This Old Blog

There's an interesting article on Phoronix titled " GPUs & Beryl: What is Needed? " The article covers the video cards and associated driver combinations they've tested with Beryl, and it's quite the read. I wish it'd been available when I was working with Beryl and Compiz under Ubuntu 7.04. One feature brought out in the article was the Beryl Benchmark indicator, which the authors describe as "not an incredibly accurate benchmark." Nevertheless, it can provide a reasonable figure of merit when attempting to compare different hardware platforms and combinations with the same software. And I'm also posting this because they didn't test with any 7x generation video cards. One minor note: to enable the benchmarking capability, bring up the Beryl Settings Manager, go to the Extras tab at the top, and enable the Benchmark plugin on the left side. Exit the Beryl Settings Manager. You then display the benchmark widget on the desktop with the ke...

There was an entry on Shuttleworth's blog about Beryl in universe. So I followed his advice and installed it, then fired it up. Boy, has Beryl come a long way since I installed it on my notebook under Suse 10.1. You can see a screen shot of the whole setup running below. I've got the Beryl defaults for Ubuntu installed and enabled. And with all the effects running it looks and runs sweet. The screen shot above shows one of the new Beryl effects (new to me, anyway); a preview of any of the applications on the panel if the mouse pointer hovers over any given application. The screen shot shows the movie running in the middle of the desktop, and a thumbnail is also running in the lower right corner. And I mean running in the lower right corner. This is the exact same effect as what you'd find running Vista. That AVI movie was ripped (transcoded) from a DVD to a 1GB MPEG-4 file. I performed the transcoding using K3B under Suse 10.2. I tried K3B under Ubuntu, but K3B's trans...