Who Wants Snow?


Want to make your Laptop or Desktop start Snowing? I sure did and I found a way to get it working. I started by searching around the internet figuring that if anything would show up it would be in google. I finally got to a compiz fusion forum which had the necessary mods and versions available. Problem was I found it first for 0.6.x then I had to go to 0.7.x, but wait I had to go to another page for 0.7.4 or 0.7.6 and then I found what I needed on the next page which was for version 0.7.8. So four pages later after google and I was on my way to “let it snow let it snow let it snow” on my desktop. Here in Vancouver we do not usually get snow very often but when it does it is either a light snow fall or a heavy one. I figured if I had it snowing on my laptop I would not miss it quite so much.

Here is how to get it:

  1. Use this command to check the version… it must be 0.7.8 for this to work: compiz –version
  2. I have to say if you do not know much about the command line you could get yourself into trouble. I am fairly good at the command line as I start to use it more and more.
  3. You need a few packages: to install if you do not already have them:
    sudo apt-get install compiz-fusion-bcop compiz-dev compizconfig-settings-manager build-essential libtool libglu1-mesa-dev libxss-dev libcairo2-dev git-core
  4. Now that you have installed all of that I suggest we get on to the creating of snow!
  5. open terminal and type in this command: mkdir -p ~/compiz/
  6. now in the terminal:  git clone git://anongit.compiz-fusion.org/fusion/plugins/snow
  7. now you have to get into the snow folder: cd ~/compiz/snow
  8. Now to compile Snow in only 3 commands:
  9. First command: make clean
  10. Second command: make
  11. Third and Final command: make install

You have now got Snow installed for compiz! Now all you have to do is go to compiz config settings manager and look under Extras: enable snow and find out the button command and there you have it. You only need to use one set of buttons to turn this on or off.

Ryan Orser.


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