It’s just the TV output.

After install all those eye candy stuff, beryl, gdesklets and everything else, it looked quite nice. Amazingly, there weren’t any memory killers or frequent crashing apps. However, there is no doubt that apple Mac OS was/is the best eye candy OS ever. I don’t have to tell you that one of the most appealing applets is the icon doc at the bottom of the screen. So, since lot of people have their eyes on this, those are ported to many platforms (rather recoded not ported).

Now, It’s time for me to go for something instead of modeling the gnome panel itself. cairo-dock, it’s my choice. Installing cairo-dock quite easy if you have all the development libraries. There is no need for me to explain all the steps there - Just follow this link : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=302570. He has explained it step by step. The installation/compilation will go smoothly.

However even after you compiled the application, unfortunately there will be some errors. The first one is icons. Probably, what you’ll get will be some blank icons. The SVG files inside the tar ball doesn’t show up correctly. You might be already knowing that SVG files are text files. So, what you have to do is open the icons in ‘vi’ or ‘gedit’ or whatever, then just look at the source of the image. Most probably around the bottom of the file, there will be a link to a PNG file. Actually there will be two links linking to the same file. Just change the link to a valid path for a PNG image. Then you are ready to go.Recompile the application, then just run it. Then with any luck you’ll see the icons

Ah! I forgot to tell you about changing the icons/launchers. You have to change the g_aIcons array. It’s at the beginning of the file. The first parameter is the image, then the Text displayed, and finally the command. Make the display text as short as possible, otherwise those will overlap with each other and it’ll look kinda fuzzy or more to the point ugly.

After all things you have a working cairo-dock. Then the next step is to add it to the startup. I used the gnome session control panel, but however since I’m also loading beryl at the startup, cairo-dock used to crash. So, I removed this from the startup, and changed the beryl loading script(Look at my beryl installation post). So, the final script looks like this.


#!/bin/sh
beryl-manager
sleep 7
beryl&
sleep 7
/media/sda5/Software/cairo/cairo-dock/start-cairo-dock.sh


Now try restarting the Xorg, it’ll work like a pro. Even, it works as it should be, there are few problems regarding this. I usually use Alt + F4 to quit applications. So, when I keep quiting applications, if I pressed one more additional Alt + F4, damn… the cairo-dock will get closed and also if you pressed the “Show Desktop” button the cairo-dock will get minimized.

So, what do we do now? Don’t worry I have a small(small as in very small) hack to get rid of that problem. Open cairo-dock.c in vi(or whatever). Search for “gtk_window_new”(There is only one instance. It’ll be around the line 1180-1190). Change the second parameter of the function to “GTK_WINDOW_POPUP”. So, the line should look like this :


pWindow = gtk_window_new (GTK_WINDOW_POPUP);


Then, recompile the code and restart the dock. And finally you have another cool gadget to impress the people :D.

A solution emerged while doing little bit of browsing. Just have to export a variable :

export AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit


Beryl is working, nice interface, another way to impress people who are saying/thinking that linux is only a black terminal(small white letters in a black screen in their words). But a small problem, some of the useful programs are not working properly.

VLC - The videos are not played properly. Change your video output redering from Default to X11 Video output. oh! You have to enable Advanced options.

Window Focusing - One annoying thing about beryl was when i started a new application/window, it didn’t get focus. In the beryl settings, General settings change the focus mode to ‘none’.

Netbeans 5.5 - Disable beryl just for now ;-). Haven’t tried anything yet.

The eye candy Linux desktops, of course way better than windows. I have seen many you tube clips on both compiz and beryl working, do I have to tell you.. those are awsome. So, however inspired by those I decided to give it a try(It was several months ago).

My Linux distribution was ubuntu 6.06. First I installed XGL and change the gdm.conf-custom file to load the XGL with gdm. Then I installed compiz. Nothing to bother at all, only few simple apt-gets and just two or three lines of config files, I have compiz running with XGL. However, since my graphic card is Intel 945GM, I’m using i915(i810) drivers. XGL is bit slow with that. However, this worked nicely without any bugs.

Then, the next thing any person would do is try to optimiz compiz, so you can get a better speed. But how? “Using Google”. Most of the sites said that the best option for my graphics card is AiGLX and Beryl. So, I installed AiGLX first, then beryl. For some reason it didn’t work and more annoyingly my sound card went out. Everytime I start the GDM with AiGLX, it crashes. So, I decided to uninstall that. Oppsss… a small problem. I can’t find the AiGLX package. Oppsss.. a big problem, AiGLX is inside the core of Xorg, it’s not a seperate module as XGL. Now, what do I do? Either I have to reinstall Xorg from the old repositories or disable AiGLX. So, I disabled AiGLX and activated XGL again. Damn.. XGL is not working either now. So, what else? I disabled the both turned back to the old ubuntu human theme.

After all those sort of stuffs, very recently(about three days ago) I formated the old ubuntu 6.06 and installed 6.10. Then I decided to give it a try again. Since, I have some bad experience with AiGLX, I tried to run Beryl with XGL. So, I installed XGL. Installed Beryl. This time, I created a seperate session for XGL, and created a small script ‘/usr/local/bin/startberyl.sh’. The content is :
#!/bin/bash
beryl-manager
sleep 5
beryl


This is not the normal procedure. I just did that on my own to get things easier. So, I logged out, then logged into the XGL session. Then went to the terminal and typed ’startberyl.sh’ and wow finally Beryl is running under XGL. However, It doesn’t sloved my problem completely. It’s still slow. However, I didn’t want to install AiGLX again, I have to statisfy with what I have. I put the script as a startup program. After working few minutes, I restarted the computer. When I rebooted the computer, wow…. It’s working really smoothly. I can’t believe XGL is running this fast. Then, I realized the secret. I forgot to set the XGL as the default session, so what I have done is booted the default gnome session, but how does the beryl is working? It needs either XGL or AiGLX. oh! Ubuntu edgy comes with AiGLX built-in support. wow!! it’s cool. Everything is working perfectly now. Beryl with AiGLX - After all It’s just matter of installing beryl and emerald-themes(for a ubuntu(6.10) edgy user).