My struggles with Beryl are over, turns out the edac did it

Last week I cleaned up my apartment, this week I cleaned out my PC. That meant clearing out the cruft from the Edgy to Feisty upgrade, tidying up my directories and fixing my 3d acceleration. The deteriorating state of my machine was depressing.

My 3d acceleration just broke after the upgrade. I coped, I don’t need it for much, but as the weeks went on I missed Neverwinter Nights and I itched to tool around with Beryl. I tried every beryl installation guide I could find, using both the radeon driver with AIGLX, and the fglrx driver with Xgl.

Eventually after reading through dmesg I discovered that I was getting “AGP not available” errors. Odd. A lot of Googling later I stumbled upon a bug report that mentions an issue with the edac kernel module prevents AGP from working on some Intel chipsets. My motherboard has a 875P chipset so I was affected. Adding two modules to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist fixed my problem. I’m still not entirely sure what these two modules do but I can run all of my apps smoothly and prettily now. The bug was reported back in January so that means I’ve been without 3d for a good long time.

For some reason the open source radeon driver wouldn’t let me go above 1024×768 on my ATi Radeon 9800 Pro, even though I added that as an available resolution in xorg.conf. I wound up switching to fglrx with Xgl to fix that. That restricts me to beryl 0.20 right now since beryl 0.21 in the universe repository has broken Xgl support. To get that working I had to force the installation of 0.20 from the ubuntu.beryl-project.org repository in Synaptic and lock it too. That’s explained in ubuntuguide.org’s Feisty guide.

Once everything was working I spent at least half an hour with minimize and maximize effects set to “Random” so I could see all of the effects. It was worth the struggle. My favourite effect so far is Beam Up. The F9 hotkey to spread out all the windows is actually useful, as is decreasing the opacity of unused windows over time. Disintegrating all windows to see the desktop with <Super>+F6 is handy. I was surprised to see all the window thumbnails were updated live, so if I had my mouse hovered over an IM window in the task bar I could see the text entry pane update was I typed. I also saw that I could watch a movie in my VLC thumbnail. Cool! Beryl has a lot of eyecandy but there are also some useful features tucked in there. Once I get home from work I’ll spend a lot more time playing with it.

Screenshots and screencasts set to random electronica to follow!