3D Desktop Effects with the Beryl Manager on Ubuntu
I’ve known about Beryl for some time but have been skeptical about installing it. 3D effects and other desktop eye candy is cool but it doesn’t trump productivity and stability.
It turned out I was wrong on both of these points. I finally made the move to Beryl and was surprised by the results, which are quite good. Most importantly I’ve since found lots of productivity-related features in Beryl that go beyond “eye candy”. Here is a short list:
- Rotating among several desktop workspaces is plain cool but it is also very encouraging towards actually utilizing multiple desktop workspaces.
- The animation effects on minimizing and closing windows are not to be estimated as a continuous source of geek-type inspiration.
- Hitting F9 displays all active windows in the current workspace at the same time (like tiles) so you can pick the one you want. Hitting F8 does the same for active windows in all workspaces. Great stuff! When many windows are opened I hate cycling through!
- Using the “Windows” (Super) key in combination with “h” toggles maximizing the window horizontally. I love this one: a life saver for wide-screen laptop users. Doing the same in combination with “v” toggles maximizing the window vertically.
- Alt+F8 initiates resizing a window.
There are many other features I haven’t yet come to but I already feel much better about using a great desktop environment.
I am running a T60 Thinkpad with an ATI card (Radeon x1400). I use the proprietary fglrx driver because the free Radeon driver doesn’t support my card well. Given this my path to Beryl required using Xgl to get the 3D effects. You can find instructions by searching for “Beryl Xgl fglrx” or use this link.