Desktop magic - cube

[wpeckham]

Greetings all,
I was wondering if anyone had a pointer to a HOW-TO document that would get that whole DESKTOP CUBE feature working on VSIDO.
It does not matter what flavor (compiz, KDE, or other) as long as it looks and works. 
I have absolutely NO REAL NEED for it: I just want to impress the pants off of my 'Windows Centric' co-workers.  A google search landed nothing but Ubuntu documents, that do not apply to any sane/other distribution.

(If there IS no such document, good advice is ALWAYS welcome!) 

[VastOne]

The only method I am aware of is the compiz way and I have not tried compiz on VSIDO.  I used to be a compiz fan a long long time ago and see no reason why it will not work. I would search google for compiz + fluxbox

[jeffreyC]

But would compiz which has been described as a window manager work with Fluxbox which is a window manager?

[VastOne]

Yes, you are correct... You would need a Desktop environment (like KDE) and not a Desktop manager (FluxBox) to have compiz work

[jedi]

For all the magic stuff, and a good DE, I would go with Xfce4.10 + kwin2 or kwin3, whichever is newest.  That way you'd have all of KDE's desktop magic tricks, with a "sane" Desktop Environment like Xfce.  I believe there is (or used to be) a youtube video on how to get it set up.  A simple youtube search would probably do you wonders!!!

Good luck, and let us know/see your results!

[wpeckham]

I really detest using video instead of a good black-and-white how-to, but in this case I will take your advice.  If that is the best information available, I will not reject it because of the format.
I will install xfce4 and kwin, and go search for the video. 

Rather glad you advised kwin, and I was leaning that way anyway.  I love compiz, but it does not seem to have much support these days.
If I get somethign worth seeing, I will capture a short and log a link here, along with some detail on ho-I-did-it.  (And, just perhaps, to a how-to document of my own creation.

Thank you all for every reply!! 

[wpeckham]

I am finding lots of videos, and I am sure they all work, IF you use the Ubuntu repositories.  So far I am finding that if they require only 12 pacakges, five of those are not in the SID repos and vsido cannot find them.  Hmmmm......

[wpeckham]

Confirmed: all of the youtube video related that I have found depend upon the same basic mix of packages, and those packages are either unavailable under SID or have changed to conflict with each other. 

I am convinced it CAN be done, but also that it CANNOT be done by following any of these videos.   

IF anyone has additional advice, I will check back here later.  I will post an update if I find a way to make it work.

[PackRat]

I thought gnome did that cube thing natively now because the compositing capability (Clutter) is integrated into the gnome window manager (Mutter).

May want to google how to make a cube in gnome 3.

Pretty sure KDE is the same way now; compiz has pretty much fallen by the wayside.

[VastOne]

You could get new friends that are impressed more by FOSS and Linux that loads in less than 100 MiB and no viruses or idiot pop ups?

[PackRat]

^ I noticed people's interest in Linux always perks up when you point out the cost of deployment.

Especially if you're cleaning a virus off their system when you bring it up 

[VastOne]

I always blow customers away by showing up randomly... installing in 5 minutes, backing up / in 5 minutes with fsarchiver, and then restoring / again in 5 minutes on a totally new machine with fsarchiver...

Changes the cost of ownership argument in a heartbeat

[PackRat]

Showing how Linux/FOSS has a positive impact on the bottom line is definitely the way to get someone's interest - whether as a home user or in the workplace.

Several years back I got our IT guy to switch to a Red Hat 9 server and use the old server as FAT16 file storage since that was the common denominator of the various OS's (still had some WinNT so no FAT32) in the office. Poor guy thought he was going to have to upgrade everything to Win2000 etc ....

Time = $$$, show someone how saving one impacts the other.

Then hit them with The Cube 

[VastOne]

The only time a back up matters is when the restore functions fail, you would not believe how often this happens

Disaster Recovery is an absolute need that is far too often overlooked especially by small business owners

[wpeckham]

Guys, not disagreeing with anything said but this has waved WAY off topic.  I have news.
I followed steps derived (loosly) from the article http://thelinuxrain.com/articles/tutorial-how-to-use-kwin-window-manager-with-xfce
and got it working.
I now have a selection on startup of fluxbox, the original look and feel (and FASTEST startup), or xfce with KWIN, or the full Plasma desktop.  I am sure this method is wasteful and heavy, it ate a lot of disk.  Full plasma is very slow to load.  XFCE with Kwin is slow, but faster than full plasma and EVERYTHING works as I want it.  I think this will be my default going forward, as it looks impressive and performs well.
I have cube animations, the hot-keys I like, window corners I defined, everything works the same under xfce and plasma. 
Because it spans different sessions, I may have to take some time with screenshots and some animation to show the result.

Thank you all for both in-form and private recommendations, comments, and subtle kicks to the brain!  It worked!