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Using Beryl: Cool!

2007, April 7 - 1:21am — vyvy

I have just installed Beryl on my computer (with an ATI Radeon 9200). I have to say that it's very cool! Here are some screenshots showing the cool effects of rotating the desktop cube and scaling the application windows for selection:

Rotates the desktop cube of Beryl A window picker of Beryl

My home desktop has an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (512KB cache) with an ATI Radeon 9200 display card, and it's running Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) at the moment. Some people (as I found out from some forums) and I who use (the comparatively old) ATI Radeon 9200 failed to install Beryl. I have made it to work eventually. Here it goes.

Use the "ati" Driver. There seems to be some problems using the ATI's closed-source "flgrx" driver with Beryl on ATI Radeon 9200. Some other people have encountered similar problems. So, I simply stick to the "ati" driver which should be automatically installed by Ubuntu by default unless you don't use an ATI card. Check /etc/X11/xorg.conf to confirm that you are using the correct driver.

Install and Setup Beryl with AIGLX. I followed some of the steps here [wiki.beryl-project.org]. However I use another way to start the Beryl manager automatically as I found it to work better.

  1. Add the software repositories. Refer to the page mentioned above. I use the latest stable version.
  2. Install packages beryl and emerald themes.
  3. Try to execute beryl-manager manually to check if it works. It should replace your current windows manager. If you don't have the luck, you may encounter some problems here. Refer to the link above for troubleshooting.
  4. Configure Beryl to start automatically. I followed the method here [m0n5t3r.info] which seems to work better. The method basically overrides the launching of the default xfwm4 with beryl, but it should fall-back to the former in case of any problem starting the latter. Simply create the following file ~/.config/xfce4/xinitrc:
    #!/bin/sh
beryl-manager 2>&1 >\$HOME/.beryl-log &
emerald 2>&1 >\$HOME/.emerald-log &
exec sh /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc

Simple and cool huh?

Note: The ATI Radeon 9200 is considered rather an old card. It does not support some effects used by some plugins, such as the blur effects, the water effect.