Score another one for the Geek Girl! I resisted the urge to force XGL/Compiz down Dapper’s throat because from what I’d read, it was mostly a bunch of hacks. After I upgraded to Edgy, I still avoided Beryl (and Compiz) because at first, you had to hack to get it to work with the current Nvidia driver. Then, Nvidia released a new driver, but I still held off Beryl because the driver was beta. I’ll happily use Adobe’s Flash beta because if that doesn’t work, it doesn’t really matter, but if my graphics driver doesn’t work, that does matter. Now, however, the driver has been officially released and I am typing this from my pretty spinning desktop cube with its wobbly windows, fancy fading and cool animation effects.

I was going to wait for the long weekend to install Beryl, just in case I fucked something up and had to muddle my way around to fix it, but I got inspired this morning and decided, “Ah, what the hell!” I started a bit after noon, knowing full well that I had water changes to do before we left for the DG course at one, so of course, I fucked it up. First because I wanted to see whether Beryl would work at all with my existing driver. It didn’t–locked X up tight and I had to kick myself out. I left Beryl (and Emerald) installed, but logged back into plain Gnome to go get the updated driver from Nvidia. I installed the new driver (after I finally remembered how to drop back into runlevel 3–only done that once before and forgot the key combination, which, for future reference, is Ctrl+Alt+F1), but that broke X because in my excitement, I’d forgot to uninstall the old driver, and that did not go well. Even after I made sure the old version of the nvidia kernel was unloaded, it still refused to start the X server. Anyway, I had to leave X broken to go to the DG course, but while P, Bob and Larry were playing (they were there when we got there, so P played with them), I was thinking about what I needed to do to get myself a desktop again without having to be root (dunno what happened there, but it would start fine if I was root).

After we got home, I did a dpkg-reconfigure and told Xorg to use Vesa, just so I could get to a GUI and see WTF was going on in there. I cheated and used Synaptic to remove the old nvidia driver, and checked to make sure it was showing removed in Automatix (more cheating–heh), which it was not. Removed it from there, then dropped to runlevel 3 and tried the latest driver install again. I had an error, something about needing the X.org SDK/development package, but I said, “Fuck it–we’ll see what happens without it”. Glx info said that direct rendering was enabled, so I guessed I was good to go. I rebooted rather than just restarting GDM, just to make sure nothing I didn’t want loaded was going to fuck me up again.

Once I got back to my desktop (mine, not root’s), I changed the screen resolution (for some reason, it gave me 1024×768), edited xorg.conf to reflect the change, then started beryl-manager. Woo-hoo! Spinning cube desktops, all the pretty animation effects….but beryl’s output complained about “no something or other at depth 32” (mine is set at 24), I had no window borders, no wobbly windows, and although I could see all of the themes in the Emerald theme manager, I couldn’t select any of them. Damn. I knew I must’ve forgot something, and eventually, I figured out that I hadn’t told the Nvidia driver to enable GLX visuals. Oh….oops. A quick copy and paste into xorg.conf and I was good to go. Now I’m bordered, selected, animated, wobbly, fading and spinning….and my desktop looks pretty damned cool, too! 🙂 Yay for the triumph of Geek Girl’s dislike for R-ing T whole FM even when she hasn’t half a fucking clue what she’s doing. I don’t have Beryl configured to start on boot because I don’t know whether it’ll get in my way when I’m doing something, but it’s simple enough to start it any time I want it with two little words. If I decide I like it enough, I’ll create the startup script and the session file for Xorg. Even if I don’t like it and find I never use it, I’m keeping it installed ’cause it’s an accomplishment.