Beryl + Ubuntu = Beauty

I finally go Beryl working this weekend. It took me hours and hours to figure it out. But, it’s not really that hard, so I’m going to share my findings with you to make it super easy.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, Beryl is a 3D desktop manager that can replace Metacity or other desktop managers in Linux (specifically Ubuntu in my case). Take a look at this video for a good idea of what it can do.

Without further ado, here’s what I did to get it to work. First of all, you need to know that I went the XGL route and not the AIGLX route. If you want to know what that means, Google it. Basically, XGL works with more video cards than AIGLX.

The first thing you need to do is enable 3D acceleration. To do that look here on the Ubuntu wiki under 3D Graphic Cards. You’ll need to know what type of video card you have.

Once you have seen direct rendering: Yes in your terminal, you’re ready for the next step: installing XGL. The Beryl wiki has a good section on installing XGL and Beryl at the same time. I did that and it didn’t work. So what I recommend is installing XGL first with the instructions on the Ubuntu Help site.

Once you have installed XGL and you’re logged on to GNOME in an XGL session, it’s time to install Beryl. The reason that I told you not to follow the official Beryl wiki is because it uses the latest version of Beryl (0.1.9999.1 as of today) which breaks Beryl on my machine. What I had to do was downgrade to version 0.1.99.2. To do that, use the terminal code posted by junknode on the Beryl forums.

After that, you should be able to type beryl-manager in your terminal and enjoy all of the 3D goodness now at your fingertips.

I hope this helps at least somebody. Let me know if I told you something that doesn’t work or if you have a better way. Enjoy!

technorati tags: beryl, ubuntu, linux, opensource, 3ddesktop, 3d, desktop