XGL and Beryl on Kubuntu Edgy

After watching all the cool videos about GLX and Beryl (see below), I decided to give it a shot and see if my older home machine could handle this fancy stuff, and to my suprise the Beryl window manager is actually faster and more responsive than the default KWin manager. Which makes sense since I still have a fairly decent graphics card.

A little background, XGL is an open source X server manager that uses your graphics card’s 3D acceleration and OpenGL to render “windows” of a desktop environment such as KDE, Gnome, Blackbox, and others. Beryl, a fork of Compiz, is the window manager which handles the all the user interaction (moving, sizeing, minimizing, maximizing, etc.) with the windows. Beryl also provides all sorts of cool effects and eye candy that can be applied to the windows, such as displaying vitual desktops on the faces of a cube, providing realtime views of all windows (including video), and glassy transparency blending.

Some more videos to see XGL and Beryl in action:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2155353011707841108
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6355987583647295883
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8668797260936502626
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8807054885646031393

Read on for step by step installation…

My Hardware: 1.4 AMD Athlon, 512 MB RAM, 64 MB Nvidia GeForce3
OS: Kubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)

Instructions (Followed these similar ones)

Add Repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://www.beerorkid.com/compiz edgy main-edgy
deb http://media.blutkind.org/xgl/ edgy main-edgy

Download public Keys for repositories:
$ sudo wget http://www.beerorkid.com/compiz/quinn.key.asc -O – | sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo wget http://media.blutkind.org/xgl/quinn.key.asc -O – | sudo apt-key add -

Install Packages:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install xserver-xgl libgl1-mesa xserver-xorg libglitz-glx1 beryl emerald-themes

Create a New Session File /usr/bin/startxgl.sh Containing the Following:
#!/bin/sh
# NVIDIA Card
Xgl -fullscreen :1 -ac -accel glx:pbuffer -accel xv:pbuffer & sleep 2 && DISPLAY=:1
# ATI Card (I have not tested. See posts below.)
# Xgl :1 -fullscreen -ac -accel xv -accel glx:pbuffer &
# Gnome:
#exec gnome-session
# KDE:
exec startkde

Make Script Executable
$ sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/startxgl.sh

Create Session File /usr/share/xsessions/xgl.desktop Containing the Following:
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=XGL
Exec=/usr/bin/startxgl.sh
Icon=
Type=Application

Create a Symbolic Link to Make beryl-manager Start at Login:
$ ln -s /usr/bin/beryl-manager ~/.kde/Autostart/beryl-manager

Logout, Then Login Choosing Your Newly Created XGL Session. Done.

Some Keyboard Shortcuts:

• Switch windows = Alt + Tab
• Arrange and View All Windows = Pause Key
• Switch desktops on cube = Ctrl + Alt + Left/Right Arrow
• Switch desktops on cube – with active window following = Ctrl + Shift + Alt + Left/Right Arrow
• Rotate cube manually = Ctrl + Alt + left-click and grab an empty desktopspace.
• Make window translucent/opaque = possible with the “transset” utility or Alt + wheel mouse
• Zoom-in once = Super-key right-click
• Zoom-in manually = Super-key + wheel mouse up
• Zoom-out manually = Super-key + wheel mouse down
• Move window = Alt + left-click
• Snap Move window (will stick to borders) = Ctrl + Shift + left-click
• Resize window = Alt + right-click
• Bring up the window below the top window = Alt + middle-click
• Slow-motion = Shift + F10
• Water = hold Ctrl+Super key
• Rain = Shift-F9

*Super key = Windows key

BUG: My super key wasn’t working
FIX: Add
Option “XkbOptions” “altwin:super_win”
to the keyboard input section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf