Anyone using Beryl?

I installed it today, using XGL and an Nvidia graphics card, Xorg 7.2.

I'm quite impressed.

I am having an issue, though, I can't figure out. MPlayer doesn't work. The mplayer-plugin works fine, and front-ends that use mplayer (such as Kaffeine) work. The things I do with MPlayer from the CLI also work normally, but when I use the MPlayer GUI, the video file will open and play, but it is squeezed into a frame that is about 10 pixels high, normal width. If I adjust the size (double or full screen) the video window disappears entirely. If I start out in full screen, I have to kill the process from a terminal. I've tried messing with various options and using every video driver available to me (xv, x11, gl, gl2, and xvidx), but they all produce the same result.

I've searched the forums, and while issues with MPlayer are noted, none described are quite like this. Trying to translate the workarounds for those other issues also yields no results.

Any suggestions?

I also can't get the beryl-manager to start automatically. I placed the commands to start beryl and beryl-manager in ~/.kde/Autostart, but when I do that, I get the white cube effect, i.e. everything is solid white. This is supposedly just an issue with using Beryl and AIGLX, but I'm not doing that. If I take that out of Autostart, then login normally, the basic effects of Beryl are running. I then start the beryl-manager, then "restart" the windows manager, and it all works perfectly, but that's a bit of an obnoxious way to go about starting things.

Any suggestions here?

Other than that, I really like this thing. Some of the effects are rather useless, like the wobbly windows, so I turned them off after they wore thin. But the possibilities for window management and organization are incredible.

Beryl is still early in its development cycle, and it is very, very buggy. Beyond the issues with Beryl not being able to be set to start automatically, I also see leftover beryl-manager processes being left after logout, crashes, glitches when interacting with KDE (funkiness with KDE's desktop switcher for example,) occasionally crashing or hanging the X server. I also had to use the newest NVidia drivers, which have their own bugs. Suspend-to-RAM is broken on the latest NVidia driver, so I had to revert to an earlier driver on my laptop.

It's fun to play with, but when I want to get things done and need my system to Just Work, I turn it off. Maybe in a year or so, the bugs will be fixed and Beryl will be usable for normal work, but not yet.

I knew that going in. I had put off playing with it, partly because I'd had a lot of problems just activating compiz, and also because I know using it is going to require readjusting my image of what a desktop is. I think this 3D desktop concept has possibilities that are more than simple eye-candy, but I don't know if I'm ready to make the leap yet.

I decided to go ahead and try Beryl, though, because I'd read an installation guide that indicated getting it working wasn't quite as complicated as my first compiz experience had been. I also play with eye-candy as a form of entertainment and was starting to notice themes and such here and there I wanted to see. So, I took the plunge.

Getting it working was, by comparison with compiz, simple, so simple it lulled me into a false sense of confidence. Since posting last night, I've uncovered a few more issues that are troublesome. The random crashes and lingering processes that shouldn't be running is a big one.

One thing I might mention here really isn't a bug so much as something I consider a design flaw. Put simplistically, the "cube," as the underlying window manager sees it, is one desktop with four different viewscreens. The annoying part of this for me is that all tasks appear in the taskbar on every viewscreen no matter what viewscreen they are on. I use desktops to separate functional groups of software I have running and limit the taskbar display to those applications running on that desktop. Using Beryl, the taskbar shows all of them, eliminating this form of organization. And, since I'm so accustomed to it, it's confusing.

SuperKarmaba doesn't work well with it either. To have my status monitor appear on all viewscreens, I have to open the plugin on each viewscreen, which consumes far too much memory and CPU power just for a status monitor.

In any case, I still think I like where this is going mostly, and it does provide a neat "wow" effect for those who think Linux is just a boring, old terminal screen.

Luckily, Mandriva is taking Beryl quite seriously and it runs very well here. Yeah, there are still a few rough edges, but the new 1.4 release has slicked it up a lot and it is a lot more stable. I don't believe I have ever seen such a rapid development cycle for any Linux app. Quinnstorm has taken a lot of crap, but you have to admit, she has kicked this thing in the ass, in all of the right ways.

Hot tip: If you are having display problems with it, turn off "Blur" in the Beryl Manager. Tends to knock a lot of problems on the head and the effect is no big whoop.

Beyond that, I can see a real future for this thing, well beyond mere "wow!" into potential productivity and ease of use gains.