Beryl - A Compiz Community

It’s not official though, sounds good?

Thanks Dennis “Onestone” Kasprzyk for the name. Logo is merged from creations of beryl logo by Corner - the Snowman and blinged up compiz logo by Jakub “jimmac” Steiner.

After months of talking (possibly more lines than there are lines of code in both projects) things seems to be on the right track for merged project..

One of the contentious issue is the name for merged project. I am sure as mentioned in one of the earlier posts, the new project will be based on compiz core, so I do not see any name change for the core, the name change might only apply to the merged community. Do we need a name change? can you come up with really cool name for merged compiz-community and beryl project?

While there has been talks on the side, developers on both sides have been very busy porting most of the Beryl plugin to work with vanilla Compiz core. Here is the impressive list of plugins that now work with Compiz:

3d animation annotate bench blur bs clone crashhandler cube dbus decoration desktopclick fade fakeargb flash fs gconf-dump gconf group ini inotify jpeg kiosk minimize mousegestures move opacify place plane png put quickchange regex resize-extra resize ring rotate scale screenshot showdesktop snow svg switcher trailfocus video vignettes wallpaper wall water widget wobbly zoom

Most exciting among all the above are new 3D animations, group tab and ring switcher plugins.

There is a very good feature overview of other plugins here on compiz site and here on beryl site.

Apart from all these plugins there are many developers working to make using Compiz easier, for example this fantastic firefox extension that lets you set Compiz skydome image right from the browser, gnome-compiz-preferences and opensuse-xgl-settings that makes setting up and customizing compiz painless (no gconf-editor!!).

To get the taste of new Compiz with all the Beryl goodies get compiz-git and compiz-extras-git packages for openSUSE from this repository. A word of warning though, they are test packages so try at your own risk.

Words or pictures cannot replace the experience of actually being in mountains, but here are some anyway.

Enjoy

Finally Beryl 0.2 is released after a long wait. Tons of new features since 0.1.4 release.

Checkout the new feature overview here: http://blog.beryl-project.org/?p=29

Packages for SUSE can be found at it’s usual place on openSUSE Build Service repositories and its mirrors:

http://software.opensuse.org/download/X11:/XGL/

Make sure to uninstall all -snapshot packages before installing 0.2 packages. Consider 0.2 as stable release and keep a copy if you intend to checkout snapshot packages later.

From this release on there will not be any updates for SUSE Linux 10.1/SLED 10 due to many updated package requirements.
Have fun!