Beryl on Edgy Eft

As announced previously I spent some time to get Beryl to work on my newly upgraded Edgy Eft installation. Although it did not went as smoothly as I would have hoped, it was not too troublesome either.

Dual head still seems to be a major problem in many areas in Linux. This definitely something the Windows people do not have to worry about just as much, but ok, this may partly be related to the hardware vendors not providing some sort of unified and/or open drivers.

Nevertheless it is now working, after some changes to my xorg.conf. Before those I always got an error message from Beryl, complaining about a missing RandR extension.

The effects are really nice, some of them are however too slow for my taste in the default settings. After speeding them up a little (I do not like to wait for a context-menu to wobble into view, if it wobbles for more than a fraction of a second) I really liked it. There are some issues left, but I assume this is because of the ongoing development. E. g. window resizing is a little strange if you grab a window's top edge and move the mouse up and down. One would expect the window to remain in place and gain or loose height from the top, i. e. where you drag. However sometimes windows seem to be resized on the bottom.

Video playback is also choppy, but that seems to depend on the file I play back. Probably due to different codecs, however I have not really looked deeper into it.

From what I have seen so far, I believe there is very much potential in this :)

For those interested, this is the contents of my xorg.conf

Section "Files"
        FontPath        "/usr/share/X11/fonts/misc"
        FontPath        "/usr/share/X11/fonts/cyrillic"
        FontPath        "/usr/share/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled"
        FontPath        "/usr/share/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled"
        FontPath        "/usr/share/X11/fonts/Type1"
        FontPath        "/usr/share/X11/fonts/100dpi"
        FontPath        "/usr/share/X11/fonts/75dpi"
        FontPath        "/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc"
        # path to defoma fonts
        FontPath        "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType"
EndSection

Section "Module"
        Load    "i2c"
        Load    "bitmap"
        Load    "ddc"
        Load    "dri"
        Load    "extmod"
        Load    "freetype"
        Load    "glx"
        Load    "int10"
        Load    "type1"
        Load    "vbe"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver       "kbd"
  Identifier   "Keyboard[0]"
  Option       "Protocol" "Standard"
  Option       "XkbLayout" "de"
  Option       "XkbModel" "pc105"
  Option       "XkbRules" "xfree86"
EndSection


Section "InputDevice"
  Driver       "mouse"
  Identifier   "Mouse[1]"
  Option       "Buttons" "6"
  Option       "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
  Option       "Name" "Logitech USB Wheel Mouse"
  Option       "Protocol" "explorerps/2"
  Option       "Vendor" "Sysp"
  Option       "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection


Section "Monitor"
  HorizSync    30-121
  Identifier   "Monitor[0]"
  ModelName    "H750"
  VendorName   "Hansol"
  VertRefresh  56-70
EndSection

Section "Screen"
  DefaultDepth 24
  SubSection "Display"
    Depth      15
    Modes      "1280x1024" 
  EndSubSection
  SubSection "Display"
    Depth      16
    Modes      "1280x1024" 
  EndSubSection
  SubSection "Display"
    Depth      24
    Modes      "1280x1024" 
  EndSubSection
  SubSection "Display"
    Depth      8
    Modes      "1280x1024" 
  EndSubSection
  Device       "Device[0]"
  Identifier   "Screen[0]"
  Monitor      "Monitor[0]"
EndSection


Section "Device"
  BoardName    "GeForce 7600GS"
  BusID        "1:0:0"
  Driver       "nvidia"
  Identifier   "Device[0]"
  Option       "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
  Option       "RenderAccel" "True"
  Option       "TwinView"
  Option       "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "60-71"
  Option       "MetaModes" "1280x1024,1280x1024"
  Option       "TwinViewOrientation" "RightOf"
  Option       "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "50-160"
  VendorName   "NVidia"
EndSection


Section "ServerLayout"
  Identifier   "Layout[all]"
  InputDevice  "Keyboard[0]" "CoreKeyboard"
  InputDevice  "Mouse[1]" "CorePointer"
  Option       "Clone" "off"
  Option       "Xinerama" "off"
  Screen       "Screen[0]"
EndSection


Section "DRI"
    Group      "video"
    Mode       0660
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
EndSection

Comments

Unknown said…
Hi Daniel,

Great to hear you have Beryl/Dual head/Eft working. Any chance you could reveal what changes you made to your xorg.conf?

I'm having problems with missing RandR too and any help you could give would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.
Sun Nov 26, 03:00:00 PM GMT+1
Daniel Schneller said…
I updated the article with the contents of my xorg.conf. Hope it helps.

Daniel
Sun Nov 26, 06:09:00 PM GMT+1
Anonymous said…
Hey thanks for that xorg.conf, that works beautifully!

It's a bit tricky figuring out twin-view + ubuntu edgy + beryl but by following the Beryl on Ubuntu wiki plus using your xorg made it painless.
Mon Jan 01, 11:24:00 PM GMT+1
Daniel Schneller said…
Glad I could be of help :)
Tue Jan 02, 01:37:00 AM GMT+1
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