One of Mirosofts Windows Vista’s most touted “features”, is the upgraded user interface. The newest incarnation of Microsofts OS ultilizes graphics cards that are in most recent consumer computers to off-load some of the processing of desktop effects onto the GPU. As a result you get flashy effects on the desktop and transparent windows. Pretty to look at but not to functional. What if you could get all of the same eye-candy and even more for free? You can. Composite desktop managers allow linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, or SuSe to generate the same effects as Microsoft’s new OS.
Back in January I got a new workstation at my office. By all comparable standards its was quite a beefy system, and it finally had a graphics card capable of rendering 3D-effects. I did a little reading and got myself up to speed on beryl and compiz. Two free and open source composite desktop managers. Now my linux install could have all the eye candy of vista….minus the activation, price tag, and headaches that go along with the newly minted OS. Although there were a few things that needed to be sacrificed. Namely it wasn’t a walk in the park to get up and running. I had to manually edit multiple config files and tweak a few settings, but the hand holding provided by the numerous wiki’s on the net made it relatively easy for anyone that can install Linux in the first place…
The installation of the proprietary NVIDIA graphics drivers is a far cry from when I attempted it back in 2001 as a freshmen in college. With the addition of addition apt-repositories to Ubuntu and a few “sudo apt-get” commands I had all the packages and drivers I needed installed to get the graphics goodness going.
As with everything that I’ve experienced with open source over the last 6 years, time will make the install even easier. When I installed my first distro (Red Hat 7.2) I had to get tutoring from the CS majors down the hall on the basic ins-and outs of running linux. With a robust community trying to spread this amazingly cool work to as many people as they can, the time until, as I call it, “Mom & Dad could do it”, is approaching very quickly.
The out of the box experience of beryl is fantastic. With a few tweaks jaw-droppingly pretty. My video is of only one of my monitors in my dual monitor setup…the machine had a few problems trying to render a video file in real-time at twice the native resolution of a DVD so I scaled it back a little. From the quick demo in the video beryl has all the eye-candy of vista AND OS X. It also contains a multitude of effects that I leave turned off during regular use because although they are pretty they suck system resources and get annoying after you see your window explode or burn up after about the 20th time. Those effects can be seen in the video below….Enjoy and go give it a try
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