I am going to talk about a little problem that I found installing Compiz over Ubuntu in my laptop. There are graphic cards in a Compiz Blacklist, because of they did not enough tested, or did not use standards, with Compiz can grant a good software performance. Treating to see the 3D Compiz-fusion Desktop on Linux, I installed Ubuntu in my new laptop:

• ASUS Z53E
• Ubuntu 7.10
• Graphics: Intel X3100

The Ubuntu installation process, brilliant. With the LiveCD a guided installation. Ubuntu was installed in 20 minutes. !! But the brand-new Desktop effects did not installed ¡¡ In the menu option System > Preferences > Aparience > Visual effects we must mark the "Extra" choice to work with 3D effects. But when I marked the option shows the error: "Desktop effects could not be enabled". This was because of my graphic card (intel x3100) is in the Compiz Blacklist, as you can read at this post: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=582112. To solve it then go off the Blacklist:

mkdir -p ~/.config/compiz/ && echo SKIP_CHECKS=yes >> ~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager

Then we have the 3D effects. But if we want to tune them, we need:

• A settings manager (compizconfig-settings-manager): Where I will configure what effects I want to show.
• A them manager (Emerald): We can tune our Desktop, with the themes in compiz repository: http://www.compiz-themes.org.

This utilities are installing from the command line as I type:

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager emerald

We have both at System > Preferences. If you want a reference about compiz-fusion, or learn the utilization, you can access to Compiz wiki: http://wiki.compiz-fusion.org/