Forget XGL+Compiz, this, THIS, is where its at.

First, instead of XGL, just use the AIGLX extension in Xorg. The best part is that if you are running Xorg 7.1 (latest 'stable' version in gentoo - not sure about other distros), then you already have AIGLX! nVidia's 9xxx series of drivers have full hardware acceleration support for this, so no longer must you give up precious 3d acceleration

Beryl is a fork of Compiz, and is formerly known as compiz-quinnstorm (not sure about the spelling of that, but thats not important). It has its own settings manager, and has no other dependencies (compiz requires gconf and something else, don't remember what)

Anywho, I'm now running this on my system, and the best part? MULTI-MONITOR SUPPORT!!! YAY!!!

Beryl's Homepage: http://www.beryl-project.org/

For screenshots and such, just check out their feature page: http://www.beryl-project.org/features.php I'll take some of my setup later

And as always, before installing this on your system, read your distros wiki and see if they have instructions for this

Impressive screenshots... it's Mac OS X, but open-source. Word.

note to self, put on next computer.

SCREENSHOT TIME! YAY!

Dial-upers be warned. The full-size images (just click the thumbnail) are BIG. Each is 2560x1024 PNG, each being somewhere in the 1MB to 1.5MB range. The thumnails are smaller, at roughly 50-60KB each

This is a shot of your standard transparency effect


Here is the desktops mapped to cube effect, although with transparancy. Note the two cubes, one per monitor (this IS CONFIGURABLE! An alternative is just one cube that is the width of the combined width of the monitors) Its a little hard to see, but I also have a "3D World" plugin enabled, so the windows are actually "floating" above each other


This is just a window being "morphed" as it is dragged


This is showing glxgears running along with the output of glxinfo (note the "Direct Rendering: Yes" part )


Same as above, but with a video being played on top of glxgears (and spanning two monitors), w/ transparency


Same as above, but with the addition of the "Blur" plugin, which blurs whatever is behind a transparent object, to increase readability on the semi-opaque window


Two others, showing live previews and the expose-style thingy

I wouldn't mind some antialiasing on the edges of that cube view...

Yeah, I'm going to look into how to enable AA full time - I think its an nvidia driver option somewhere...

EDIT: Huh, I enabled AA, but there isn't an option for TRAA (anti-aliasing for transparency) like there is in windows. Sooo that means there won't be any change, as everything is being render as a transparent texture

EDIT2: Not that it really matters though, as I don't spend a whole lot of time at the cube view

*polite cough* :p

How hard is it on sys resources? Can you (yes, you, on your computer) run [random first person shooter] in cube mode?

Tasty, but I don't feel like messing with fglrx more, after I finally got XGL and Beryl working..

Yes, elfprince, that was the joke.

well... this system isn't exactly "average". I haven't tried, but I'll run Quake4-demo in a window and see.

Just remember my system is an AthlonX2 4200, 2gb of RAM, and a 7900GT video card

I know it's not average. That's why I asked you. And my new one won't be far behind it.

Well then let me go crazy, and see what happens if I have quake4 (partially transparent) running over americas-army, with mplayer and glxgears running on a different virtual desktop - and THEN cube rotate part way between the two...

hehe, I just hope I have enough video ram for this, as theres a bug that once you max video RAM on nvidia cards that all you get are black boxes for new windows....

Yea, AIGLX and Beryl can be a lot of fun. I had them running for a while, but it wasn't all that stable for me on Ubuntu, and I grew bored of the eye candy. I still whip it out to impress friends and try to convince them that linux is superior, but I'm fine with default gnome for everyday use.

My favorite features (that you haven't documented in screenshots) are:

*Rotating the cube from inside
*Maximize a window, click a corner and drag it across the screen
*Minimizing and maximizing windows (with random selected as the minimize and maximize routine

How unstable did you find it to be in Ubuntu? The computer I'm building is going to be my graduation project, and I wanted to impress the panel with some fancy eyecandy. I figured this would be perfect, but I'd look like an idiot if it crashed...

My stability issues weren't too large. Mainly they consisted of:

*It having problems running Armagetron Advanced in full screen
*I found a repeatable glitch were if I right clicked on a window and selected resize, my computer would become unresponsive
*The occasional random not loading of either the top or bottom toolbars
*The occasional random crash at startup and subsequent reloading of beryl (This was my major qualm with it)

I'd say that you should definitely put it on there. The way I set it up, each time I booted into Ubuntu I could select what session I wanted (whether it be plain old Metacity or if I wanted Beryl). I suggest you do the same so that if you do have any problems with it, you can just boot into regular (safe) Metacity to show this panel.

Edit:

You don't even need to have two different sessions. Just install it, and boot like normal. Then, if you want to switch to beryl, just hit alt-F2 and tell it to run "beryl-manager"

It is stable for me, though, I have only had one bug that causes a crash, so I just avoid it

Awesome. This is going to be sweet!

Well? Aren't you going to let us know how this experiment worked out? If you haven't started yet, hurry up!

I can't take a screenshot, because it grabs the mouse and won't let go - ditto for the keyboard

HOWEVER, I did manage to reduce the opacity of both Quake4 and America's Army, and it was still smooth as silk. The mouse wasn't locked during the load, and the move warp and everything still worked without a problem. Although I was unable to, lets say, play them both at the same time, there certainly wasn't any noticeable slowdown running them in a window