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Beryl User Interface for Linux Reviewed
techie writes "OSWeekly.com has published a review of Beryl, a very cool looking UI for Linux. Matt Hartley writes, "This release, in my opinion, was the most over-hyped and bug-filled to date. You will have to really hit Technorati to see more of what I'm talking about, but Feisty is as buggy as the beta I tested a short time ago. After completely tossing into the wilds of the ubber-buggy "network-manager," anything running with Edgy supported RT2500 driver shows up, but it will not connect without a special script. Those of you who are on Feisty and need help with your RT2500 cards are welcome to e-mail me for the bash script."
Perhaps:
Beryl (note spelling) is buggy. It isn't finished yet.
Feisty Fawn is still a bit buggy. Its only just released.
... I think the author needed to include a little more information.
For example, exactly how does Beryl interfere with OpenOffice Write's word count feature? I'm trying to make a connection and I'm flummoxed.
Also, given that the author spent most of his time reviewing Beryl on Edgy, how exactly does Feisty's network manager reflect on the stability of Beryl? I think he was including the network manager as an example of how buggy Feisty is (though I haven't really noticed any problems myself, perhaps Kubuntu's network manager is a different beast) but there were a few connections that he made internally that didn't necessarily make the transition to the article itself.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
if it's the rt2500 that isn't working then it's most likely isn't network-manager, but your driver. Please complain about the correct part(s) ;)
still reading?
Did you mean "beryl"? Seriously, you got it right in the title but not in the blurb.
And you can find the project here. Has web 2.0 killed direct-linking? Let me write a blog post and submit to Slashdot to find out.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
TFA is slashdotted already, but from the summary I can't tell if he's reviewing Beryl, the unstable fork of Compiz 3D window manager, which is itself unstable and not enabled by default in the latest Ubuntu and most other distros, or the recently released Ubuntu 7.04, AKA Feisty Fawn.
Christ...I thought I was doing something wrong! Well, that explains that! The "special Desktop effects" for the windows, and stuff doesn't work, and now when I click on the icon it says that it's not there. Well, I guess I'll just wait for the next update, but I must say getting online was the easiest I've ever experienced in my life! Xmms locks up so bad that I have to reboot just about every time, and that goddamned Totem is pissing me right off...I hate that thing as it takes over everything! Anyway...yay...I got online!
Like the brawl between Neo and all the Smiths? Man, that was cool.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
No no no! Please don't give us detailed information, publish this "special script" or link to it. Just keep it as a secret.
Was this yet another attempt by a programmer to make a non-intuitive GUI overladen with features that the average user would never touch?
Wow -- different experiences for different people, I guess.
I'm running a Dell Optiplex GX520, all standard corporate hardware, with 2GB of Ram and an Acer AL1912 monitor off the integrated video subsystem -- and running Beryl. Everything "just worked." No configuration needed to install from the 7.0.4 CD & update from the network.
Actually, I have one problem: a page refresh problem with FireFox. When I scroll "up" a page that has been scrolled "down" I get repeated horizontal lines as artifacts. Touching the top window bar clears the page. Minor annoyance that I'm not worried about enough to investigate.
I couldn't be happier.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
He complained about OpenGL performance, however he is running XGL which is known to be slower with 3d programs. Unless he had an ATI card, there was no reason, really, to not use AIGLX, which tends to run 3d stuff a lot faster.
In a recent Mark Shuttleworth interview posted on Slashdot, the interviewer criticized Fiesty for not having the eye candy turned on. He responded "The actual software itself - Compiz and Beryl - is not good enough."
This is Google's fault. People have come to expect Betaware to be essentially a finished application. It isn't. Final is finished. Beta is for testing. If it's at the point where it works and the devs think they've sorted all the showstoppers then it's a release candidate.
So yes, the author is right, casual users definitely should leave this alone until it's done. That's what "beta" means.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
*rant about beryl still being beta*
*rant about word-count in openoffice not working, no reasons given*
*rant about feisty being the most buggy and overhyped release so far, based on the fact that the new network manager fails to work with his specific network card*
seriously, does he get paid for this?
is it like the blurb? That is, a big rant on Ubuntu and not much on Beryl? If Ubuntu sucks so bad why not try it on a different distro? Mine works just fine under Fedora 6.
I haven't been able to access the article, but I'd have to agree with the summary. I've tried running Beryl on Feisty for a few days, and I've had a few issues. The effects worked quite well for me, but the deal breaker for me was the poor fullscreen support. It's a known issue. I had trouble with both non-OpenGL (mplayer) and OpenGL (mythfrontend) programs, and "undirected fullscreen rendering" didn't work for me. Beryl isn't activated in Feisty (or Edgy) be default for reason.
However, I do think that the work the beryl developers are doing is fantastic, even though it's not yet a stable release. I worry that the enthusiasm in developing great software like this is hampered by negative (non-constructive) feedback... particularly of a non-stable release.
