Beryl:

I gotta say, the Beryl project is extremely cool. I had a great time picking out a skydome wallpaper and just tweaking out the desktop effects. I had to kill off the trailfocus plugin in beryl, I was getting annoyed with the fading out of apps. Other than that, I couldn’t be happier with the software. It’s just amazing. I have a nice fresh looking desktop with fun effects that just may help convince a few others to give Linux a shot (you KNOW anyone coming into this abode will be visiting my machine). Yeah, yeah, eye candy isn’t the reason to switch operating systems. That doesn’t mean that it won’t have an impact on some of those who are more reluctant to make the change. Who knows?

On the topic of Beryl, it seems that the folks over at Fedora are creating packages for it. That’s excellent news! I’ve noticed that Beryl core and Beryl devel have made it into the repos. I’m hoping that they’re planning to create packages for the plugins and extra toys as well.

*Note: if you followed the instructions for installing Beryl 0.1.1 in this post, and you update to the latest version in the Fedora repos, you WILL break Beryl. The good news is that it’s easy to fix. The RPMs referenced in the post have been updated to v 0.1.2. You can just download and install all of the packages except for core and devel (the post explains how if you don’t know what I’m talking about). After that, Beryl will be back, and up-to-date. Be sure to play with the “burn” animation. It looks NICE, but IMO it gets too annoying to use regularly. I wouldn’t mind seeing a “smoke” animation. Something that turns into wisps of smoke when you close an app could be pretty sexy

VMware:

I took some time today to set up some test VMware appliances for LinuxWorldNet. I’ll be using these “machines” to explore software and record my steps so I can post some how-to’s here. I’ve mostly completed the Fedora install, I’ll be working on Edgy shortly and I’ve created a Debian stable server for testing.

Upcoming Things:

I’ll be using the Debian VM to test out some FTP servers for Linux. I currently use Gene6 for Windows and would like to make the move to one of my Linux machines. I have no idea how well this will work out, I’ll post about my ups and downs here. Its going to be tough for any FTP server to beat G6, that’s just an amazing app. As I get into it, I’ll tell you what my requirements are and we’ll see how far I can get

I also plan on covering the configuration of OpenSSH server for both Fedora and Ubuntu. I’ll explain how to set them up in the most paranoid way I know how. I’m hoping that any newbies stumbling upon this blog will be able to open his/her SSH server to the evils of the Internet and still feel confident that they will be as safe as can possibly be.

That’s pretty much it for now. The only other thing I’d like to put out there is this; I’d like to hear from anyone that checks this blog out and has a few minutes to fire off a comment or email (matt at linuxworldnet dot com). Let me know what you think or if there’s a topic you’d like covered (I’ll do what I can, I’m still new to this Linux thing myself).

I need to get back to my beer and play, laydah!

Sooo, I went to work early this morning (all excited) to install the latest Fedora on my machine. I did the base install for a workstation, installed the apps I use the most and then turned on the nifty desktop effects. It was far less impressive than it was last week (see FC6 First Impressions). After using Beryl on my Ubuntu machine, Compiz is just kinda lame. You get a subset of what is available in Beryl and Fedora didn’t include any way to manage Compiz themes (at least none that I could find).

Is that such a big deal? To me it is.

The Beryl settings manager allows you to tweak features to what feels like an infinite level. You can change default settings (which is good, the wavy menu thing was buggin’ me), disable the effects that annoy or make your system feel slow, and experiment with what makes your desktop experience better. Since I’m running it on an older/less powerful machine here at work I’m tweaking the settings so that things don’t feel so laggy.

Beryl’s Emerald theme manager has (as installed on Fedora) 39 themes available. More than enough to pick your favorite colors to get started with.

Compiz had neither of those nifty config apps and I couldn’t find a suitable substitute in Fedora’s repos. Time to install Beryl.

You’ll have to do a little manual labor to install Beryl on Fedora, the Fedora forum has this post that will make it easy to install. If you’re using FC6, you can skip way down to ” HOWTO : FEDORA CORE 6 – BERYL”, download each RPM to a directory, open a terminal session, change to the directory you downloaded the RPMs to, switch to the root account (su) and enter “rpm -ivh *”. Once all of the packages are installed you can follow the instructions for starting Beryl on the same forum post. Poof! You’re done!

Ahhhh, now the gotcha. Since you’re not installing from your standard package manager, you won’t find Puplet or Yum telling you that there are updated packages when new versions of Beryl are released. I’m hoping the author of the post will keep the RPMs updated but you can’t count on that. If it comes down to it, you could compile new releases yourself. If you’re anything like me, that thought could make you a little nervous (esp if you’ve failed to compile things on Fedora as many times as I have). I personally believe that the benefits outweigh the risk. I find Beryl to be a bit more stable than Fedora’s Compiz (which surprised me). Using Compiz I found my Gnome terminals crashing frequently and that hasn’t happened yet with Beryl.

