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).