Beta software has bugs. In other news, Avril Lavigne can't sing, people hate paying taxes, the sky is blue, and your "girlfriend" from Nigeria who keeps asking for money is really a man.
weird, beryl is quite easy to compile, and doesn't take that long too, it worked for me quite well, and I've tested a lot of its releases, but I ain't no beryl fan as I don't see the point of it, it's just bloated bloat on top of bloat, which isn't functional, and the whole spinning box thingie is useless, I prefer e17's (Enlightenment \,,/) multidesktop feature, it JUST WORKS, is fast and easy to use, and quite handy if you need to run a lot of apps at the same time
\,,/ Rock and Roll ain't noise pollution, Rock and roll ain't gonna die! \,,/
still using feisty beta that i installed monday last week. beryl works great and i haven't needed to boot windows for ANYHTING since the install. didn't even bother to download the release iso - seems to be working fine with the beta+updates. using an nvidia gpu on a latitude d620.
installed the same disc on my desktop at home and it was a little funny. had to get the alt iso because it didn't like my ATI all in wonder x800. after some tweaking i got it working pretty well.
some things i've noticed - on my laptop i had to set the renderer to aiglx instead of auto - was getting black empty windows after a while. have not had that problem since changing that setting. at home i get some flickering when rotating the cube.
other than that i couldn't be happier. fawn/beryl are working great for me and i have everything i need to do my job.
"...if you don't like your job, you don't strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed..." -Homer
Working ok with a creaky old FX5200 at 1680x1050. In fact working better than OK...
Wow, I wished they had told me sooner; before I had successfully used Beryl on my Feisty box. Now, I am going to have my cool display break on me....
Seriously people; what's the deal? Beryl has worked for me; and I could be an anomaly, but A) I know it is beta and B) it has worked for my friends. So is Beryl really that bad?
And regardless of your opinions of Ubuntu as a distribution, is it really that buggy? I haven't had any problems yet. Have any of you?
Informal poll here:
Is Beryl (not required for Ubuntu) as bad as this guy makes it out to be?
Is Feisty (required for Ubuntu 7.04) as bad as this guy makes it out to be?
holy typos batman, fire up the utunbu box adn psot on t3h froum.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Until the 0.7 is out, I can't use it (lack of LEAP support). And I have seen it lose it's mind completely on an ipw2100 system in WPA2 on occasion whereas a simple wpa_supplicant.conf and single wpa_supplicant run is rock solid.
And I'm no stranger to crappy, buggy drivers, my primary laptop has an Atheros chip in it now.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I can't RTFA because it's not loading, but my roommate recently installed Xubuntu because he likes the look of XFCE. He has zero Linux experience, but he seems really pleased with it so far. At the same time, he doesn't seem to grasp the concept that the window manager is separate for the OS, and any distribution of Linux can "look like that". Why does the summary go from reviewing Beryl to the middle of a review of the latest release of Ubunutu?
These "reviews" are stupid.
#1. Review the distribution with hardware that WORKS WITH IT. You want to review the distribution, right? Not "does it work with Card XYZ123". I know, I know. Finding that hardware is too hard for you. You want to "review" it based upon whatever you have at hand right now. Whether it works or not.
#2. If you want to review how it has problems with "Card XYZ123" then right your review about that card. That means you try that card with different distributions. Again, I know. You don't want to spend more time or effort than is absolutely necessary to get your "review" out.
#3. If you're going to review hardware, review hardware. Which cards are supported? How well? Which are not? Why not? Of course we're not going to see many of these because it takes even more time and effort than the other two.
See, not having used Beryl myself, I had no idea that was a problem. A little more detail in the article describing the problem would have been pretty helpful.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
When using Beryl I feel dizzy because my eyes try to focus on the blurry windows when I move them around. After 5 minutes of use I have a strong feeling to puke because of that, its very uncomfortable and I am not using it because of that.
Don't get me wrong, the fluff is nice but I can't use it. Same goes with OSX's and Vistas "enhancements"... nice but in the long run its just in the way.
I am brand new to Linux (installed 6.10 a month ago) and just installed 7.04, primarily in the hopes of getting Beryl to work with my ATI x800 card. I succeeded and everything works well (I couldn't get it to work with Edgy). However, the process was only slightly more enjoyable than shoving hot lava rocks up my butt. From what I can tell, getting Beryl to work with later model ATI cards (read "cards less than 2 years old") involves reading through various help forum posts, printing out a half dozen or so configuration techniques, and trying them one by one (hoping that you don't bork your installation in the process). I don't think the upgrade to 7.04 in and of itself fixed the problem. However, there do appear to be many more posts that address the problem with 7.04 so there is a wider range of possible fixes to choose from. I'm don't really understand why this is such a problem. All I did was make some configuration changes (I already had the correct drivers). I would hope that this would be dealt with in the initial installation. Oh well, I guess I deserve it for using beta software.
Other than getting Beryl to work, I don't notice any significant difference from 6.10, although I am hardly a power user.
i'm liking Metisse a lot. i only played with it a little, but it seemed to be actually useful eye candy. dont get me wrong, i like compiz/beryl, but it doesnt seem to be geared toward productivity.
Metisse, on the other hand, seems to be all about giving you quick access to the window you're looking for, and being able to store more windows on a single desktop.
What makes this even more surreal is the juxtaposition of advertising text in the flow of the article, which I included for the fun of it.
...
(Review) - To this day, I still have to smile when new Linux users decide to take the plunge because they want the cool looking visual effects that Beryl offers. To some limited degree, I can understand the motivation. The stunning videos on YouTube are certainly compelling to those who have never tried to use the setup themselves. Unfortunately, there are still some valid reasons for sticking with the alternatives for the time being. Let's explore some of the issues that I have found with using Beryl.
Pretty, But In Beta. Even assuming you follow the official how-to and not those half-baked tutorials you see floating around, the end result can easily be broken with the blink of an eye. Or rather, an install of a Beryl update. Yes, it's true, updating Beta software can break things, especially when it is your window manager. Because of this, I tend to keep the Beryl repositories commented out only to keep an eye out for any security reasons. Even from the stable updates, I have completely hosed X on more than one occasion. If it works and there is no compelling reason to upgrade - leave it be!
