Now, seeing that this card was pretty recent, it wasn’t supported by the graphics driver that shipped with Ubuntu 8.04. Now, I did try to update the driver manually using the driver from the Nvidia website, and it’s times like those when you really appreciate the drivers in the repositories. To put it one way, it didn’t really work. Whereas I had a kind-of-working desktop beforehand, now I was working in a resolution of 800×600, which didn’t look great on my 22 inch screen. So, I did what it seems I always end up doing – upgrading to an untested, unstable early alpha of Ubuntu!

Now, I have to say that it was actually pretty smooth. The update worked first time, and then I was able to just grab the driver for my card from Synaptic. Sure, a whole host of programs crash from time to time, but compared to my other experiences, I had a pretty stable system.

But somewhere along the line, I found that I was no longer able to move any windows when Compiz was running. (I knew this because Compiz had a little habbit of crashing on startup for a while). Now, I assumed that this was a bug in Emerald, the application that draws the nice, glassy window borders. I put up with this for a few days, but eventually started sifting the net for a solution when it just got too annoying.

It was actually quite a bit simpler than I was expecting. It wasn’t a bug or a crash. Turns out, I had disabled a very important plugin in Compiz:

What an anticlimax. But it really makes you think – what purpose does this serve? Why would anyone ever want to disable the ability to move windows around? What’s next – an ‘Open Programs’ plugin?