Ubuntu Feisty Fawn with Beryl
I saw my cat today outside in the yard. She looked up at the roof of the house, turned toward me, and gave me the most pathetic look accompanied with a helpless squeak of a meow before looking back at the roof. I turned to see what was bothering her, and there was a little bird staring eagerly. The sparrows have been swooping at her quite a bit lately, and in numbers they are pretty powerful.
If you thought the rest of this post was going to be about birdwatching, sorry to disappoint you. I recently installed Ubuntu on my parents’ machine. Specs time!
This machine, christened “Mamimi” from Furi Kuri, has an AMD Sempron 2600+ 64-bit processor with a 10% overclock from the BIOS, two sticks of 256MB RAM, an nVidia 5200 FX graphics card (128MB video RAM), and standard peripherals. I built the computer about a year ago for under USD $500 from Newegg. For reference, the computer can barely handle four or five applications using Windows XP.
So, I downloaded the new Ubuntu, called Feisty Fawn, primarily to give Beryl, the successor to XGL/Compiz, a try. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, this video is a good starting point.
The installation really surprised and impressed me thoroughly. Although it insisted there was a floppy drive the whole time (floppies are deprecated; hence I did not install a floppy drive), it accurately detected the rest of the hardware without a hitch. The livecd booted up, I double-clicked the install icon, and 40 minutes later I was rebooting into a freshly installed Feisty system. It was then relatively simple to peruse the wiki and forums for how to get the necessary software installed. A simple script got me a 32-bit Firefox so I could run Flash and Java and another small script allowed me to install Beryl flawlessly. This was all finished in under an hour after installation.
So, I’ve been running Beryl on this computer for about a week now. It has some really cool visual effects. Of course it makes heavy use of compositing. A lot of 3D effects are evident, such as the 3D viewports, stacking of the desktop, and intense perspective.
Transparency is one of the cooler features; a lot of things can go transparent. It takes a bit of work to get menus transparent, however. It’s necessary to open beryl-manager and modify values for specifics using the state plugin.
Some other heavy graphical effects are the famous wobbly window (which aren’t as annoying as one would think), the rain effect (the only thing I’ve enabled that actually slowed this computer down slightly), and the blur effect.
The blur effect is amazing, as it shows motion blur when moving windows, and changing windows fade to update the content. If that hurts your brain, imagine opening a new tab in firefox and watching it fade to white. Then type in a url and watch the letters smoothly appear as though a ghost were softly writing them in. Press enter and watch the page fade from white and show the content. That sounds pretty cool right? Now when you scroll down the page, you’ll see a very smooth transition from the first part of the page to the next. Unfortunately, I couldn’t manage to find way to get a screenshot to do it justice, so one would need to actually use it or watch a video to really understand what it is. I’ve disabled the blur effect on this computer since it is still a bit buggy and it crashes full screen video.
As a sufferer of NADD, I always have a ton of applications open. I use the computer until it has an electronic heart attack. I’ve regularly had between 10 and 20 applications open at a time, between browsers, music players, videos, terminals, graphics programs, virtual network clients, emulators, games, …well the list goes on for awhile, but that’s besides the point. I just opened top and, with Beryl running full steam at 60 FPS, I have 119 total tasks open, using 480 MB of my 512 MB RAM, barely touching my swap space, using a mere 15% of the CPU, and the machine isn’t taking a performance hit at all. Plus, the printer works!
High resolution screenshots available at images.possumism.net!
3 Responses to “Ubuntu Feisty Fawn with Beryl”
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April 30th, 2007 at 3:28 am
Awwwe… poor cat =(
Good work on Mamimi ^_^b , but just wondering what do your parents think about their comp?
UsingApril 30th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
My mom really enjoys it, but neither of them actually use Ubuntu since they need to use Quickbooks for Windows (a version not supported by wine). I’m always running Ubuntu when I’m here, and Tim and Krystal use it pretty often.
Anyway, the screenshots don’t really do the system justice. I’d like to capture the video, but it runs much slower when recording. If I ever get a video recorded, I’ll post it.
UsingMay 1st, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Wow, if anyone is interested, Dell will be offering preinstalled Feisty at the end of May.
Using