Personal Bytes

This is much more than a tutorial on installing Beryl and AIGLX. It’s an epilogue about how things change so fast and its consequences.

Change

First there was XGl and Compiz. A new Xserver with OpenGL capabilities and a layer for adding eye-candy effects. Sponsored by Novell.

And then there was AIGLX. Redhat’s effort on getting back on track. AIGLX is a modified version of Xorg that supports OpenGL. Compiz was due to remain intact. Or not…

Finally there’s a girl unsatisfied with Novell’s lack of response. She tried submiting patches but with no success. Sick of standing still, she decided to fork the Compiz project and start her own. Beryl.

State of Art

And here we are. We don’t have the smallest clue about who’s going to win and prevail. Xgl + Compiz or AIGLX + Beryl. What we do know is that the possibility of actually choosing is a bliss.

Moreover, there are clear differences as for the hardware requirements to each approach. The first one takes a lot of hardware (a kind of Windows Vista, but not that bad) while the second option is much more tolerant.

AIGLX + Beryl - Proof of Concept

There’s no better test than trying to run it on one of the baddest graphics card around. Intel i810, the one that usually comes bundled with the Centrino package. And that’s precisely the one that powers my humble laptop (actually, a great one), an ASUS S5N.

Following this tutorial I got it to work in no more than 5 minutes plus the time required to update the system. It works like a charm. Fast and very useful.

Sadly, or not, I was not able to test AIGLX with Compiz. I tried several tutorials but none seemed to work with Ubuntu Dapper. The abovementioned worked flawlessly though.

Conclusions

Never doubt of the power of choice, the freedom of forking and the Free Software community. Also, bear in mind that the GNU/Linux community is paying attention to what’s going on. There are some serious efforst going on in order to push Linux even further. And it’s working!