Going back to my tweaking now.. I’ve found that disabling Trail Focus and shortening the animation durations have really improved the feel of things on this GX270

As it turns out, the problems I had installing the latest Ubuntu were caused by my DVD/CD burner. I couldn’t get a “good burn” until I used a different machine with a different burner. Funny enough, I don’t have problems when burning DVDs, it only seems to be an issue when burning CDRs. Once I overcame that particular hurdle I was able to install Edgy an give it a shot.

Moving on, Ubuntu 6.10, the Edgy Eft!

Boot times have REALLY improved. Changing from INIT to Upstart seems to have made a real difference. I’ll be honest, I have no idea what the differences are, I can only tell you that I’ve stripped out all of the services I don’t need on my dapper install and the Edgy boot time (unmodified) smokes Dapper.

They’ve FINALLY come up with a really nice looking boot splash. Nice work! It looks professional and sleek. The Human theme has gone through some changes, its a bit lighter and easier on the eyes. I still had to change it to something blue and more my style. I do like the Human theme, I just always find myself going to something blue or black/gray.

Installing Compiz is a simple process, technically I didn’t install compiz, I installed the Beryl fork using the guide available on the Ubuntu forums. Beryl is far cooler than the stock compiz in Fedora. I’m so new to these enhanced desktop effects that I can’t really go into the details of it. Once I get some experience with them I’ll give my impressions.

Edgy includes the latest and greatest Gnome, Firefox, Gaim, OpenOffice and other apps. If you want the newest, you’ll find it all here. I’m a huge fan of having the latest of everything, of course that can cause some instability. I haven’t been using Edgy long enough to say if there are any problems. If I find any, I’ll post about them here.

If its possible for you, I would suggest installing Edgy fresh. I haven’t attempted a Dapper upgrade, but I have seen a lot of people seeking help regarding issues with INIT/Upstart in the Ubuntu IRC channels. It makes sense to me, Edgy is such a different beast.. Upgrading could be a dangerous undertaking.

All in all, I’m really liking Edgy. IMO, for a new user it’s still above Fedora. I’ll still be using Fedora at work (I’m looking forward to getting in early Monday morning to get it installed) but at home I’m all Ubuntu

Next project, getting the laptop up to Edgy and exploring the improved Gnome power management.

The very first thing I did this morning was to burn the DVD copy of FC6 that I downloaded overnight and install it to a spare partition on my machine here at home. The install doesn’t take very long, I chose to do a default desktop install and let it go…

Visually, Fedora is the best looking distro I’ve used. They’ve updated the graphics and theme (as they do with every release). The logo is just sexy, it’s darker than Core 5 and IMO looks a LOT better. I couldn’t stand the light blue bubbly look of 5. The boot splash, login theme and default desktop all flow and have a common look. I’ll be keeping the desktop background for a while, it has an under water feel to it and I’m digging on it.

Boot times are similar to FC5, to me it’s just fast. I’ve heard people call Fedora bloated, I’m just not understanding why. It doesn’t load a lot of services that I don’t need and feels fast to me.

The software selection is minimal in a default install, and I like that. You end up with a Gnome desktop, OpenOffice, Gimp, Gaim, Firefox, Evolution, Rythymbox and a few other apps. All in all, a decent place to start.

Firefox is at version 1.5.0.7 and Gnome is at 2.16. I’m not surprised that FF isn’t up to version 2 yet, FF2 just went gold this week. I’m a little surprised that Gnome isn’t up to 2.18 though. I didn’t follow the development of this release so I’m not sure what the reasoning was. I’ll just take a guess and say that by the time 2.18 was released they had already put too much effort into development to just up and change to the latest version. Gaim and OpenOffice are the latest releases, Gaim is the latest v2 beta and OO.o is v2.04.

*** Edit ***

I was wrong, Gnome 2.16 is the latest stable release. My mistake.

** End Edit ***

Out of the box there are some 10 updates that need to be applied. Pup lets you know and performs the update with about 3 mouse clicks and one password prompt. It’s a nice simple way to keep your machine up to date. Who doesn’t like that??

My first impressions are good. My only complaint about Fedora comes from the fact that I’m a newb and I’ve been using Ubuntu. The package selection isn’t weak, but it doesn’t even compete with Ubuntu’s.

So now I’m off to play, I need to install some of my applications. Add some repos and get to playing. This is actually the first time I’ve had to configure a Fedora release without the assistance of fedorafaq.org. Should be interesting

** Edit **

I’ve spent a couple of hours playing with FC6 now. I’ve got AIGLX/Compiz running (oh and doing that was just a few mouse clicks, System > Preferences > Desktop Effects) on my Intel card, using the i810 driver. I’ve got most of the software I like to use (mplayer, amarok etc) running, and running well. The only issue I’ve had is there are times when I open an instance of gnome-terminal, all of my existing terminal windows close (ack, now that is annoying). This only happens when I have the desktop effects enabled. I’ll look into that when I have time.

If you want to check out Linux eye candy and have a helluva good distro running, take some time to install FC6 and give it a shot!