The main point here is that Beryl is very much a beta product. It really kills me to see people spend so much time to get this running when the "wow" factor wears off fairly quickly.
Web Apps Can Never Be Desktop Replacements
What Works and What Doesn't With Beryl. Since I have not tried Beryl on other distributions other than Ubuntu Edgy, the following is not to be seen as a blanket statement. With that said, you will find that some tasks are not well suited for this 3D wonderland. An example? How about anything with OpenGL! Sure, I can run Second Life while cruising around in my world of Beryl. However, the fact remains that it runs so poorly that I'm then forced to use a separate login session. Yes, even switching back to Metacity from the Beryl Manager, thus ensuring things are back to their two dimensional selves, I continue to feel the lag in my system resources when running Second Life and the like.
Then we have the word count in Open Office Write. Obviously, this is something that I use on a daily basis. Unfortunately, it only works about a third of the time (not tested with Feisty yet) when using version 2.04 of the office suite.
And finally, we have the fun of setting up your configuration wrong only to discover that you cannot get pop-up alerts for spell check and other similar items, turn up behind the main browser window. I'm not blaming Beryl on this one, but the end-user. Regardless though, it is still annoying.
Is Beryl Worth Trying? Yes, I believe that Beryl is most certainly worth trying - as a separate session and not the only one you have. I say this as I grow tired of the "running with an ATI card and my drivers don't work" crowd are far too often the bloggers you read about when bad mouthing how "difficult" Beryl is to setup.
GoodBye Windows XP Forever and Ever
In truth, Beryl is easy enough for the average Windows/Mac power user to breeze through once they understand the following.
Get your video driver from this utility. Also consider using a NVIDIA card, if at all possible.
Stick to a tutorial with proven success (Ubuntu Edgy). In my case, I opted to take the XGL route. You may, however, choose to try the AIGLX path instead. I personally use XGL, as I have never had a problem getting it to run - not once. If you can cut and paste with the right mouse click into a terminal window, you can do this. The only area that takes a little trial and error is the startup script. The worst that can happen here is that it does not start Beryl after you do a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X.
Make sure you are closely following the directions. Since this is for Ubuntu, you may wish to search for another tutorial if you are looking to
Just as a counterpost to the very negative summary: I am currently running feisty with beryl enabled on a dual screen, running nvidia drivers. I made a complete switch from windows about a month ago, while feisty was still in beta, but I haven't looked back since. No way am i letting go of my scale plugin for beryl :) (That feature is worth the whole switch just by itself.)
Doolittle :
Bomb no.20 : To explode of course.
An open source project has the luxury of making publicly available pre-releases, and updating them as they improve. Beryl, for one, is still down in the .2 releases. It's around 20% done, and it's unreasonable to expect it to be as stable as finished software (not that I ever had instability or crashes in the time I ran it).
It's as simple as all that. And since I play at least two games that utilize OpenGL and I like the OpenGL screensavers, I have to vote "no" to the current 3D desktops...or at least to Beryl since that is the only one I have tried. If/when there is a 3D desktop that will coexist with my other 3D stuff, then I'm down with it.
alright alright! just remember to breathe.
or to use punctuation.
~~~ Paf. Le chien.
I'm running it on Ubuntu 7.4 as I type, it's amusing for about 15 minutes. I do have something positive to say about it, it isn't as irritating as I expected it to be.
The (metacity?) wobbly windows from "system/preference/desktop effects" actually feel quite natural; I think these are separate from Beryl.
I switched to beryl from a plain'ol xfce setup. Very cool eye candy, and I actually did find the layered transparency on my terminals very helpful. Beyond the fact that co-workers would stop by to ooh and ahh from time to time, I eventually decided to just stick with plain 'ol xfce. The cube was a neat idea as well, but not that much superior (imo) than plain ol virtual desktops.
:) Cool looking like I said, but it didn't make my desktop a more efficient workplace.
Everything ends up taking a little longer waiting for animations of windows to explode or swish away, or for the cube to zoom out and switch around.
Maybe I missed something that would have tilted the usability in beryl's favor.
I know the intent is mainly to look great, and it definitely does that!
Not only does the OOo word count not work for him, but it somehow crossed his "Review of Beryl.odt" article with his "Random Rants About Ubuntu and Stuff.odt" article and spit out one incoherent piece of shit!
The software update manager in Kubuntu asked me if I wanted to "upgrade" last week. End-users are asked to upgrade from not-so-good Edgy to Feisty which is *really* not working well compared to running Etch.
I'm using Edgy after using Debian Etch throughout its testing phase and *Edgy* is *still* buggier than Etch was in testing. It should not be asking me if I want an upgrade. The upgrade should be an optional meta-package at best.
There are definitely problems with KDE/beryl drawing some of the the kde dialog boxes right. I don't really know where the problem is, but I can confirm I've seen it on KDE. If there was complaints about kde's default wireless gui, it is very limited in use. Kwlan is much better.
The overall impression I get after using the installer and Edgy with KDE is the Canonical projects are running very quick and dirty for what is supposed to be "released" software.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
... on the front page right now has some sort of spelling or grammatical error. Every single one.
/. janitors, explain yourselves.
