Today, I faced a problem on setting up Compiz for my company Ubuntu Gibbon Gutsy desktop. At the System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects tab, no matter what I choose, normal or advanced. In just 10 seconds, a dialog box pop up saying that “Desktop effects could not be enabled”.

After some troubleshoot, by running “compiz” in the terminal, I finally got myself a reason why I could not run it.

Checking for Xgl: not present.
Blacklisted PCIID ‘8086:2a02′ found
aborting and using fallback: /usr/bin/metacity

It was because the on board graphic chipset on my company desktop was Intel I965 series. On Compiz wiki writen that the blacklisted reason is due to XV does not play with XAA under compiz, only with EXA. Anyway, I have not idea what does that mean. Besides Intel graphic cards, two more series of ATI graphic cards also blacklisted – Rs480 and Rv350.

However, to avoid such problem is to skip the blacklisted detection by just running this command on the terminal.

SKIP_CHECKS=yes compiz

Also, you could create a text file called compiz-manager and added this line SKIP_CHECKS=yes in the file.

sudo gedit ~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager

updated on 25.10.07: I found that in Ubuntu, the place to modified the config file should be /etc/xdg/compiz/compiz-manager.