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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."
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.
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
First of all, Fiesty IS Ubuntu 7.04, not required for it. They are one and the same thing.
Second of all, Beryl works great for me, doesn't crash, and doesn't interfere with anything.
Finally, I'd like to point out that Fiesty is the greatest thing that happened to my laptop. It finally convinced me to get rid of Windows altogether, because finally S3 suspend works correctly, along with all my other hardware.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
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
I would say it's best with Intel. nVidia users seem to run into issues a lot, like the black window bug that's caused by nVidia making craptastic drivers. Intel graphics *never* fail.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
Beta has been abused a lot in software firms across the board. This is how it is, and should be:
Alpha release, is a software release that essentially works, but lacks some functionality that is planned for final release. It is released to a limited set of users (or maybe just in the firm that created the software) for ironing out the worst bugs.
Beta release, is a software that has all functionality, which has been tested internally, but which needs some real world testing with users.
Then we have the whole "Release Candidate" debacle which appeared much later because of the frequent use of "beta" for what was actually alpha-releases.
Alpha - Untested not yet complete. :)
Beta - Untested complete.
Then 1.0
Lately I've also thought about why Google has so much beta testing, but then I found out that the write in Python and then it all became clear. Python, as a type-unsafe-programming language requires E X T E N S I V E user testing to iron out the bugs.
Badgers, we don't need no stinking badgers! - UHF
That card is using a DEC Tulip compatible chipset (the Davicom 9102). It's been supported by the kernel for quite a few years, so I doubt that it's the kernel's fault. As a quick thing to check, try killing all dhclient/dhclient3 processes, and running "dhclient eth0" by hand. That would tell you whether it was network-manager/dhclient or something more, at least. You could also trying manually configuring with "ifconfig eth0 my.full.ip.address netmask 255.255.255.0 up" and see if you get some network access. If you do that, you'll need to also do "route add default gw gate.way.ip.address" to get off your LAN.
FWIW, I'm running one fresh install of Feisty without problems on my NForce board (MCP51). I did an upgrade from Edgy on a Broadcom BCM5754 desktop, and a laptop with a Broadcom BCM5751 and an Intel 2200BG 802.11g miniPCI card. If you have time and another network card, I'm sure the Ubuntu people would appreciate you trying it out and posting a bug report on Launchpad.
Why is parent marked informative? While this may be a strange concept to some of you, this is one of those joke things. They're usually considered "funny" rather than "informative".
Dapper already had a tiny but nasty problem with Davicom ethernet cards (I know, I'm writing from a Dapper box with a Davicom card). Basically, it loaded the wrong driver -tulip.
To me it was enough to add "blacklist tulip" as a line in the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file, but it was not immediate at all to understand what the problem was.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
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.
After a couple of reboots and no network, I stumbled on some advice somewhere else that said to run "sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart". I did that, and it got connected (the output in the console showed the DHCP request and response and it worked with ping and firefox. I then actually enabled "desktop effects" (the beryl thing) and it wanted another reboot to install the nVidia blob driver. After that reboot, the network was working again. For some reason; I thought I might have to run that script every boot - but at least right now it is working again.
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.)
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 noticed that a swing app (IntelliJ) I was running in the 1.6 sun jre didn't work with beryl. The application wouldn't paint anything inside the window it popped up in. After a little digging, I found a patch for the jre and now it works fine.
http://wiki.beryl-project.org/wiki/Java.
maybe a similar problem with open office?