Come on,
Ubuntu FF will be stable after second servicepack. (hides from a tossed penguin)
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
Oh bullshit. If you are a company who wants "commercial" level software you don't use an OSs latest release that literally just came out, and you don't use a graphical interface that is known to be buggy just so your users can have eye-candy. Which is why you won't catch major companies using Ubuntu 7.04+Beryl or Vista right now. There's nothing unfinished about Debian stable or RHEL.
The problem with comparing a lot of OSS with commercial software is that you get to see and play with the OSS before it's done. It's a feature, not a bug, to be able to have the code before the developers are satisfied with it. Instead of complaining about them "shipping" bad code, you could just not use beta software. The developers of Beryl will be the first to tell you that it's not stable. Would it make you feel better if they hid it from you until it's "done"?
If you look at the bugs database for Feisty there wasn't much outstanding to get done. I ran Edgy and updated to Feisty. No issues, actually the update fixed a few setup issues I had but they were caused by stuff I did.
The issues I do see have nothing to do with the release. It is with code they have no control over. The one thing I still see is the media players crashing out every now and then and I had the same thing happen when I used to use Windows a few months back.
You inferring there was a borked release is incorrect, the only borked releases I know of recently were Vista (late, buggy, forced down peoples throats) and Leopard (late, delayed till October).
The whole summary is just wrong. It's illogical, badly worded, and badly typed. The quote from TFA doesn't appear much better.
He mentions something about his network card being Edgy-supported even though he's using Feisty. I have a hard time understanding why he'd even try something in Feisty that's from Edgy and which he considers superbly (or overly) buggy. If someone's just saying that the card is supported under Edgy and therefore should work fine under Feisty, he should just say that. From the way the quote is constructed, I can't tell if there's actually a problem with the card support anyway, because he says what's needed is script to set it up properly. He says this right after saying the network manager is the buggy part of the process. So wouldn't it more likely be the network manager's fault, and not have anything to do with card support at all? It sounds like the card support is fine and his mention of the issue is just a distraction from the discussion of the network manager.
The graphical interface is spelled 'Beryl'. The word 'ber' is spelled 'ber', 'ueber', or possibly 'uber' but never 'ubber'. 'Edgy supported' would be more properly 'Edgy-supported'. Very few people use 'e-mail' as a hyphenated word these days, but it's at least somewhat normal. 'Tossing' is, last I checked, usually a transitive verb. What was tossed into the wilds? I think maybe the metaphor here is mixed. 'Trekking into the wilds', 'venturing into the wilds', or 'tossing my configuration to the wilds' might make sense. 'You will have to really hit Technocrati' I think puts the emphasis on the wrong word. By splitting 'to hit' with 'really', it sounds like I'd have to hit Techoncrati particularly hard (metaphorically) or that I'd have to really, literally, need to physically strike Technocrati. Perhaps the author meant 'You really will have to hit Technocrati', which simply means that seeing the information at Technocrati is the only good way to get the full effect of what he is saying. When reordered in such a manner, it sounds quite awkward. Even better would be 'You really need to hit Technocrati' or 'You really have to hit Technocrati'. Perhaps 'You should hit Technocrati' would be even better.
Now, the spelling or typing mistakes alone don't break the summary. The grammatical mistakes don't take too much away. Each little logical fallacy doesn't destroy it on its own. However, the writing really does not help the situation. The poor expression of the ideas confounds what appear to be issues with the ideas themselves. This is why we get grammar and spelling corrections all the time. It's often overkill on Slashdot to correct someone's spelling or grammar. That's because the idea is usually still clear enough and because the errors are usually in the comments. In this case, the points the authors (of the summary and the quoted section of the article) of a root post are actually quite lost. I'm not even sure there were points being made.
I wish I could RTFA to clear up my understanding of what's being said. However, it seems the people who consider themselves so qualified to review an operating system failed to scale their servers to Slashdottian proportions before they got a link to them from the front page. Obviously, many servers get trounced by the Slashdot effect, but most of them are not for OS review sites. I'm not particularly familiar with OS Weekly, so perhaps they specialize in just desktop concerns. If that's the case, their reviews might be worthwhile. However, I hope they don't review operating systems for production servers. I certainly wouldn't give much weight to their reviews for those now.
We see enough misuse of the terms beta and alpha on the internet. It'd be nice to at least get slashdot on the right page.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
'über'. The word is spelled 'über', 'ueber, or 'uber'. Never 'ubber'.
Wait! Is he suggesting that unstable software might have bugs in it? Holy crapses! This changes everything!
Yeah, you're right. If only Feisty was as polished as Vista.
I tend to be an "early-installer" and I also love eye-candy. As such, I was one who was running the early versions of compiz and Xgl when switching to modular xorg was still an advanced procedure.
After a 10 month repose from all those snazzy effects, I recently installed Beryl on my gentoo laptop (acer 5102). It was easy (and if you compare it to the nightmare it used to be, it was -extremely- easy). Not only that, it is themeable, the beryl manager allows for easy to understand configuration of oodles of tasks. In short, even though Beryl is still in heavy development, it is coming along very well and is very useable.
Even with the factory video card in my laptop (Radeon Xpress 1100) I have lots of unused hardware power sitting around. The configurability of Beryl allows you to, say, disable all of the effects except drop shadows and menu fading. Thus, without noticeably affecting the responsiveness of your system, you can add some very overdue, subtle, and appealing aesthetic touches to your desktop.
Anyway, my point is: don't over emphasize Beryl's beta-ness more than is due. It is really coming along and is very functional and, I think, a necessary development that is needed to revitalize our aging, grey desktops.
