Experience with Proprietary NVIDIA Driver and one Compiz Fusion tip

After I installed proprietary graphic driver from the official NVIDIA website because of the recent decision of using Second Life on my Fedora system, I installed Compiz Fusion. I was surprised to see that the animations produced by Compiz Fusion is smoother than before, although I don’t know why the NVIDIA driver installed from RPM Fusion does not have the same performance as the official driver. Aside from great performance and ability to smoothly run Second Life, I also noticed that the print screen key didn’t work. The problem came from using Compiz desktop. The print screen works once I switched to Metacity window manager by right-click the Compiz Fusion icon, select “Select Window Manager”, and choose Metacity. I decided to find the solution of this problem since I want to completely use Compiz Fusion and will be taking screenshot in the future. After I searched over in the CompizConfig Settings Manager, I discovered a neat feature in the settings manager to search the whole text across the Compiz Fusion plugins.

1. After you opened CompizConfig Settings Manager, choose Advanced Search on the bottom left, at the top of the Close button.
2. Wait a few moment to allow it to scan all of the Compiz Fusion plugins.
3. After that, check “Settings value” checkbox under “Search in…” (Note: this will be unchecked once the manager window is closed, I guess that the search settings cannot be saved).
4. Then type the word you want to search under Filter (in my case, it’s “print”).
5. While you type, the plugins that contain the filter characters appear under Plugin.
6. I found that the print screen key is in the Gnome Compatibility plugin. So I went back to the plugins list by clicking the Back button and enabled the Gnome Compatibility plugin.
7. Now I can use the print screen key to make the screenshots. The problem solved.

I’m not sure why the Gnome Compatibility plugin was not enabled by default because it seems to be enabled by default during my re-installation of Fedora in the past. Maybe perhaps because of the proprietary NVIDIA Driver. But I’m still believing the open source Nouveau video driver. I hope its 3D support version will be released soon.