags $COMMAND' where $COMMAND can be 'pull' 'make' 'make install' 'make clean' 'clone'. YAGS will then apply this command to all applicable directories.

Setup

If you hadn't already, you will need to configure your system using one of the many [:Hardware: hardware guides] available.