Ubuntu Dapper with Beryl/XGL
I installed Beryl/XGL on Ubuntu Dapper over the weekend using these instructions. I then selected the Wombat theme and customised it to look like the image above. As you can see, you are able to create some really cool glassy effects with your window manager. If you are interested in the Sunrise theme, then feel free to download it from here, and import it into your Emerald Theme manager. You can download the background image from here.
Beryl provides some eye candy for the linux desktop. If you are a Mac user, then you’ll feel right at home… well almost. You can minimise windows with the genie effect or select a running application a la Exposé. Switching desktops is similar to switching user accounts on the Mac, which is done through a rotating cube effect.
Something different is the wobbly effect that seems to turn your windows to jelly when you move them around the screen. This was cool for like 2 minutes, until I started feeling nauseous, so I disabled it.
For a 0.1 release, Beryl is quite impressive. However, it seems to crash a lot. In fact it crashed twice whilst I was trying to write this blog entry.
I just got Beryl (v0.1.1) to work on my Gentoo box with AIGLX and it seems pretty stable. Had some small bugs where Beryl would would occasionally forget to redraw a window but it hasn’t crashed yet.
Couldn’t get the water effects to work though. Have you managed to get them to work?
Dimitri
8 Nov 06 at 4:34 pm
Yeah I thought Beryl kept crashing on me at one point, but it turned out that Beryl reconfigures a key binding for resetting the X server. So if you hit Shift + Backspace you end up resetting your X server. Normally you would do Ctrl + Alt + Backspace to restart the X server.
I couldn’t get the water effects to work either. I’m not sure what events would trigger the water effects.
Nick
8 Nov 06 at 6:43 pm
[...] On my Intel i945 chipset based laptop, Beryl 0.13 is wicked fast. Admittedly I’ve toned down a lot of the glitz, but I still have burn, blur, cube, negative and zoom turned on. I’m also using transparency via Nick Carroll’s Sunrise theme, which looks very nice. Alt+Tab was quick on 0.12, but it’s fast now… almost faster than w/out beryl it feels like. And, you get the added benefit of the extra usability, if you have your settings configured properly. My remaining challenges are: [...]
Matt Nuzum :: Beryl 0.13 is fast - water effect is not
12 Dec 06 at 2:44 pm