Another Opinion Among Many

I recently installed Sabayon Linux on one of my hard drives. The advantage of collecting old, unwanted computer parts is that you can sometimes end up with a few HDs out of the deal. They’re not going to be very large, of course, so that’s the drawback. I got into the myriad of applications and configurations possible and it became apparent that there’s a new breed of desktop on the horizon (Windows Vista has a hint of something new as well) that will not be constrained to 2 dimensions.

Sabayon is the first Live CD distribution of GNU/Linux to include AIGLX/XGL accelleration and the Beryl windowmanager, as well as the close-source proprietary drivers for the newer ATI and NVidia cards.

The rubbery, bouncy windows were cool to experience as was the “cube” desktop environment and the polish of the Sabayon project’s visuals was flawless. However, my Radeon 9500 Pro was detected and the proprietary ATI fglrx driver was loaded. Unfortunately, the proprietary driver is not compatible with the AIGLX accelleration, so the slower,memory-intensive XGL accelleration method was paired with it. I don’t know if this was an issue or not, but Beryl running with3D applications was flakey at best. I have other issues with Sabayon, but, as new user, I am going to give it a try and any strangeness that I find, I will report to the maintainers or forum for resolution, as this distro shows great promise.

When I was trying to troubleshoot my computer’s behavior, I came across quite a few HOWTO’s relating to Ubuntu, so I thought that I’d give Beryl a try on my Kubuntu installation, as there seemed to be a lot more out there in the search engine results regarding the use of AIGLX and Beryl on ATI cards.  I got DRI working fine with the  free Radeon driver in X.org 7.1 and followed a tutorial from the Ubuntu forum on enabling AIGLX and getting Beryl.  I must say that the claims seem to be true.  AIGLX is far more responsive and “lighter” than XGL.  I haven’t done any movies of the effects, but there are several YouTube videos on the things that Beryl can do.  Try this one.  Its pretty cool.