timothy's Journal: Beryl rocks out with Ubuntu (and a decent graphics card)

If you have been living in the Slashdot equivalent of a cave (which, note, might mean approximately the opposite of what that phrase would mean in the non-tech-obsessed world), you might not know that Beryl and Compiz are a) apparently about to merge back together and b) are compositing window managers that let you do all that wiggly-window, 3-D cube visual effect madness. I've been watching enviously screencasts of the cubes flipping merrily around, and windows wiggling like Jell-O brand gelatin dessert, but after glancing through with glazed eye some of the "how to get Beryl to work" instructions, figured I'd wait until it was a bit more automagic.(I'm a) lazy and b) easily led to temporary insanity by almost-but-not-quite-working software.)

Then, I saw that Mark Shuttleworth posted a little note that Beryl had landed in "Universe" (one of the software collections that Ubuntu users can draw from), and so I refreshed my list of sources, searched for "beryl" ... and got nothing :( I checked to make sure that "universe" is enabled in my synaptic settings (it is), but no luck. (I should mention that I'm running Linux-Mint, based on Edgy Eft, on both my primary -- desktop -- system and a newer Toshiba laptop which is my main portable machine. Maybe that has something to do with it? I don't think it should -- Linux-Mint is still set up to draw from the Edgy repositories.)

Mark S.'s directions sounded so implausibly, temptingly easy that I decided to devote a few more minutes than my usual 30-seconds-to-frustration. I checked out the installation page at the Beryl project's support wiki, linked from someone else's journal post on planet.ubuntu.com (http://wiki.beryl-project.org/index.php/Install/Ubuntu/Edgy/XGL), and installed as per that page's directions another repository in Synaptic ("deb http://ubuntu.beryl-project.org/ edgy main") and again reloaded the list of packages.

I also ran the command "glxinfo | grep direct" which indeed returned the desired result: "direct rendering: Yes." I wasn't sure what to expect on that front; my graphics card in the desktop system is really no card at all, but rather a cheap integrated "solution" from VIA, "UltraChrome" I think it's called -- understand, this is a low-end eMachine system from nearly three years ago; high-end by the standards of 1960s NASA, hopelessly outdated for anyone who plays modern video games, and about average by my standards of out-datedness.

After a reload of Synaptic's package list with the new repositories, a search for beryl resulted in a long list of choices, but as the instruction page at the Beryl wiki linked above told me, the only packages I needed to actually install are "xserver-xgl," "beryl," and "emerald themes." No package called "emerald themes" was actually listed; I went ahead though and installed the other two, as well as a package of unsupported Beryl extensions.

Mark S.'s post said that for him, after these packages are installed, starting Beryl is as easy as "running "beryl-manager" at the command prompt."

However, in my case, though Beryl tried gamely to start up on my desktop machine, I got an error message -- or rather, a few:

"Support for non power of two textures missing
libGL warning: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x46
beryl: Support for non power of two textures missing
beryl: Failed to manage screen: 0
beryl: No manageable screens found on display :0.0"

So, no dice on the cheap-and-mostly-cheerful desktop machine. No big surprise, really! However, this was nearly success. I decided to repeat the above steps on the laptop (a Satellite with a Core Duo processor and integrated Intel 915 graphics). This time, AMAZING -- it started up so fast I didn't even realize anything had happened; I just kept waiting for the same error message as on the desktop.

The Beryl manager app has so many choices, it felt like I was setting up Enlightenment for the first time all over again -- eye candy choices that beg to be played with. Took me a little while to figure out how to activate the rotating-cube thing (control-alt-arrow-key), and how to get the full 3D effect (by default, control-alt-mouse-drag). Then I started playing with the other settings ... transparency in window decorations, transparency in moving, distance of windows from each other when doing 3-D effects, boatloads of other options. Almost an overload, but not quite. I did spend a lot longer than I intended to experimenting with the effects, but intent or not, I guess I should have anticipated that.

Other than the 3-D effects, my favorite feature is probably the Expose-like feature activated by hitting F9 -- all active windows are shrunk to fit and neatly arranged on the desktop for selection. Perhaps not faster than selecting via Alt-Tab, but very striking.

A few questions puzzle me with the combo of Beryl and Metacity (which is what I'm using):

1) I like auto-raise of windows on mouseover, and I can't figure out how to do this yet.

2) I don't know how to get 6 workspaces (so all sides of the cube are used) rather than only 4.

Despite those things (both of which seem like easy things, except that I don't have the easy answers), I am very impressed with how snappy it is on my very low-end (though not ancient) laptop; I was anticipating that it would be far more sluggish, since I'm not using ATI or nVidia graphics hardware.

Now I look forward to showing a few computer-enthusiast friends what a modern Free software desktop can look like ;)

This is making me realize it's time to upgrade the desktop machine with an actual graphics card. I wonder what the best cheap-but-workable 3-D card is that can be run well using no proprietary drivers. Does Intel make PCI / AGP cards?