As 73 other blogs already mentioned, you don't need XGL to run Beryl any longer if you use the beta nvidia-drivers in Portage (which are currently quite masked). This is pretty nice because the last version of XGL that worked for me was from July. I've had to mask every one since then. I got some kind of GlxBadDrawableSomethingOrOther error every time I tried to run the new ones. I tried everything I know of (which is arguably not much) to get the newer versions to work, but nothing ever worked right. Tried every version of nvidia-drivers under the moon, recompiled my whole system once (for other reasons, but still). Nope. So this is good news. It runs at full speed too, which is also nice. A few short weeks ago, nvidia drivers + Xorg would crawl any time any special effects happened. Once again I'm amazed at how quickly the development of this project is going.

I noticed a lot of themes missing from Emerald that used to exist in Compiz/CGWD. Apparently they removed all the non-GPL themes, which is good I think. We don't want Beryl being sued out of existence by MS and/or Apple. However I don't think most of the themes there now really take advantage of the flashy transparent eye-candy that Emerald is capable of. If only I wasn't working on 12 other things and dead tired from work, I might give a theme a shot.

My emerge -e world finished after almost exactly 24 hours. Not bad for 600 packages I guess. It failed on samba, some gst-plugins, qt, vnc, and probably a few other things. That was annoying. I actually managed to finish without using (much) of --skipfirst though. It's nice that when emerge -e world fails on the 300th package, you can emerge or emerge -C another app, and then emerge --resume and it will still be smart enough to resume with the 300th package from before. Doesn't work as well as it could, though.

In other news, compiz no longer works. I get a blank white screen. I don't know what happened. I haven't been updating compiz or XGL, but I must've updated one of its dependencies. Possibly the nvidia drivers. Who knows. It's not worth tracking down to fix, really. The surprising thing isn't that compiz doesn't work now, it's that compiz somehow managed to work on my computer for as long as it did.

Anyone who wants to try XGL without completely b0rking their system should take a look at this XGL liveCD. It's a completely safe way to test out XGL.

XGL is an OpenGL-accelerated X server, meaning everything is drawn via hardware. This enables crazy special effects like wobbly liquid windows and rotating workspace-switching cube effects and menus that kind of "boing" when you open them, and that's barely scratching the surface apparently. It's impossible to describe. Look at the videos on the bottom of this page if you haven't already.