Nvidia drivers, 3d Acceleration, and Beryl (Hey Doug! It works!)

Good... morning, everybody.

You may remember my post earlier this year about Xserver-Xgl and
compiz. You may also remember that I 'got it working', but not quite.

Well, there's a 'better' version out. Ubunty Edgy and Debian Etch have
readily available packages for x86 and x86_64 for xserver-xgl and beryl.

The primary sticking point for Beryl and Xerver-XGL is that you need a
*good* 3D video card (nvidia, ATI, etc) and you need direct rendering.

Getting the 3D drivers working (for nvidia, that's 'nvidia', and for
ATI, it's 'fglrx', I think) has been a pain for me historically; the
ubuntu packages haven't worked ever on my systems. Only Gentoo got it
working painlessly, and only for a handful of kernels. Even then, I
never had direct rendering available for some reason.

Ubuntu Edgy has, for the first time ever, a working nvidia driver and
kernel. I dist-upgraded last night and completed the job today, and the
nvidia driver and Direct Rendering worked on the first boot.

Following this HOWTO:
http://wiki.beryl-project.org/index.php/Install/Ubuntu/Edgy/XGL

Got it working with a minimum of effort.

In contrast to COMPIZ, Beryl is a really easy, highly configurable
window manager that has all the fuctionality of GNOME and then some.
Translucency is easily configurable and there are keymappings for just
about everything. While Beryl is currently at version .1, I've been
using it all day today with only one problem (I did something that
replaced my desktop background with white. Everything works normaly, but
I have a white background that I can't replace ;)

While I don't recommend upgrading to Edgy or Etch right away, Beryl
deserves a close watch. Xserver-XGL has come a long way in the past 3
years, and it's not only usable, it's downright awesome at this
point. CPU usage is pretty low, and stability is high (only the
shift-backspace thing is killing me currently- I keep nuking X.)

If you have a fast video card, and some spare time, give Beryl a shot.
It's easily reversed and I plan on using it from now on.

Adam

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Received on Sun Oct 15 03:42:00 2006