Running AIGLX and Beryl on Debian

After seeing some eye candy on Bud's desktop last Sunday, I wanted to try AIGLX and Beryl on my Debian Etch notebook. To get a preview of what this is all about, try searching for "aiglx" and/or "beryl" on YouTube or Google Video. Debian Etch now has xorg 7.1 with built in AIGLX, so there was no need to install anything. I "enabled" AIGLX by following "Prerequists", "xorg.conf" and "AIGLX" sections of this blog entry. Just that easy! Here are some important sections of my xorg.conf file. My video adapter is a Radeon Mobility 7500 on an IBM (not Lenovo) Thinkpad R50. IMPORTANT: This is not the complete xorg.conf file!

Section "Module"
  Load    "bitmap"
  Load    "dbe"
  Load    "ddc"
  Load    "dri"
  Load    "extmod"
  Load    "freetype"
  Load    "glcore"
  Load    "glx"
  Load    "int10"
  Load    "record"
  Load    "type1"
  Load    "v4l"
  Load    "vbe"
EndSection

Section "Device"
  Identifier  "Radeon Mobility 7500"
  Driver      "radeon"
  Option      "RenderAccel" "true"
  Option      "backingstore" "true"
  Option      "EnablePageFlip" "true"
  Option      "AGPMode" "8"
  Option      "AGPFastWrite" "true"
  Option      "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
  Option      "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
  Identifier  "Default Screen"
  Device      "Radeon Mobility 7500"
  Monitor     "Generic Monitor"
  DefaultDepth    24
  SubSection "Display"
      Depth       24
      Modes       "1280x1024" "1024x768"
  EndSubSection
  Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
  Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
  Mode    0666
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
  Option "Composite" "true"
EndSection

Then I installed Beryl 0.1.2 by using the DEB packages by following this link, started KDE and ran "beryl-manager". Everything started working as expected! Then I wanted to upgrade to 0.1.3, but couldn't find any DEBs around. So I built some myself using the distro specific build files provided by the good Beryl developers. Thanks! You can get my Beryl/Emerald 0.1.3 packages for Debian Etch (without XGL support) by adding this line to your sources.list file:

deb http://www.linux.lk/~anuradha/beryl/etch/ ./

and installing "beryl" and "emerald-themes" packages. The latter is not installed automatically when installing the "beryl" package. Here are some insteresting things to try:

• Press left/right arrow keys with ctrl and alt.
• Press ctrl and alt and drag the mouse.
• Open few windows and move the mouse to the top right corner (Mac users will scream at this ;-)).

The sad part is that none of these work on my FVWM Crystal desktop. :-(

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