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I have been resisting upgrading Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on my Dell Latitdue D600 because I had tried 8.10 and compiz did NOT work well at all - VERY slow. So with much trepidation I upgraded to 9.04 last weekend to see if the video/X11 side of the latest release of Ubuntu was any better at handling my aging ,but still very capable, Dell laptop(affectionally called dellboy). Things didn't look so hot at first but I just ran with the not-compiz settings until having a look tonight. Trying all sorts of AddRGBGLXVisuals and other, non-relevant, NVIDIA-chipset-only, options to xorg.conf resulted in no change - wobbly windows would appear but no window decorator and an unusable, completely white gnome-terminal. Then I remembered a couple of things I had seen mentioned elsewhere: 1. For some chipsets (Intel & now ATI): the default EXA acceleration doesn't work or is unacceptably slow. For ATI, trying the older XAA works marvels. For  Intel chipsets try the latest UXA acceleration method. And 2. The last time I tried with 8.10 I needed to increase the colour depth to 24. Well, I inserted both the following into /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Under Section 'Device':

Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"

Under Section 'Screen':

Depth 24

Voila! Compiz, in all it's glory, works very acceptably on my Dell Latitude D600 laptop running under Ubuntu 9.04 'Jaunty Jackalope'.

FANTASTIC.I am stoked!