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

New packages (r3419) should be up in the repositories
A whole lot of new improvement.

Update:

- New 3D animation effects

- beryl-settings-simple and beryl-settings-tool (commandline beryl control) is part of beryl-settings package

- lot of bugs squashed

- bit better emerald

- discover new things yourself

Sorry no changelog as there have been over 300 commits since last update. The beryl-devs don’t sleep ever.

Translation tools are devised in such a way that not only they help you in speedy translation, but they help you in maintaining consistency across your work and with find & replace tool if you want to correct your common errors. They also provide machine assisted auto-translation features that help you translating strings as much as 30 to 40 % automatically depending upon your available translation database. Some tools are platform specific and some are available cross platform.

Here is the review of some of them available to you as a translator:

http://raviratlami1.blogspot.com/2006/07/tips-for-linux-localization.html

Alright I hear you guys.

Now on we would have two versions of packages in our repository, tagged releases and svn snapshots.

The packages would be named like:

Stable or development releases: beryl-core-0.1.4…rpm

Unstable SVN snapshot: beryl-core-snapshot-…rpm

Cheers

Here is the tip, get libwnck package from the repository and install those instead of official SUSE ones.

This is for right click title bar in Beryl/Compiz, the official libwnck does not have On Top active and the other options that come in handy when using Beryl/Compiz such as Brightness Saturation and opacity controls and moving windows to other viewports.

Have a lot of fun!

There is now a new xwinwrap package in the repository, download and install that.

Open terminal and run

Enjoy!