Just a minute ago I was ready to throw my computer across the room because Beryl was bugging out on me.

Linux users will know that this outstanding window decorator and "eye candy engine" is and will still be for some time to come in a beta stage, which means that it will have its fair share of bugs. There are two bugs that completelly ruin my Kubuntu experience:

1.) When drawing a window, sometimes just the title bar appears and the rest of the window is completely black unless you resize it or have it redrawn in any sort of way. This means that I can't see ANYTHING other than the title bar... but this happens occasionally. Enough to peeve me off.

2.) Sometimes Beryl likes to lock up windows. As in render them unresponsive. I was just tweaking appearance settings (configuring the desktop), clicked on OK on one of the dialogs, and nothing happened. I clicked Cancel; nothing happened. I hovered over the application task buttons (minimize, maximize, close - X, sticky) and they highlighted as I hovered over them, so they were responsive, but clicking on them did nothing. The only way to get rid of the windows is to ignore them completely... and I'm not savvy enough to know the Linux equivalent to Windows's Task Manager. (I know I can kill the task from a command line, but I'd rather be able to do it using the GUI, as most people would prefer.)

Has anything experienced these problems? How did you fix them? (I installed Beryl using Adept Manager, so I'm assuming that I have the latest and greatest. And to my understanding, there is no further support for Beryl... only Compiz. And it doesn't work very well with Gutsy Gibbon at the moment.) I have an NVIDIA GeForce 420 Go in this machine... and I also have installed the nvidia-glx component using the apt command line. (I'm a noob when it comes to Linux.)

Another minor annoyance, although not as great as 1 or 2, is that Linux brings to focus any window that you hover your mouse cursor over. I don't know how to change this, so if anyone could also help me there, that would be awesome. (I'm not sure if this is a Beryl setting or if this is a KDE thing.)

 

 

 

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The graphics card on this computer cannot support Compiz or Beryl, so i can't really help you much on this topic, but on my friend's computer that uses Ubuntu 7.10, Compiz works great for him.


K-menu > System > KSysGuard. Tab "Process Table."


I am inclined to say that that's a KDE thing, as i remembered something similar to it in the KDE settings, but it's not really on by default in Kubuntu. I'll check it out and report back.

 

 

 

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Go into the KDE Control Centre, go into the Desktop part and finally select Window Behaviour. In the drop down at the top, labelled Policy: change it to Click to Focus.

I tried Beryl ages ago, and decided to scrap it due to a major bug. My laptop has an integrated Intel graphics chip, and Beryl doesn't play nice with it. After I booted up, Beryl would convert every window to a white square and take away all control. I had to manually switch to the default KDE desktop to log in, which defeated the point of Beryl

I do have Beryl installed on here (been through a few OS upgrades since) and it does seem to work, but until I can be sure that my graphics are supported, I won't use it. Compiz Fusion, however, (the merging of Compiz and Beryl once again) looks like it will have much better stability and hardware support, while keeping the cooler effects of Beryl - the best of both worlds!

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Thanks guys.

I looked at the Window Behavior dialog and it IS on Click to Focus. What happens is that when I hover my mouse over a window underneath my active window, the active window becomes transparent and the one underneath comes into focus. If the active window is on top of the window that came into focus, and I click on an area of the focused window that's covered by my active window, the active window comes back into focus again. (Sorry if that sounded confusing.)

I think I might look again at Gutsy Gibbon. It might seem silly, but the improved eye candy with Compiz was what I was looking for, and I tried getting it to work but to no avail on 7.10. If what you say about NVIDIA not able to render Compiz's window decorations and whatnot... well, that stinks.

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