Beryl Graphics Manager

If you are running Ubuntu Version 7.10 0r Ubuntu Version 8.10 Beryl has been replaced by Compizfusion this will have many of the features of Beryl if not more.

Beryl What is it?

It is perhaps easier to say what it is not, and it is most definitely not Vista or anything close to it. I have seen Vista and in my somewhat biased opinion Beryl is much more than Vista will ever be, it also has the advantage that it costs nothing. Beryl is EYE CANDY and wonderful eye candy at that. With the right equipment it is possible to have incorporated into your desktop environment a spinning cube (Well perhaps a list would be better).

        

• Spinning Cube
• Water droplets while you work (really cool on those hot summer days)
• Transparent windows
• See all your Desktops at once
• Wobbly windows & Dialog Boxes
• And Much Much more

If you have never experienced Beryl at the cost of nothing its worth giving it a try, we very much hope that Gutsy Gibbon the new Ubuntu distro out on the 18th October 2007 may have this incorporated into it. However for those that want to try this now should look at the install procedure for running Beryl at the following link http://soslug.org/beryl follow these simple steps and Beryl should work provided you have suitable hardware. Nvidia or some ATI graphics cards should work fine.

If you intend to try this, we recommend you first test this on a live Ubuntu CD first, using the same procedure above, which may work on version 6.06 but this has not been tested. With the right equipment hardware the Beryl Procedure does definitely work on Ubuntu 7.04 (Fiesty Fawn). Cassandra Mint V3.0 comes pre-installed (You need only run beryl-manager) but this may not work well from LiveCD (You may need an installation to your hard disk before you can test it), Ubuntu (Fiesty Fawn) on the other hand can be installed and run from CD so would recommend this method first you can always go to Mint later.

Most of the time your your Graphics card good though it is, is very much under used even in Linux so if you want to impress your friends and rob them of the glory of Vista show them what they are missing with Beryl.

Once You Have Tested and Installed Beryl

Ok you have, we hoped tested Beryl on your system using the Ubuntu LiveCD, and now you have installed to the Hard disk but find it does not run automatically in the Gnome version of Ubuntu this is easy select Sessions from Preferences menu as shown below in the Startup Programs click New for description add Beryl for command add the path to the beryl manager with /usr/bin/beryl-manager as shown.

   

To get the very best out of Beryl visit Beryl Project for the very latest how configuration howtos.