This release includes many minor bug fixes and improvements to Wall, switcher and group plugins.

Disable cube and enable wall plugin from beryl-settings.

Video in this post here: Beryl Blog

Packages are available from the openSUSE Build Service repositories.

Recently my brother shot a MIG 35 which was a part of Aero India 2007. Here is the result:

You tube video

Check out the new packages of kiba-dock. Kiba-dock has come a long way from the prototype developed by Kristian Høgsberg.

The project developed very rapidly at beryl-project to become useful application launcher. Now the kiba-dock project have their own website at www.kiba-dock.org.

Latest version of kiba-dock features application launcher, preview of running applications, memory status, and a clock. It is highly configurable so that some of the fun physics can be toned down or enhanced as you like.

Packages for openSUSE are available HERE.

Installation instructions and getting the code HERE.

We would soon be releasing Beryl 0.2, here is a look at usability
features(including videos) that will come with it.

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=17276

If you cannot wait for the 0.2 release, get the latest snapshot
release(r4048) with even more cutting edge features and eye candy here:

http://software.opensuse.org/download/X11:/XGL/openSUSE_10.2/repodata/

How to Beryl on openSUSE:

http://en.opensuse.org/beryl

Cheers

-J

Here are jotting down some of the ideas about the role that Beryl should be looking to play in future of Linux Desktop development.

Leave the core to Compiz project to develop and maintain.

I don’t believe core is the identity of Beryl or any major work by the project has gone into it to say we cannot give up its maintenance. Compiz project maintaining the core and Beryl developers helping improve it would serve several purposes that I will list down shortly.

Compiz core should be treated as infrastructure like x.org that we are using to meet our aims. Obvious question that would arise out of this is what is the identity of Beryl if we don’t duplicate core work?

I suggest redefining ourselves and creating another niche for Beryl than to compete and duplicate efforts of Compiz project. There are more important things we can put our efforts into and make Linux Desktop pleasure to use for everybody.

Some time back some developers floated idea of creating another Desktop Environment around composited WM, I think we can aim for something close to it, but not quite full DE.

Same as GNU applications and Linux kernel makes up GNU/Linux OS, we could aim for being something like GNU. Beryl should focus on the following to accomplish that goal and define its place.

1. Create repository of all sorts of plugins, usability as well as eyecandy ones. Let them be known as Beryl-plugins with dependency on Compiz-core. Let’s not just stop at that.

2. Brings together various projects such as kiba-dock, gnome-dock, Awn, Screenlets etc creating a project with such components that has compositing as fundamental requirement.
3. There are some fantastic ideas here on Gnome 3 and KDE 4 goal pages, we can help achieve those.

These are just personal ideas, please don’t take it as official Beryl road map, I just think we should move on from where we started.

I am sure many of you would have other ideas of what we can/should do, do share (no flame wars please ;)).

Have a lot of fun!

After learning that Mandriva has shipped Metisse on one of their new release, I decided to give Metisse a try on my machine running openSUSE. It was easier to build and than I imagined.

Here is how it looks:

To install:

wget http://insitu.lri.fr/metisse/download/0.4.0-rc4/nucleo-0.6.tar.bz2
tar xjvf nucleo-0.6.tar.bz2
cd nucleo-0.6 &&  ./configure –prefix=/usr && make && make install

wget http://insitu.lri.fr/metisse/download/0.4.0-rc4/metisse-0.4.0-rc4.tar.bz2
tar xjvf metisse-0.4.0-rc4.tar.bz2
cd metisse-0.4.0-rc4 && ./configure –prefix=/usr –enable-glx-x86 && make && make install

Only thing other than build requires for beryl I had to install mDNSresponder-devel and libstroke.

To run:

init 3

Xmetisse -ac -geometry 1024×768 :1 >& /tmp/Xmetisse-log &

X :1&

DISPLAY=:1 xterm&

Control+Alt+F8

Now in xterm run:

metisse-start-fvwm -wd :1 >& /tmp/compositor-log &

That's it. Play with it take some screenshots and impress the guys who paid $$$ for that other OS.

Hopefully we would soon have some of the stuff that is possible in Metisse in Compiz and Beryl (Quinnstorm is already in dialogue with metisse devs)

Here is some help:

Metisse Home page

Building

Running

Using