Desktop effects with an nVidia card and Fedora 9

I'm setting up a machine at home to act as a videoconferencing station so that my family can easily talk to me during the summer, while I'm in NYC. This machine is equipped with an Athlon 64-bit processor and a nVidia GeForce 6200 PCI-Express video card. I decided to install Fedora 9 in this computer because this is the distribution I'm currently using everywhere (well, everywhere except on the Mac ;-). Plus it just works (TM), or mostly.

The 3D desktop is not something that is really needed for daily work, but I wanted to try it. Unfortunately, I could not get the desktop effects to work the first time I tried. I enabled the livna repositories, installed the nVidia binary drivers and configured the X server to use them. However, telling the system to enable the Desktop Effects failed, and running glxinfo crashed with a "locking assertion failure" message.

Googling a bit, I found a page mentioning that one has to run the livna-config-display command to properly configure the X server. I think I did not do this, so I just ran this manually and later restarted X. No luck.

Fortunately, that same page also contained a snippet of the xorg.conf configuration file that was like this:

Section "Files"
 ModulePath "/usr/lib64/xorg/modules/extensions/nvidia"
 ModulePath "/usr/lib64/xorg/modules"
EndSection

Effectively, my configuration file was lacking the path to the nVidia extensions subdirectory. Adding that line fixed the problem: now the server loads the correct GLX plugin, instead of the "generic" one that lives in the modules directory. I guess livna-config-display should have set that up automatically for me, but it didn't...

The desktop effects are now working :-) Now I figure out why compiz feels so slow... specially because I have the same problem at work with an Intel 965Q video card.