Lately Beryl has been running very sluggishly for me. Who knows why. It also tends to freeze up intermittently. I just turned it off entirely. The wobblies and zoomings get a bit tiring after a while anyways. God help anyone with motion sickness who tries to use it.

Good old kwin. It's amazingly powerful. Especially compared to the likes of Metacity. All I want out of life is to sticky Gaim windows as soon as I open them, and this kwin gladly gives me.

I have decided to retire the cow layout for this site. It's been fun, but I need a change of pace. I'm going ultra-minimalistic now. The new layout should be done sometime this weekend.

Haven't posted one in a while. Gnome + Beryl, Buuf icons, MurrinaNeoGraphite GTK theme. I caught a window in mid-closing-animation, but I thought it looked neat so I left it.

The latest version of Beryl, or whatever version I just installed (0.1.2 I think) has new effects (new to me anyways). One is Beam Up and the other is Burn. Beam Up is like a Star Trek transporter effect. Burn is a flame animation, but if you set it to random colors it looks like magic or something. It's quite simply the nicest-looking thing I've ever seen.

Here's a very short little movie I made of these effects: ogg format, avi format. They were created using recordmydesktop.

Again Ubuntu took about 25 seconds to update every beryl-related package on my system. Gotta love it. Gotta love Linux in general; you don't even have to exit the X server to restart your window manager. How many times would I have had to reboot if I was doing this in Windows? (The answer is "undefined", because Windows doesn't have anything this nice to install in the first place.)

Good:

• Installing Beryl was brain-dead easy: add a repository and apt-get install beryl. About the same as Gentoo I guess, where you'd layman -S whatever-the-repo-name-is and then emerge beryl. Except Ubuntu didn't take 30 minutes to install it, and it was nice and tested and likely to work. I'm using the Emerald theme called "kind of blue". It's simple and looks nice and most important does NOT look like Vista or OS X. The only thing I don't like about all of this is having all these third-party repositories; for example I needed yet another one for the beta nvidia drivers. But I suppose it's not much different or worse than using overlays in Gentoo.

• I got lm-sensors working. Again it was mostly easy; I followed this guide, sort of winging it on a few steps. There are a LOT of guides for ubuntu that assume you know nothing. If you know anything at all, it's more than enough information, usually. Anyways other than that it was a matter of apt-get install lm-sensors and then sensors-detect which tells you which kernel modules you need. (I had to run some bash script to create some device nodes first.) I modprobed those myself, and restarted conky, but conky hung without outputting anything. Turns out the sensors show up a bit differently in Ubuntu than they did in Linux. I had to change my ${i2c temp 1} to ${i2c 9191-0290 temp 1} in ~/.conkyrc. Took me a while to figure that one out. Ubuntu must be detecting more than one i2c device. Even after getting that right, conky wouldn't work until I killed and restarted X. Strange. Works now though.

Bad:

• My printer (Canon iP1600) refuses to work in Ubuntu. Every site I check for every distro says that there is no Linux support for this printer at all (except, ironically, Gentoo). But I had it working in Gentoo, unless I've been imagining the past year. I tried the iP2200 drivers, and a bunch of other things, and nothing works. I tried some drivers from a site called turboprint; it worked, but it prints a huge logo over top of everything you print and if you want to disable the logo you have to pay $40 for the driver. Screw that. I'll probably set up my old 550MHz computer, stick Windows XP on it, set it to load VNC by default, and stick it in a corner somewhere with my printer plugged into it.

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.

I got beryl (i.e. compiz-quinnstorm) working. I had to do this:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/opengl/xorg-x11/lib
export DISPLAY=:1
beryl-manager

This thread was a life-saver. Now rather than the whole screen being white, I get nice unnecessarily bouncy window effects. Can't be beat. A lot of new stuff has been added since last I looked. The development speed on this project is rather shocking. Every time I look there's a new plugin or new feature that's been ganked from OS X or Vista. It's an exciting time to be a Linux user.

A new screenshot:

This is KDE/Xgl/Compiz with a Milkish sort of cgwd theme. Just enough transparency to make things interesting. Of course Compiz is best when you see it in action.

The wallpaper from Interfacelift. Such a nice wallpaper.