After having installed the four .deb packages to downgrade MESA from 8.x to 7.x, I wanted to try different ways of seeing if there was any noticeable difference in the graphics performance of my machine.

So I decided to try and install Cairo-Dock, which is basically Linux's take on the Mac OS X's dock, but offers more stuff. It runs and animates quite smoothly... but I get this weird graphics thing where I have a large black rectangular border around the dock, which effectively blocks everything underneath it, including the taskbar panels.

I don't know if this is somewhat related, but when I go into Synaptic, Compiz-Fusion is nowhere to be found. I remember being able to use it back when I was in MintPPC 9.3, though I have to admit that I was alternating back and forth between LXDE and Gnome environments, so I can't remember exactly which one it worked under.

How can I add composition to MintPPC and how do I correct that graphics bug with Cairo-Dock?

I think it depends on your window manager among other things. I might suggest just installing XFCE desktop to test.

Maybe useful: http://glx-dock.org/ww_page.php?p=Recurrents%20problems&lang=en

Specific to Open-Box(LXDE) - http://openbox.org/wiki/Help:FAQ#How_do_I_get_true_32-bit_transparent_windows.3F

EDIT: To be clear, I haven't played with it yet.

THANK YOU!!!!

This is EXACTLY what i needed! It works and looks beautiful now!

Well this is kind of embarrassing; celebrating before I actually had the thing solved...

I have a new problem (still related). Each time I reboot, the dock keeps displaying that black border again, and so each time, I have to keep typing in "xcompmgr" in the terminal to make it go away.

I tried to follow the advice HERE.... about trying to add the command "xcompmgr &" to the autostart...... but each time i reboot, it just doesn't obey the autostart file. Any ideas?

I edited autostart files at both of the following locations... just because I was paranoid and desperately wanted this thing to stick...

• /etc/xdg/openbox/autostart
• ~/.config/openbox/autostart

What is the command you use to have the dock working properly? There are specific entries in MintPPC where you can autostart stuff. I have to digg into it again as I always forget where I put it. I can play myself a bit and if I find the autostart solution I can tell. You use normal cairo-dock ?

Under the "System Tools" menu, I always pick the one that says "GLX-Dock (Cairo-Dock with OpenGL)". Regardless of whether or not I set the dock to start automatically once I reach the desktop after boot/reboot, the end result is always the same: I still have to go into the terminal and issue the "xcompmgr &" command.

And since neither the clean/fresh install of MintPPC nor Cairo-Dock includes xcompmgr by default, I had to install it myself from Synaptic.

Those are the only things I did to get the thing working really.

Well, there's also the whole thing with my recent downgrade of MESA...

You know, I'm looking at "System Tools:Services" from the Mint Menu, and I'm wondering if that's where xcompmgr needs to be. And if it is, would I be able to include the "&" symbol somewhere... because in the terminal, I seem to absolutely have to include it or else I have to CTRL+C to kill the process.... (sorry if this seems like a trivial thing, but i really wouldn't know if it's sufficient to just close the terminal window).

Give me some time, I will have a look if I can find a way to have it autostarted in the mint-lxde session. That is the solution you need.