I’ve got two laptops. One an IBM Thinkpad X31, the other a Compaq Presario R3000. I use the latter for general desktop use (as it has a 15″ screen, so it’s large) – gaming, coding, blogging – and the Thinkpad for traveling with. Being quite old, the Presario doesn’t have the best of specs:

• AMD64 3000 (clocked to ~800 MHz :()
• 1GB RAM
• 40GB HDD
• NVidia GeForce 440 Go
• WLAN and Ethernet network adapters
• Ubuntu ‘Feisty Fawn’
• 15″ Screen

It has definately served me well; allowing me to play games such as Anarchy Online and Eternal Lands, as well as plenty of compiling, programming and other heavy usage for the last 3 years. Not necessarily on its last legs, but not in its best state, I was simply astonished when I managed to get Beryl – the window manager that provides 3D animation (much like those on Mac OS) – working not only in the first instance, but flawlessly. No lag. No crazy fan. Just pure uninterrupted 3D animation and transparency. I was simply amazed. It was easy to install and setup (thanks to apt-get) and configuration is both plentiful and straighforward.

Installation

Using Ubuntu’s built-in package manager, apt-get, I installed beryl like so (using a shell/terminal):

$ apt-get install beryl beryl-manager

Then I began configuring using beryl-settings, which is provided by the beryl package itself. It was then a matter of running beryl (which I did in a shell at first, then added to auto-started applications) and playing with its many features. I provided a video of Beryl in action here.

Issues

I did encounter one problem – no window title or borders. This seemed to be quite a common issue, but was solved by adding the following to the end of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

And the following to the “Device” section:

Option         "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Option         "RenderAccel" "True"
Option         "AllowGLXWithComposite" "True"
Option         "backingstore" "True"
Option         "TripleBuffer" "True"

Make sure you’re running with a depth of 24, as I believe this is all beryl provides. Now all I did was restart X (ctrl+alt+backspace) and then run beryl-manager, force nvidia by selecting “Advanced Beryl Options” -> “Rendering Platform” -> “Force NVidia” and voila!

Well done to everyone at the Beryl project, I was simply astounded and thoroughly impressed at what you’ve achieved – thank you!