I know this is OT but google didn't help me on this. I recently upgraded my desktop to Ubuntu Feisty. Now, whenever the desktop is idle for a while, it automatically logs me off. Has anyone else come across the problem??
Um, you don't run your screensaver and game at the same time, so why would you expect a 3d desktop to behave with a game?
Beryl's got a really neat feature where you can toggle between metacity and beryl via the config tray icon. Just turn on metacity when you're gaming, then turn beryl back on afterwards.
'Tis not the fault of the desktop manager...maybe when cards get bigger running multiple 3d apps won't drag it down so much.
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
http://zanerylin.com/images/Screenshotubuntu.png
Here's a Screenshot of Beryl/Compiz on my Ubuntu Feisty Fawn desktop. I have an HP ze5600 Notebook that's about 4-5 years old. ATI drivers worked out of the box for me so all I had to do was enable Desktop Effects and it worked with no issues at all. All I had to do was find me a theme that I liked. Looks pretty good imo.
Also, I had no issues with network-manager. It's actually a GREAT improvement over Edgy and works better but then again...my card is supported.
Bite my shiny metal ass.
I can play Q3A-based games, at least, with Beryl running. There is not a significant reduction in FPS. The "Unredirect fullscreen windows" option helps, but my screensaver (Euphoria) looks pretty good even without that.
Back when I used XGL with old Nvidia drivers, I did indeed have problems with FPS in OpenGL apps, because there was basically no way to render directly. I used to have a script to launch games in a second X session (and I still use it for games which are difficult to minimise - it's nice to still be able to respond to IMs). Now I do not use XGL or AIGLX, just Xorg and recent Nvidia drivers. This system has no such limitation.
However, I currently have Beryl set up to make all windows of type "unknown" semi-transparent, which covers qt menus and various strange OSDs (e.g. Amarok's), and generally looks very nice but sadly also covers fullscreen OpenGL windows. I hope there is a workaround for this soon, as many KDE users have things set up like that.
So ATM I do what many people who have problems with Beryl do: I just start another WM before running a game, and start Beryl again afterwards. Once you've made the shortcuts to do this, it's no trouble at all.
All in all, Beryl should be considered still in devel and you might have small problems but they are generally easy to fix or quickly work around.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Does anyone understand why the make or break of a new OS this year is whether you can view different workspaces (multiple desktops, whatever you call them) imposed onto a cube which you can twist about? This seems completely dysfunctional. You can't possibly view observe all six faces at once, so it's going to be very difficult to find anything, and you'll get quite disorientated looking. If you perform the wrong transformations, desktops will come out upside down, or rotated 90 or 270 degrees. Most people have 4:3 or 16:9 ratio screens, so you can't possibly map six of these onto the faces of a cube without distorting them terribly. If you had four or nine desktops, then you could split the screen to display them all in a rectangular grid, which would make finding applications easy: this would be planar rather than 3D. There's no need to make the desktop something from Half-Life 2, or I'd staple six screens together and send myself to space.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
I love it when jackasses decide to base an entire review on unstable software, then turn around and whine about stability issues. Running Edgy at work with the latest version of Beryl, I have not had any problems whatsoever in months (on a dual display setup using TwinView, too). The worst problem I've encountered was an occasional Firefox crash, but that's been so long it's entirely negligible.
Beryl on Ubuntu kicks ass, 'nuff said. I'd just strongly recommend using Intel reference hardware with an nVidia card (ATI's Linux support still sucks, and probably explains the author's issues).
whoever wrote this is..
I have had FF beta running with Beryl with no flaws on my HP dv6000 laptop. After a little configing.. its a solid awesome looking OS.
writer is a nub
Kill your TV
rt2500 support is not broken, its just that network manager does not know how to talk to ito urce-2.6.20/+bug/37120
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-s
you can still use it fine with the old networking tools
System -> Administration -> Networking
choose the rt2500 card
click properies.
disable roaming.
set your network name, and put in any WEP key you might need
for most network setups choose the DHCP configuration.
I'm sorry for stating this so bluntly, but: that was a very poor review. It doesn't mention what Beryl does apart from the title, which mentions that it's a cool looking window manager. The article doesn't even have any screenshots or descriptions of how it improves the UI. The author doesn't expound on any features since they don't even mention any of them. It doesn't mention development of beryl, where they intend to go with it, how beryl compares to other similar routes to a 3D desktop on Linux, how it compares to desktops on other OSes, or any advantages to be gained from the functionality of using beryl for every day work. This is material for a message board post, basically.
OK, it's easy to criticize, so I'll do my part. Beryl (wiki) is a desktop compositing manager and window manager that takes advantage of 3D acceleration. Essentially it draws each window separately, allowing them to refresh and paint independantly and then puts it all together into the desktop you see. This allows graphical effects due to the fact that each window can be manipulated as a separate element by the 3D card and mapped as a texture to 3D objects, to which shaders and other geometry-altering effects can be applied, allowing for effects such as wobbling windows and water ripples.
Beryl accepts plugins for extra effects and features. The functionality Beryl provides can be extended to control the transparency of windows, allowing you to reference other windows while you make changes in the current one. Plugins are provided that organize your windows in front of you, allowing easy task switching. An enhanced alt+tab task switcher shows picture-in-picture previews of windows you can switch to, while highlighting the window you are currently selecting. Beryl can provide zoom and contrast features to make your desktop easier to see in certain situations.
