Ubuntu – How to upgrade Compiz to 0.9.8 or downgrade to 0.8.6 in 12.04

Unless your Compiz package is really buggy and you are desperate to upgrade it, I would suggest you hold your horses and wait until the fixes made in Compiz during Quantal development is backported to Precise. As you probably might have noted, the fix for your bug has been milestoned to Compiz Core 0.9.7.10 "SRU-1" and would probably land before Precise 12.04.2 point release.

But if you really have to upgrade, I wouldn't stop you.. Read on.

There was a half-baked Compiz package that reportedly included most of the SRU fixes that were meant to land in 12.04.

January has nicely laid down the necessary instructions to install the PPA in this question:

• Compiz / Unity very unstable, crashing very often on 12.04

I'll quickly go through the basic instructions for reference:

Install the PPA and the Compiz package:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:vanvugt/compiz-preproposed
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install compiz=1:0.9.7.8-0ubuntu1vvpreproposed2 compiz-core=1:0.9.7.8-0ubuntu1vvpreproposed2 compiz-gnome=1:0.9.7.8-0ubuntu1vvpreproposed2 compiz-plugins=1:0.9.7.8-0ubuntu1vvpreproposed2 compiz-plugins=1:0.9.7.8-0ubuntu1vvpreproposed2 compiz-plugins-default=1:0.9.7.8-0ubuntu1vvpreproposed2 libdecoration0=1:0.9.7.8-0ubuntu1vvpreproposed2

Log out and back in. If that fixes your problems, you can lock Compiz to this particular version. General instructions on how to lock a package here:

• How to prevent updating of a specific package?

If it is buggy, you can just update your system and you will be reverted back to the current Compiz package in the repo.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade