Playing with Beryl
January 21, 2007
Today I played a bit with Beryl. But firstly I needed to get the Super Key (Windows Key on Keyboard) working, this was accomplished by modifying Keyboard Section “InputDevice” in /etc/X11/xorg.conf with the following :
Option "XkbOptions" "altwin:super_win"
Now you can enjoy some more Beryl features, with the shortcuts (you can see snapshot of my desktop on the right) :
- Pause Key or F8 : Scale Effect : Arrange and View All Windows
- Ctrl + Alt + Left/Right Arrow : Switch desktops on cube
- Ctrl + Shift + Alt + Left/Right Arrow : Switch desktops on cube – with active window following
- Ctrl + Alt + left-click and grab desktop : Rotate cube manually
- Alt + wheel mouse : Make window translucent/opaque
- Super Key + wheel mouse up / down : Zoom-in/out manually
- Ctrl + Super Key : Water
- Shift + F9 : Rain
Also be sure to test the funky burn effect on windows minimizing through Beryl Settings Manager / Visual Effects / Animations / Minimize Animation => Burn
Wake up all at Compiz as Beryl is alive and kicking !
You might be interested that over a weekend a mate and myself introduced Beryl back in to the fold. This is a direct result of our frustration of how bloated Compiz has become and is becoming more of a fashion thing rather than functional for having multiple desktops.
OK so I have been using Ubuntu 7.04 on and off for a couple of years now and Beryl comes as default. After Ubuntu 7.04 Compiz Fusion (now Compiz) came as default. To begin with this was not a problem but as Compiz became more complex with spheres, globes and other useless features, performance was becoming impaired.
Late one night I started looking at introducing Beryl to Ubuntu 9.04 (Alpha 6). As expected there were numerous depedendency issues.
Piratesmack looked in to the same possibilty and together we pooled our resources and after running many scripts and testing by myself Piratesmack compiled some dependency free deb. packages.
Piratesmacks Beryl 0.2.1 deb. packages for Ubuntu 9.04
http://files.filefront.com/beryl+fixed+904tarbz2/;13596520;/fileinfo.html
Save to home directory
extract tar.bz2
cd beryl-fixed-9.04
sudo ./install.sh
Piratesmacks Beryl 0.2.1 deb. packages for Ubuntu/Mint
http://files.filefront.com/beryl+packages+021tarbz2/;13508777;/fileinfo.html
Save to home directory
extract tar.bz2
cd beryl-packages-0.2.1
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
Beryl 0.2.1 on Ubuntu 9.04
http://s266.photobucket.com/albums/ii256/Linux_Ubuntu_geek/?action=view¤t=Screenshot.png
Beryl 0.2.1 on Mint 6
http://s266.photobucket.com/albums/ii256/Linux_Ubuntu_geek/?action=view¤t=Screenshot-1.png
One thing you cannot do is knock the simplicity of Beryl and how much more useful it is than modern day Compiz.
So for those who wish to mock I say Beryl is far from dead and people want it as they are downloading it for the very reasons I have outlined above.
LUg.