Indy Telecom & Industrial Media

After installing Edgy, I figured I’d go ahead and install Beryl – an open-source 3d Window Manager that totally rocks.

While this took some doing, it was totally worth it, as the screenshots below will attest to (and when you are done looking at those, you should have a look at some of the YouTube videos on Beryl).

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.