To use the composite manager it is required that the X-server has support enabled for the COMPOSITE, DAMAGE, FIXES, and RENDER extensions. For reasonable performance it is also required that hardware acceleration of the RENDER extension is enabled.
As of version 0.16.8.2 it may happen that the borders on application windows
using ARGB visuals (for transparency) are "ugly". Applications may use ARGB
visuals intentionally (e.g. fdclock) or not (e.g. xv on 16 bit root depth).
Applications unintentionally using an ARGB visual will normally not be
rendered properly at all and should be started with the environment variable
XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS
set.
To fix border rendering on "real" ARGB windows it is required to use imlib2
with version >= 1.3.0.
Tweaks:
As of e16 >= 0.16.8.9: If there is any kind of trouble with the composite
manager, first check compmgr.mode
(eesh show compmgr), and set it to 1 if
it isn't (eesh set compmgr.mode 1, restart).
If pop-up windows disappear immediately after having appeared (may happen e.g. with certain pop-up windows when using gnome > 2.12), try:
$ eesh set compmgr.override_redirect.mode 0
This should make the pop-up windows usable, but not always rendered properly. This problem should not occur with recent X-servers.
If window resize/shading with composite enabled is ugly, try:
$ eesh set compmgr.resize_fix_enable 1
This problem should not occur with recent X-servers.