x.org 6.8.1 – transparency and more

I installed x.org 6.8.1 on my desktop (debian unstable) yesterday to see what it was like.
The installation was quite painless, but getting it to work properly did require some work. The documentation on the X.org site is fine for compilation / installation but does not cover usage and configuration.
I found some documentation, with pointers, on the gentoo site, however the “funkier” features of X are transparency and drop shadows, which you can’t do “out of the box”. You need to get a couple of tools, namely xcompmgr and transset. I’m running debian unstable on my desktop, so I used rpms via alien to install the necessary software.
Of course I am no expert with X configuration, so I enlisted the help of pron, who was able to edit my xorg.conf to make it a bit saner (thanks pron)
The ATI card may support some of the more advanced features of x.org, but I haven’t had a chance to do any research into it yet.
So far I’ve tried the transparency and drop shadows. They both work and look fantastic, but the performance is pretty dire
To see some of the things you can do with x.org have a look at:
KDE