Beryl, except changing their name (ex name is Compiz), there are really some big changes.

First yesterday I installed Mandriva Free 2007.0 after I figured I’m gonna stay on this distro for awhile, it came with compiz, which is ok, but the problem is that I cant stand blue color. And its window decoration is blue, so I had to do something about it. Last night I played with compiz, no help.

Today a certain person got me into installing beryl. First, I don’t care about this whole animated, 3d, interactive stuff … blah blah, kids play. I did turn off XGL at one point, but got back on it, and this blue theme had to be changed so I had to do something.

This morning I installed beryl. Procedure was following at least for me:

Downloading Beryl and installing it:

urpmi.addmedia beryl http://mandriva.beryl-project.org/2007/i586

urpmi beryl-core beryl-manager

Editing my system and saying that it doesnt need compiz or xgl:

vim
/etc/sysconfig/xgl

XGL=no

vim /etc/sysconfig/compiz

COMPIZ=no

Xorg had to be edited too.

vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section "device"Option "RenderAccel" "True"Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "true"Option "BackStoring" "True"

Section "screen"Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"

Section "Extensions"Option "Composite" "Enable"Option "RENDER" "Enable"

Since I’m an intel user, I had to add another line to these same parameters:

Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"

Now as always those are pretty much instructions issued by beryl crew, but as always there are problems, here’s what happened to me, minor one but still …

Ran “beryl-manager”, cool, got it all sorted out, customized system the way I want it.
Restarted X just to see if everything is ok, nope nothing was ok, beryl wasnt up, xgl I told not to get up. Running command “beryl” helped, but I had no window decoration at all! Running “beryl-manager” got my dectorations running :)

Restarted X again, nope, same thing happened like it happened before. So I figured that I need to put “beryl” in startup process.

So I created “beryl.sh” just wrote beryl in it and put it in |/home/absinthe/.kde/Autostart” Restarted X, nope same thing. This is my first serious “ok I’m gonna quit”, but being stubord I had to give it one more try.

And I figured what happened, I forgot to make it “executable”! So I make it executable.

Restart X again, beryl was running alright, but I had no window decoration! So I didnt really panic created another .sh “beryl-manager.sh” wrote “beryl-manage” inside it, made it executable and restarted X again …

Everything worked fine, everything booted into my beryl the way I want it :)

Between 0.1 and 0.1.1 changes are huge (hey they only gave it +0.0.1 version image what would 1.0 look like o_O) New and most used effect is “magic lamp” as you can see on the picture above, if you don’t like it there are 7-8 more effects you can replace it with.

There are new effects, theme menager is awesome, you can download new ones from the internet, everything is great. Beryl really makes you ask yourself what is the linux GUI future, right now it’s better then Windows and MacOSx. I think they dont have time to make somethng similiar on Windows Vista, MacOSx, well that new lamp effect remainds me on it. But still, MacOSx is screwed too, they gotta do something new.

It’s amazing, the uglies of them all linux, is winning the battle, leaving rest of the crew far behind.

Btw, tomorrow I should leave for Visoko on Tankard concert \m/ I’ll stay there at my friend “Sapphire” place till Monday when I gotta go to Sarajevo to see my uni. assistant regarding my paper on CPU speed over the time.