Indy Telecom & Industrial Media

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So, here is a brief overview of the problems I had in installing Beryl on Edgy on my Dell e1405 with an Intel chipset. I figured this information might be useful for folks that might do some searching later.

• For starters, I used the information from the Beryl project’s wiki page for Edgy as the base-line to begin from.

• The default video driver that Edgy comes with seems to have problem, and for whatever reason, I had nvidia’s glx drivers installed. So, I did the following (without X running):

sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-glx
sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-i810
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-i810


• After this, I tried running glxgears and while it ran, it was quite choppy and was being rendered indirectly.

• This, as it turns out, was because the installation procedure overwrites a version of libgl-mesa that has conflicts with the drivers. So, I installed the latest libgl-mesa driver:sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri

• After this, I installed beryl using sudo apt-get install beryl and beryl-manager using sudo apt-get install beryl-manager and everything seems to work fine.

I did find a couple of other bugs, however:

• Having gnome’s screensaver on seems to hang X. So, if your screensaver hangs, you can either revert to Xscreensaver or turn it off. There are plenty of threads on Ubuntuforums discussing this.

• The System > Quit -> [Hibernate/Sleep/Reboot/Login/Switch User/Shutdown] options disappear, and clicking on the System -> Quit icon seems to reboot.

Turns out that both of these are bugs acknowledged by the Beryl project, so you’d just have to wait until these are solved. For the moment, for the first bug, I do not really care since I do not use screensavers. As far as the second one is concerned, I revert back to Metacity and then everything works fine. When I get back, I just start Beryl up again.

So far, I am loving it! I have an Intel Centrino Duo notebook with an i810 chipset (with an Intel 950 GMA) and 1 GB HDD. Nothing spectacular, yet with all the special effects on, Beryl is a breeze - I haven’t noticed any discernible drop in performance in any way. If anything, I find myself way more productive.

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In a lot of ways, it is. I got just about everything working. And as you can tell from the screenshots, it also knocks the pants off most other Linux installs I have seen.

So, the three things that I could not get to work on Dapper were — multimedia (mp3s, DVDs and AVIs), my wireless and my monitor at its native (highest) resolution. Here is a brief overview of the solutions I found.

• Multimedia on Ubuntu: For the mp3s, despite ALSA working and despite downloading the right codecs, I could just not play any mp3s and nor could i play any DVDs or AVIs. I found this Digg article on “How to Get Full Multimedia Support in Ubuntu” to be immensely useful. Which of course begs the question — just why isn’t Ubuntu shipping all this with its desktop install?

• Wireless on Ubuntu: While I could not get my wireless to work on Dapper, it magically started working with Edgy Eft. To me, this was the greatest benefit of this upgrade. Now, if this does not work for you, the “Dell E1405 and Broadcom 4311 wireless HOWTO” is extremely useful.

• Getting E1405’s LCD to work on its native resolution on Ubuntu: This was a slightly harder problem. To solve this, I basically followed the instructions given here on getting the Dell e1405 WXGA+ to work on Edgy Eft — but please note that I had the Section “Device” read Driver: vesa instead of i810. After making the changes mentioned there (including changing vesa to i810), I installed 915resolution (sudo apt-get install 915resolution). I then restarted X, went to my preferences and viola! There was 1440×900, which I then changed to. It works like a charm. Beats the days when you had to mess with XF86Setup and the like.

Now my final problem resulted from the Firefox upgrade. It turns out that there is a problem with Firefox release candidates and various Linux flavours/versions, where a lot of people have had trouble getting https to work. After the upgrade, Firefox would just throw up an error for any https page, which totally sucked. Funnily enough, Opera would work just fine, without any problem.

To fix this, I basically wrote the following script and have it stored in my home directory:

#!/bin/sh
killall firefox-bin
mv .mozilla .mozilla-old
firefox &

Surprisingly, after the very first time, I stopped having this problem. But I have the script there anyway, just in case.

So, now I have a perfectly functional Ubuntu install that can pretty much do everything that Windows could, and I am extremely pleased with it! The best part about the whole setup is that I can hibernate Windows and work in Linux and vice-versa.

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