μHOWTO: Beryl on Debian

20070421 15:32 by javier

Last week Jordi Fernández gave me a quick hands-on tutorial for a working Beryl setup on Debian. He owns a Dell Latitude D620 running Debian GNU/Linux just like mine, so leeching his setup was even easier for me. What sold me immediately into Beryl is that you don’t need to install Xgl.
Basically I edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf and added these lines to the Device section:

Option “RenderAccel” “true”
Option “backingstore” “true”
Option “XAANoOffsetScreenPixmaps” “true”
Option “AddRGBGLXVisuals” “On”

and added a new section to the very end:

Section “Extensions”
Option “Composite” “Enable”
EndSection

My updated xorg.conf is available right here.
After restarting X (ctrl-alt-Backspace for lazy users like me) you can type this on a terminal:

$ beryl-manager &
$ beryl

I have the official nvidia drivers (1.0-8776) installed via module-assistant and a Beryl version that is kind of old (0.2.0+svn20070205-r3687+imudebian0, rather ancient in Internet Time). This worked immediately for me but Your Mileage May Vary.
There you have it. A working beryl setup in a few minutes. Thanks to Jordi for this tutorial and the rather impressive demo that followed, and to the Compiz and Beryl developers for their hard work.

Tags: uHOWTO, Dell, D620, debian, linux, X, Beryl

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2007 at 15:32 and is filed under Dell D620, General, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.