There are many ways in which Beryl can be extended to provide helpful tools for every day desktop use, but since it is in its infancy (being on version 0.2.0 as of this writing), many additional features may be incorporated into the main release, and who knows how developers and users will enhance the desktop with Beryl's feature set.
It doesn't really change the feel of using applications under Gnome or KDE, but you feel a lot more aware of what's going on because new animations represent your actions visually and you see smoother transitions between actions such as opening menus, switching, minimizing, maximizing, and dragging windows. I haven't used any other 3D accelerated desktop, so I can't comment on how it compares to those. I have no idea how it compares to Windows Vista, or OS X. Feel free to reply with your experiences and comparisons.
A feature spotlight is available on the home page, and you can download additional Beryl window manager themes.
Twinstiq, game news
- Hibernate now works
- I don't have to fiddle around for 10-15 minutes setting up NetworkManager
- I don't need to edit
/etc/modules to make my sound card work properly
TI SD card readers never were well-supported. Dapper was a no-go. Edgy was "editlook! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
I'm confused why they reviewed beryl on a distribution that doesn't inherently support it. I would have suggested using Sabayon Linux. The live dvd itself supports AIGLX and XGL running beryl with almost no configuration, and is easily installed.
Its not systematic, I've only done it on my one system - but at least it is about beryl
Firstly installing was easy enough - on Fedora using yum it went in no probs.
The FAQ on the beryl page was quite useful, you should consider looking at it ( see http://www.beryl-project.org/faq.php )
Nvidia don't make great drivers compatibility wise, so you probably will need to use the copy rendering path, you can select it in the advanced beryl options > rendering path > copy, after clicking on the gem icon (this stops you getting random black screens when you have a few windows open, but does cost some speed)- the devs from nvidia said they are working on it... but don't hold your breath
Themes are pretty easy to get
There are a lot of options to play around with and you can make your system look exactly how you want with a little bit of effort
All in all, its pretty good... give it a go, if you don't like it you can always go back to metacity easily
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
I think you are venting..
1. Dont blame Ubuntu for Beryl's shortcomings, Beryl is BETA software there WILL be bugs.
2. I agree that wireless support in Feisty is disappointing, but the blame should always fall with the manufacturer for not providing drivers. Getting pissed at the Ubuntu devs isn't going to help. And this has absolutely NOTHING to do with Beryl.
I upgraded from Edgy to Feisty. Now my Linksys PCI wireless card is acting up. I can see the wireless network, but it doesn't connect to it. Or rather, it connects but silently refuses to use it.
Needless to say I'm not impressed. I couldn't care less about eye-candy, maybe the next release could focus on stability and quality?
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What I think would be very useful is if you could put the desktop as a cube all the time, instead of having to do Ctrl+Alt+Mouse1 on it, and then have it snap back down to one desktop. Then the wraparound feature would actually be useful. And if there is a way to do that now, please enlighten me.
As the saying goes, you can't polish a turd ... hey wait, don't mod me down, I was referring to Vista!
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
"Second, it's quite modular, and you don't have to use any of its features. Just uncheck them if you don't like them."
Hmmm...interesting. When MS has feature bugs and it's suggested to "turn them off", it's a "Ha Ha" tag on slashdot.
So what tag do we give this story then?
that criticized OS X when it debuted for its "eye candy" do a complete turnaround. Now it seems to be "lets out do OS X with garish out of place special effects". Let's set the open and close dialogs ablaze when the user selects a file, let's add physics to the dock, let's add flapping to the windows....
As Lucy would say 'HA!'
Let's spin this another way for you--my present XP setup has less apparent, known bugs to me than my Ubuntu 6.10 box does. If you are only going to stay with support for major hardware, I might as well return to XP and Vista and get officially supported drivers than this aggravation. And yes, I can point out bugs not fixed from 6 to 6.10 that are documented and have just sat there, unfixed, despite clearly reported and demonstrable and repeatable. They're on the forums, documented, and have been mentioned on
I agree that usability improvements are somewhat difficult to find in Beryl. I've been running it for a while now, and I have very few options on because anything more is clutter and distracts me.
The biggest improvement I've found is that I can bind the option key (sadly aka. the Windows key) and my left mouse button to window resize, which completely eliminates the need to find the edges or corners of the windows to resize them. This is a very basic, yet huge improvement for me. When I first turned it on I thought it would be just as useless as the fire burning up the windows; fun to look at while providing no real benefit in terms of usability.
And the problem with OSS projects releasing beta software is that they very, very seldom release anything BUT beta software. Beta releases have taken over the role of regular releases, and nobody puts in the effort to polish up a working version but instead just adds more half-finished features.
What would make me feel better is if more open source projects would pick a subset of all the features they want, and implement and polish those until they work, and release this as non-beta software before moving on to working on adding new things. It would improve software quality immensely.
No, I don't know why this "review" of Beryl managed to turn into an anti-Feisty rant. (Feisty runs just fine for me, by the way. Not a single bug. And Beryl, which is an unsupported third-party beta package that I had to install manually because it is not part of Feisty, the developers of which did not waste time on eye-candy like Beryl which they decided not to waste time supporting because it is still beta software, also works fine.)
troll? this doesn't read like a troll. op doesn't seem to be trolling here. wtf is up with the retarded moderators? you'll be meta-modded into oblivion, i hope. enjoy your mod points, cause you won't have them for long.
