Compiz Fusion in Debian

One of the things I love the most about Linux environments is Compiz-Fusion. Even though the majority of plugins are pure eye-candy, I find that zooming around the desktop environment in a pretty environment is helpful to my productivity. And seriously, who wouldn’t want their desktop to do this?

What I needed to do is get this installed on my new Debian system, but it does take a little bit of work to get installed. This post over on the Debian forums told me exactly what to do. It looks like Compiz-Fusion is in the sid repository, so you need to add a new line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

## SID: to get compiz
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ sid main non-free contrib

After you do that, run these commands to set your default release channel, update the repository listings, and install compiz-fusion and some common compiz add-ons:

sudo su
echo 'APT::Default-Release "testing";' >> /etc/apt/apt.conf
apt-get update
apt-get install fusion-icon compiz* compizconfig-settings-manager

This should install Compiz, the fusion-icon program, a suite of stable and unstable plugins, and the graphical settings manager.