OK, so with luck you now have the via drivers installed. You can do a few funky things already, for example go to System-Preferences-Screen Resolution and change it to 1024×768. This will compress the display onto the 1024×600 screen which allows some of the overly tall dialog boxes to fit (like the Evolution setup wizard for example). If you plug in an external monitor or projector the display should fill the screen nicely. In fact if you are into that kind of thing you can go to the synaptic package manager and install the openoffice.org-ogltrans package and get a bunch of fancy 3d transitions in the Impress application. I will have a go at posting some screenshots of that later.
Lets move on to enabling Compiz. To do this we are going to have to tell Compiz that the VIA driver actually is plenty good enough to use. Go to Applications-Accessories-Terminal and lets try to start Compiz just to see what happens.
so that didn’t go so well. Press ctrl+c to get back to a command prompt. So it has no whitelisted driver and is refusing to start. Fortunately I know where it stores it’s whitelist 
The compiz command is just a script file that starts off some other things and this script contains the whitelist of approved graphics drivers, so lets go edit it
sudo nano /usr/bin/compiz
now go and find the line that starts with WHITELIST, add via to the end of the list inside the quotes as shown below:
now save and close with
Ctrl+X y return
now lets try starting compiz again (starting from the 4th line in the screenshot below)
lots of screen flicker then it seems to have started. Don’t worry too much about the error message on the last line. You should now see a few fancy fades and effects happening. Try switching desktops and they will slide across. Open and close a few windows. Nice isn’t it! Compiz will start automatically when you log on now that you have whitelisted the via driver.
There are lots and lots of effects to turn on, for that you need the CompizConfig Settings Manager, which I will talk about in part 4
Please let me know if the instructions work!
Now running compiz after a bit of fiddling about at Part 2, would advise anyone thinking about it to be doubly sure they know how to revert to the previous driver. Alan is working on a fix for the time being with some wrinkles needing to be ironed out, it worked for me, but your millage may vary!
Current instructions worked well for me. Got the CompizConfig settings manager installed and working, except… it is too large for the screen and won’t move with the alt – drag approach. I wonder if a squished 1024 x 768 will work? Let’s see.
And it does, just to get set up. All good.
Many thanks Alan. Does this mean we can set back the gstreamer video settings to automatic from X window?
for the alt-drag thing you need to go to the very last setting which is nearly off screen at 1024×600 which is the “move” settings. Untick the “constrain Y” checkbox and you will be able to alt-drag stuff off the top of the screen. More on this later.
For gstreamer, turning back to automatic doesn’t work for me right now. not sure why, I am sure I had it working before.
Hey Alan!
Looking forward to trying this out. Any word on some form of recovery media yet? I still can’t use my webbook
And, it works for me, just going to get compiz config settings manager from synaptic.
Again, outstanding work Alan. Thanks.
Alan
alt-F7 when your in the settings manager and it focused, you can move it up, dont click or anything just move the mouse pointer. But if you move the mouse down just a smidgen it will get sticky on the top bar again.
Thanks Alan and others. All OK. Now I remember why I turned the cube transition off on my OS X Macs years ago
Flashy but intensely annoying in day to day use. But I really like the desktop display that the cube option gives with ctrl+alt down arrow- the line up. I need to work through the Compiz options to see if I can get this as default.
Again – Alan, I’m really enjoying the webbook/Ubuntu experience and thanks.
Try pressing the windows key(must get that changed to a penguin or something) and e together.
Hallo,
I guess this is broadly related to the video driver issue (which I’m not going to try to update manually), but will the webbook run Google Earth with the current drivers?
I’m used to Linux and reasonably happy with the command line, but don’t want to create unnecessary grief for myself.
Many thanks.
@Paul, best answer I can give right now on Google Earth is “quite possibly if you install the 3D drivers”. Do give it a try and send me a screenshot if it works, would make a good blog article.
@Paul & @Alan, indeed the webbook will run google earth, its a bit of a fiddle, without doing this update it runs, but just really slowly. With the new driver it seems to suffer from breakout, even in safe mode (in google earth) With funny graphics which work or don’t work depending on the size of the window, whether its full screen or not. It works, but its not reliable, stick to something else (ie, maps.google.co.uk). Ill email you some screenshots Alan, I am on my mac at the moment an I have to go back to work
Thank u Alan i had the blank screen problem but with ure brilliant advice and tutorial not only did i get tis wonderful lappy working, i also learnt allot about Linux and have compiz running thanks for putting all this time and effort into this blog
Hi Alan,
I’ve managed to get compiz working on my webbook, but when i restart it all disappears and i have to go to terminal and start compiz again. is there a way i can keep it without having to keep doing that.
Thanks
Hey,
Thank you for a fab website, it’s very helpful!
Is there any update on the new via drivers for the Kernel update? I have updated to Intrepid (with no problems thankfully) and would really like to be able to activate compiz on it. Did you find that it worked better with the RAM upgraded?
Thank you
The ram upgrade is pretty marginal, probably makes things a bit snappier with lots of applications open, but for me it was not dramatic. VIA do not seem to be answering emails from me any more (they were pretty unresponsive at the best of times) so I don’t really know how we are going to get Compiz back.