It's run fine for me, even in the earlier releases. The update to 0.0.20 seemed to iron out a lot of bugs. I'm using Ubuntu Edgy, just upgraded to Feisty, and no issues whatsoever have cropped up. The system I'm speaking of is actually my wife's, and she's given nothing but compliments to the coolness, and has said she's had absolutely no problems, even when running things like GNUCash over an ssh/X session to my Ubuntu server.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Then we have the word count in Open Office Write. Obviously, this is something that I use on a daily basis. Unfortunately, it only works about a third of the time (not tested with Feisty yet) when using version 2.04 of the office suite.
What the hell does the Open Office word count have to do with Beryl?
It's shit because it's not BeOS.
well, I guess I said something contrary to the groupthink here. Nice work moderators, bury anyone who says anything that sounds like it might have been something negative about Linux (or maybe it's Apple). When did slashdot become so provincial? Hopefully metamod.pl will end your run as moderators, you bunch of lusers.
Incidentally, I have noticed that lately I have had several posts modded modded overrated for no apparent reason. Anyone else ever get the feeling that there are a group of moderators who stalk people they have disagreed with in the past? I mean, maybe I once said that I thought Windows wasn't *that* bad or that I believe in God or something that offended someone's (in)sensibilities. Now some mother's-basement-dweller with no job and an axe to grind is stalking me to mod me down. I dunno, maybe I need to go to the tinfoil haberdashery. Or maybe I am right and I am calling you out.
Not that it really matters in the end. Like many of you, I really don't care that much about this. Slashdot is entertainment for me. The few intelligent people who post here are overshadowed by the morons who like to argue over trivialities but who do not have the necessary reading comprehension to read and respond to a post properly, those who offer their "insights" but who are empty-headed fools, the (real) trolls, and script kiddies posing as graduate students. But if I am going to spend time writing sincere posts with the hopes of having good discussions with other intelligent people or maybe having a bad understanding corrected and thus learning something, only to have them modded down unjustly by a bunch of slack-jawed troglodytes posing as moderators, then I can just go somewhere else and spend my time.
Moderators who modded my post troll, and who will inevitably mod this flamebait: I hope your outhouses burn down, you stupid bunch of inbred, snaggletoothed, hicks! And I hope you one day meet your fathers (hint: it's probably your mom's brother or father). And don't worry: just because you took an IQ test and failed doesn't mean you can't have a productive life as mudflap or a poopsmith. Ciao!
this post courtesy of hobo sapiens.
some marketing dude out there is a genius...Beryl is actually the generic term for a compound of beryllium. Beryl is the term for both the Emerald and the Aquamarine...it has a hardness of 7 whereas a diamond is 10. both are beautiful gemstones, though the red gem logo is sort of inappropriate...itshould've been blue/green to represent both the emerald as well asthe aquamarine. all in all its just beautiful.
Now here's one iPoddy site! iPod Range
For anybody else wondering what the hell Expose was. Sorry, but I've managed, with great effort, not to touch a Mac in almost ten years.
Now that I know what you are talking about, the expose-like features and the drop shadows (really helps my eyes) are the only reasons I've left Beryl turned on. I'm running it on Mepis 6.5, BTW.
I've checked all over beryl's website http://www.beryl-project.org/ and Ubuntu's http://www.ubuntu.org/ and I'm beginning to think they may be separate entities. weird.
Browse at -1 to keep an eye out for abuses.
I comment on this because the "Expose" effect in OSX and Beryl is the one feature I have come to rely on so much that I have trouble using...for instance...Vista because it lacks a version of it. I mean....I can but I hate to.
What you are missing when you have it explained to you or you hit F9 on a Mac is how with both Beryl and OSX I can bind the effect to an extra button on my mouse. So now on my noble Mouseman, the thumb button is now my primary task switcher. A single push of the button and a single click on the mouse on the window I want is by far the best way I have ever found to switch tasks. Sure Alt-Tab "might be faster" but you have to do it multiple times and its easy to go past what you want and have to go through again. Plus for a person like myself that is mostly doing mousework (little typing) its nicer to be able to completely switch tasks without need to reach for the keyboard or trying to hit a box in a small percentage of my screen called a taskbar.
Apple nailed it with Expose (and Beryl's organic mode with a little spring is even better than OSXs)- it is the one feature of composited desktops that is a "must have." More productive than a million cubes or a billion blurred windows....even though I love that stuff too!
Open Source Sushi
I'm using (K)ubuntu since hoary. So i upgraded to feisty via the update-manager on friday night. After downloading and installing i restarted the machine and everything seemed to work fine. But after about 20 minute i got a hard freeze with no sign of an error in the logs. So i restarted. 25 minutes later another hard freeze. I began to suspect beryl, so i disabled it. Again 25 minutes into the session, hard freeze. AFter 4 Hours of trial an error i read a message: mdadm updated to 2.5.3. My / is on a raid1, so mdadm tried to rebuild it. Bad idea, as soon as the rebuild reached /proc i had to expect problems and freezes. So i booted into Live-Knoppix and rebuild the / offfline. After that no more freezes. And yes Beryl is eye-candy at its best.
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
I got the impression that Ubuntu in general tried to bring (rush?) eye candy to the desktop. Perhaps that impression is wrong. I don't like Beryl much but I can see the distinction between the beta-ness of Beryl and Ubuntu proper.
However that doesn't negate my point that Feisty broke my wireless. I still haven't gotten it working, by the way. As said, I can see the networks (even my neightbours) but it won't connect whatever I try.
Mind, Edgy wasn't a no-flaws install either. I'm seriously considering going back to the LTS version as that worked like a charm out of the box.
