It has come to my attention that this post is out of date. Since Squeeze’s release, I have not been able to update it. Your best bet to get compiz working correctly would be to follow to the directions in the Debian wiki: http://wiki.debian.org/Compiz

Getting compiz running on squeeze is surprising easy. Debian has included a document to help set it up, but there are a few little things necessary to get it to be usable.

1. Get the packages installed.

apt-get install compiz compizconfig-settings-manager compiz-fusion-plugins-main

2.Follow the instructions here: http://wiki.debian.org/Compiz to customize your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file

3. restart gdm

/etc/init.d/gdm restart

4. open up a terminal and type

compiz --replace

5. If a went well, you should see everything flash around as it redraws your desktop.

6. My window decorations (title bars) dissapeared when I enabled compiz. Additionally, i couldn’t drag windows by clicking on the title bar. To fix this: go to

a. System -> Preferences -> Compizconfig Settings Manager
b. Scroll down to the “Effects” section and enable “Window decoration”
c. Scroll down to “Window Management” and enable “Move Window”

7. If you want to use the desktop cube and/or workspaces, you will need more than the single or dual workspaces provided by default.

a. System -> Preferences -> Compizconfig Settings Manager
b. Click “General options”
c. Select the “Desktop size” tab.
d. Set the “Horizontal Virtual size” to whatever you want. For a cube… 4

8. If you want compiz to start automatically with GNOME:

Add “compiz –replace” to “Desktop -> Preferences -> Sessions -> Startup Programs”

You can find out how much bandwidth your linux machine is using with a simple tool called “bwm-ng”. In Debian, install it with

aptitude install bwm-ng

Then, just type ‘bwm-ng’ in the command line. It will give you something like this:

bwm-ng v0.6 (probing every 5.000s), press 'h' for help
  input: /proc/net/dev type: rate
  -         iface                   Rx                   Tx                Total
  ==============================================================================
               lo:           0.00 KB/s            0.00 KB/s            0.00 KB/s
             eth0:        2221.47 KB/s           48.13 KB/s         2269.60 KB/s
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
            total:        2221.47 KB/s           48.13 KB/s         2269.60 KB/s

Pressing the “h” key while it is running wil actually pull up a nice menu to change some of the options you are looking at.

bwm-ng is very basic, “iptraf” is another tool that provides some more functionality if you want to drill further into what is moving in and out of your box.

You can remove or configure the Pidgin pop up’s that you see from pidgin. Buddies logging on/off, and in my case, new messages. I didn’t want every new message i receive to be blasted up on the desktop OSD. To control what you see there, Pull up your Pidgin window (buddy window, not your conversation box), then: Tools -> Plugins -> Libnotify Popups. When you have selected the libnotify pop-ups, click on “configure plug-in”. That will give you some check boxes to customize the behaviour