Monday 24 October 2011

Moving windows laggy in Compiz


A most irritating bug whereby windows will jerk and lag when attempting to move them, either after compiz has been running for a bit, or just after a viewport/workspace change.

The problem appears to be something to do with mouse polling in compiz, and the fix is to limit the rate at which your mouse can be polled.

Following the solution posted here:

sudo gedit /etc/modules
Add the following to the end of the file:
-r usbhid
usbhid mousepoll=10
Save and reboot. Hopefully moving windows is now back to being smooth!

Friday 21 October 2011

Manually change GTK3 theme in Xubuntu, Xfce 4.8


Due to a rather intense dislike of both Unity and Gnome-Shell in their current iterations, I've recently switched to using Xubuntu. One quibble i've had is that changing the theme in xfce4-settings-manager often causes the theme used with gtk3 applications to revert to the ugly default, presumably as many themes do not have gtk3 counterparts to display.

The only solution i've been able to find with regards to manually changing the gtk3 theme is to hunt down the theme folder in /user/share/themes and copy the gtk-3.0 folder from that theme into ~/.config.

So if you've changed the theme and just want the default greybird gtk-3.0 theme back for your gtk3 apps, while keeping a different theme for your gtk2 applications you might run something along the lines of:

cp -r /usr/share/themes/greybird/gtk-3.0 ~/.config

For applications run as root to adapt to this theme too you'll need to copy to /root/.config also.
sudo cp -r /usr/share/themes/greybird/gtk-3.0 /root/.config

Hope that helps someone, as it was beginning to annoy me rather a lot. If anyone has a cleaner way to do this please let me know.