Beryl. Take 2.

In case you haven’t read, I received my new T40 the other day. I decided to install Ubuntu Feisty on it instead of Edgy, mainly because I read that it had built in support for XGL and Beryl/Compiz goodies. Once installed, I started poking around. Navigating to system->preferences, I noticed a new option called Desktop Effects

This worked! Well it sort of worked. I was getting odd behavior where menu items weren’t showing up in some windows. NOTHING was showing up in a terminal, I mean not even typed text. But hey, the windows wobbled and the cube was there. I figured that I was on the right track. So for fun, I fed The Google “Feisty T40″ to see what got regurgitated . The first hit I got was a link to a thread on the Ubuntu Forums telling the requester, who was having the same issue, to type the following 2 commands.

gconftool-2 –type int –set /apps/compiz/general/screen0/options/hsize 4

gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/compiz/general/screen0/options/number_of_desktops 1

I figured it was worth a shot. BAM! It worked. I like these cool effects, I’m a eye candy weenie I suppose. For a couple of days I was happy…then I thought I’d give full blown Beryl a shot. I mean, I’m basically there right?

So this morning my Dad and I have a 9:00am tee time. As I sit here drinking my coffee, I opened up a terminal window and type.
sudo apt-get install beryl beryl-manager emerald-themes

After a few minutes I try to launch beryl-manager…….VIOLA!  It works. Now I don’t know what I was missing with my last T40, but I couldn’t get this to work for anything. The folks working on Feisty have done an outstanding job putting this together and I’m thankful.

On a side note, I hear that the shipit site was down with a message that they would be back shortly shipping shiny new Feisty CDs, but I can’t verify that as it appears to be back to normal now.

Here’s a screenshot.

Dale

My New T40!

I just received my new Thinkpad T40. I know, it’s a few yrs old and there are better laptops for running Linux, but I really like it. I purchased it from one of those off-lease liquidation shops on ebay. I must say, I’m pleasently surprised at the condition. It looks almost new…seriously. For $400 I get 1.5gHz Centrino, 512megs of RAM, CD-RW/DVD combo, 40gig HD, 802.11g integrated wifi…the works. What a great deal. I have another 512 megs of RAM to stick into it when I get it home. That will help.

This system came preloaded with PCLinux…not too familiar with that distro, but it’s KDE and I don’t think it will make it through the night. I was afraid that I’d have to change the name of the blog to “Life With Ubuntu on a D600″ until I found this little gem. I’m so excited I can hardly contain myself…..

Dale