Havoc's Blog

If you want to play with compositing on Fedora 8 using the Intel
drivers, here’s how I got it working.

• For testing, you can run a second X server on the
  hardware. However, you first need to disable DRI on the main X server
  (and not use a compositing WM on the main X server). This is done by
  adding Option "NoDRI" to xorg.conf. If you don’t have a
  xorg.conf (I didn’t), run system-config-display and let it write out a
  minimal one. Add the NoDRI option to the Device section. Next, copy
  xorg.conf to something like xorg-dri.conf, and re-enable DRI in the
  copied file. Then you can run a second X server as something like
  “X -config xorg-dri.conf -audit 0 -br -ac :8 -nolisten tcp
  vt8“. Careful: if your main X server has DRI running, you won’t
  get DRI on the new X server even though it’s in the config file. So be
  sure the main server lacks DRI (use “glxinfo” to check).
• If you run Compiz on a server without DRI, the error is
  "No GLXFBConfig for default depth, this isn't going to work."
  You must have direct rendering enabled (check glxinfo).
• Once you enable DRI, however, Compiz will say the
  GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap extension is missing. To fix
  this, you have to set LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 in the environment.
  The desktop-effects control panel that comes with Fedora sets
  this env variable when it runs compiz. Yes, you should have direct
  rendering enabled, and then you have to set LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2008-01.html#28)