Kubuntu 6.10 with Beryl expirience

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evilmonkey
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Kubuntu 6.10 with Beryl expirience

Post by evilmonkey »

Hi All,

This is to share my pleasant expiriences with Beryl on Kubuntu 6.10 which I installed over the weekend. I had Kubuntu Breezy and Dapper installed before (I absolutely refuse to use Gnome, hence no Ubuntu for me), then got off Linux for a while in favour of XP, and decided to try Linux again, returning to my all-time favourite distro. This time, I decided to put it on my laptop.

HARDWARE:
Intel Centrino 1.5GhZ
512MB RAM
60GB HDD
Intel 815i 64MB graphics card

To my (somewhat) disappointment, Beryl is not installed in Edgy by default. Normally I wouldn't mind that, but Edgy was suppossed to be a cutting edge release, so they could have bundled it. Installation of Beryl was largely a breeze (though there is some editing of flat files involved).

FINDINGS: I excepted this to be just useless eye candy that hogs up resources, but having used it, I can see how it can really improve productivity. I haven't tried this yet, but I think it's even better with more than one monitor. I will try this when I get home tonight. The fact that you can drag a window from desktop to desktop really helps. For the php developers, you can swtich between your manual, your IDE, your FTP client, and your firefox test window with a click of a button without having all that clutter on one screen. The icing on the cake is all the cool animations you can enjoy while switching said windows. :P Transparent windows are good too if you have something under your window that you'd like to keep track of (i.e. a download or a proccess).

The cool thing is, with the magic of skins, you can make your PC look just like windows vista, and then you can go ahead and show off to your eye-candy obsessed friends why Linux is better than Vista :P (Beryl has a lot of features Vista doesn't have)

CAVEATS: You need a good PC. I could see my poor laptop struggling under the load, and when I tried to run Superkaramba widgets, my laptop crapped out. Forget running it on your old 800MhZ P3's with 256MB RAM, it won't happen. You video card has to have 3D acceleration, or you'll be missing out on features and everything is going to be tearfully slow. On my laptop, the water mod doesn't work, though snow does (look up screenshots of the water mod it looks really nice...totally useless though).

FINAL THOUGHTS: I like it and will keep using it. Linux has come along very far since the first time I ran Mandrake in 2001. Back then, I couldn't figure out what's what and needed command-line for everything. Today, I prefer to do things using command line, but all of them can be done using GUI (with apt-get/synaptic being the prime the example). If you've never used Linux, there has never been a better time to give it a shot.

Hope you enjoyed this mini-review, screenshots coming soon.
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Kieran Huggins
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Post by Kieran Huggins »

I had the good fortune of building a monster machine for work last week:

dual core Athlon x2 4400+
4GB DDR 400
SATA-II
PCI-E Radeon x1650

(built the whole thing for < 1k - saw a very similar Dell for $7000!)

The big boss wanted to see what Vista looked like, so I triple booted XP64, Vista64 and Feisty Fawn x64 with beryl as a demo, before installing stock XP.

Vista crashed and burned fairly regularly during the demo, he was suitably not impressed. XP was it's normal, stable self.

Feisty was breathtaking! Taking him through a demo some of the UI enhancements of beryl was fun - everyone's jaw dropped when they saw the cube :-) It's especially cool when you drop the opacity by 5 or 10%, so you can see the windows through the cube!

Beryl setup was a breeze on feisty - a few command line pastes from the wiki was all it took. K/Ubuntu is making some fantastic progress!
Charles256
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Post by Charles256 »

question..what version of vista? Mine hasn't crashed since I installed and it's been running the whole time..
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Kieran Huggins
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Post by Kieran Huggins »

Vista Ultimate x64
Charles256
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Post by Charles256 »

nevermind. i use premium x32 so i imagine our experiences have a chance of being different
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