To recap: I'm very content with Ubuntu, I use it daily. It is very capable and I wish it all the best for the future. But at the same time I find that every new version breaks something for me. I can live with that because I'm not dependent on the latest-and-greatest.
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"It's as simple as all that. And since I play at least two games that utilize OpenGL and I like the OpenGL screensavers, I have to vote "no" to the current 3D desktops...or at least to Beryl since that is the only one I have tried. If/when there is a 3D desktop that will coexist with my other 3D stuff, then I'm down with it."
Odd that you have come to this decision. My favorite screensaver is the openGL 3D Molecule renderer. I have found it to to be especially entertaining when the "Water Effect ie: Rain" plugin of Beryl is running concurrently. As for games I don't really do much gaming but when I occasionally run GL-117 a 3D openGL flight game I have found that left clicking the Beryl icon in the KDE kicker system tray - "Select Window Manager" and simply selecting to switch to KWin or Metacity for the duration of the game does help with performance somewhat, I am not sure what menu/icon item to use in Gnome or XForce. Of course regardless of desktop manager you could also start a new x-session to run the game in and just switch back to an uninterrupted Beryl in the current session when done. You can of course also automate these methods via a shell script and have the game icon/menu item do any of this in one click.
This is not to say that Beryl will co-exist nicely with the myriad of 3D apps/games out there, I just don't have the exposure to them all to know. What I do know is it plays nice or is easy to bypass/negate such issues with the stuff I use. Please note I have been running the latest SVN of Beryl for sometime now cause I find that the older more developed features that I use the most are also the most stable in the SVN releases. I hope the merge back with Compiz does not slow down progress too much. Of course I am all for stability but I have actually found Beryl to be more stable and a better performer that Compiz on my rather aged box, Asus P4 S533-E | Intel P4 2.2ghz/2gb SDRAM | nVidia GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 256mb | openSuse 10.2 |nVidia Driver & XGL. The only glitch I have at this time is an occasional -once or twice per 8 hours of use- frame remnant left on the screen by a drop down menu when the system is very busy. This is simple to fix with a reload of Beryl, right click-left click - 15 seconds and all is pretty and shiny again.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
You know when I first tried Beryl I though that it was going to be just eye candy stuff that I would tire of quickly and then turn off. However many of the features have turned out to be much more natural and intuitive and thus more useful that anything else I have used. Most of the spinning cube clips on MySpace actually do a great injustice to Beryl by focusing mainly on the flashier but on the less useful features. I am pretty certain that the exact type of view manager you specify does exist for Beryl in the latest SVN versions anyway. It is an "Extra" called "Mini-Viewport". However I found this specific extra to not be stable on my system, at this time anyway, and thus turned it back off, it is off by default as are all iffy extras/features.
However there are several features in Beryl I have found to be just as useful or more so and have been damn stable for me. The closest to what you describe is the "Scale" feature in the "Window Management" settings manager group. Pressing the F8 key for all viewports or the F9 for the current viewport only causes the current widows to fade out and all appropriate windows to be all displayed scaled on your clean desktop. You can also designate a hot corner of the screen to engage this feature via the mouse.
The "planar" or as I prefer the "Ring" task switchers can be used to display all windows in a single viewport or in all viewports("cube" sides). As I noted I really like the "Ring" switcher, when called with "Super-Ctrl-Tab" keys this fades away the current window and displays all windows from all viewports in a 3D ellipse and cycles through them bringing one to the foreground and active state with each Tab press, release and you are switched to the app in the foreground at that time. Another handy feature is the "kicker" taskbar "Extra" called "Window Previews" that displays a live mini window of whatever taskbar item you hover your mouse over.
All these "Window Management" and "Extras" window/task display methods have one common and very handy feature. The items displayed are live or dynamically updating mini versions of the actual window instead of a simple icon or snapshot. This is really handy if you need to to check on say a download or compiler progress, etc with minimum effort or distraction.They all have seemingly endless configuration options to tweak things just how you want them.
There are many other features that I would not want to give up anymore.The "Visual Effect" "Opacity-Brightness-Saturation" feature makes it really easy to check on something behind the current window with just my mouse wheel and the Alt key. With the Super key and N key I can toggle the "Accessibility" feature "Negative" and give my eyes a break by inverting the current windows display colors. With the "Accessibility" feature "Input Zoom Enabled" I can easily zoom in and out on any application and still have unfettered control of my mouse and keyboard. The "Visual Effects" feature "Trail Focus" dims widows based on time since last focus, neater than you would think, as it reduces distractions. I am sure the "Window Management" feature "Group & Tab Windows" is going to the feature I have been waiting for as soon as I get the time to tweak it out.
As for the "cube" and transformations/ distortions, I run a 16:9 ratio here on a 20" Samsung SN204BW. I usually run 8 viewports so instead of a cube I actually have an octagonal 3D configuration. This SVN version I am running supports up to 16 viewports though some earlier ones did 32 or more. In addition you can specify up to 16 desktops. So one can have up to 16x16 or 256 individual workspaces though I don't know how useful such a number would be, it would defiantly make for a huge pager. I don't use a pager, I simply have one desktop and flip through the 8 viewports with my mousewheel or "Ctrl-Alt-arrow keys". I actually do very little of that and usually use the taskbar or "Ring" switcher to find, checkon or switch to a window. Though I have been known to occasionally press both mouse buttons and shout wheee as I zoom out, spin and roll the octagonal "cube" crazily about. Try the latest SVN version and don't be too quick to give up on it you might just find a lot of stuff you like.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew