« Cool Little Desktop Support Gadget | Main | Long Review of Lord of the Rings MMORPG »
Beryl really is that cool
By Paul Venezia | March 5, 2007, 7:36 pm
I’ve been running Beryl for a month or so on my main FC6 workstation. It really is as cool as it looks. At this point, installing it on FC6 simply requires adding the extras repo and searching for beryl in the GUI software tool or a yum install beryl-gnome or yum install beryl-kde from the command line. This will install beryl 0.1.9999.2-1.fc6, which is the all-but-2.0-release version. From there, it might take some quick tweaks to your xorg.conf, but that’s it.
Having run Beryl on my main box, I’ve noticed more than a few bugs, and occasionally a window manager crash. I simply can’t stand an unstable workstation, and I’m still running it, so although it could certainly be more stable, these issues haven’t been showstoppers. There appears to be a really annoying issue with OpenOffice.org 2.1’s window calls, so much so that I’ve ceased using OOo on that box when Beryl’s running. That one tends to piss me off, but then, I find that I write best with a laptop for some reason. Give me a recliner and my MacBook and I get all Tolstoy. Add a glass of Lagavulin or Caol Ila and it gets worse. Oliver, on the other hand, turns into Danielle Steele in the same situation. Tragic.
Anyway, I’m certainly hoping that some of these issues are ironed out in the official 2.0 release, but for a project that really didn’t exist six months ago, it’s certainly come a long way. Kinda makes you wonder if the Compiz developers are regretting anything. I’m just wondering exactly how fast this will make it into mainstream distros as the default window manager. Assuming that the next six months of Beryl development runs at the same pace as the last, my guess is well before the end of the year. With Vista and OS X 10.5 Leopard making big runs on desktop eyecandy, it’s certain that Linux distros will follow suit, though in many respects, Linux has always been ahead of the curve. There’s never been a dearth of attractive window managers for Linux, but they’ve either been buggy, slow, or ceased development somewhere along the way. Beryl sure seems to be clearing those hurdles with aplomb.
Topics: Desktops |
Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.