The Majesty that is Beryl

[Zorak]

I just installed Beryl last night, and I must say that I am quite impressed with its capabilities. It is able to run just fine on my system (which is pushing 4 years old, btw) and it is able to mimic (almost)all of the eye candy features of they eye-candy of vista and then some!

I'd post this in a Vista forum just to get attention, but A) I don't know where to put it in that forum and B) I don't want to start a flame war.

I am so glad that I can run cool desktop acceleration like that without having to drop ~$1500 on a new rig plus ~$200-$400 on Vista. Now if only I could get my damn ATI drivers working, then it would be able to run everything without the occasional slowdowns I get...

-Zorak

P.S. I am not opposed to the idea of getting cool new hardware, but seeing as how I am strapped for cash right now, I like the idea that I can squeeze some extra capability from my old hardware. I AM however opposed to every buying vista

 

[bmouring]

Welcome to the club. I set up beryl just as a "let's see what all the hubbub is about" project (and it was convenient since I was rebuilding my system anyway). It looked so nice and took so little in terms of resources (I have a 7800GT and the AIGLX-built-in drivers) that I decided to keep it as my primary Window Manager.

As for not starting a flame war, I would enjoy the initial jab as much as anyone, but the repercussions of annoying fanboys stopping by to lame-bomb us (a phrase I use to describe stopping by just to post something lame and nonsensical like "LUNIX IS TEH SUX OMFG BBQ!!!111!") more than outweighs the initial guilty pleasure of (rightly) showing how great Linux is and somewhat rubbing it in their collective faces.

What have you tried in regards to getting the ATI drivers working? Anything unusual about your setup that renders other guides somewhat incomplete?

 

[linux_0]

@bmouring

modprobe fglrx produces a permission denied error

We ran it using strace and did not get any further details just permission denied.

The module exists, is readable, SELinux is disabled but the module still will not load.

I think I may have encountered this problem before but I forget how I fixed it a few months ago.

 

[bmouring]

Huh, weird. I haven't really experienced this problem before, does it indicate what file/resource it's attempting to access? I've had my share of flgrx weirdness but I can say this has me stumped.

 

[Zorak]

Here is the unfortunate part. Last night, Mr. Linux_0 was kind enough to help me try to install the livna drivers again. Just for reference, lets say that I started out with about a 50% workable graphics driver before installing the livna one's last night. By the time we decided to adjourn for the evening, he helped me get a 75% workable system (it was a long and strange process). I was pretty happy because Beryl seemed more responsive, but for some reason doing lsmod showed that the driver was not working. Furthermore, if i tried to mess with the ATI control panel gui, it said something to the effect of "this driver doesn't provide fireGL extensions". All of this was occurring despite glxinfo saying direct rendering was enabled.

All of this would have been perfectly ok with me, but I tried one final test - I tried playing StarCraft through wine to see if the improved gfx driver would take away the lag. It was almost playable, which made me happy, but I was unsatisfied, so I looked up a howto for installing the ati drivers from livna and how to enable them after Linux_0 had left. THIS WAS A BAD IDEA! I ended up somehow hosing my graphics driver (i think my xorg.conf file was overwritten with something not so hot in the process) and now glxinfo gives me weird output like this:

[code:1:cbb9876ca6]$ glxinfo
name of display: :0.0
Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
Error: couldn't find RGB GLX visual

visual x bf lv rg d st colorbuffer ax dp st accumbuffer ms cav
id dep cl sp sz l ci b ro r g b a bf th cl r g b a ns b eat
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
0x21 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
0x22 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
0x33 32 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
[/code:1:cbb9876ca6]

I tried restoring an older xorg.conf file since i saw that it was being overwritten (but it backed up the old one first, i think) by a cli tool called 'aticonfig' run with the '--initial' switch, but this didn't work. I fear I have made my original graphics problem worse in my 'greed'

Thanks for all your help guys.

-Zorak

P.S. So, as of right now, Beryl won't work because there isn't even a scintilla of direct rendering working like there was before, which makes me sad because i no longer have any of the cool effects I have come to love. *sigh* Why does it have to be this hard?

 

[knightrous]

I read over at http://doc.gwos.org/ that if you lose or over write your xorg file and it causes problems, you can run the following..

[code:1:b0c20bc304]dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg[/code:1:b0c20bc304]

This is for Ubuntu, I'm not sure if it will apply to your distro, but it might

 

[Zorak]

I appreciate the help, but since I use fedora core 6, i don't think I have that debian package manager on my system. Your post did however inspire me to see if I can scour the net for a yum equivalent so that perhaps I can fix this mess.

-Zorak

 

[MU_Engineer]

I run Beryl on my 2002-era Gateway laptop with its Radeon M9000 GPU + OSS DRI drivers. It seems pretty stable and runs fine, although I must switch from AIGLX to KWin (and thus turn off Beryl) before suspending to disk or else X will hang upon resume.

I find that I generally don't use Beryl on that machine much for two reasons, both stemming from the fact that I use my laptop as a note-taking and presentation-giving machine. One is that it attracts largely-unwanted attention from people who like to look over shoulders. I hate hearing "Is that a Mac?" or "Is that Vista?" and then seeing the blank expression when I tell them it's not. Then having to explain what Linux is, generally "it's an operating system that's neither Macintosh nor Windows. And you can get it for free legally." The second reason is that Beryl of course uses more resources than standard KWin and thus makes the Pentium 4-M based laptop's 7000-rpm hair-dryer fan turn on a lot more. The fan is loud enough that I often get the same looks from others that a ringing cell phone would get when it kicks on.

 

[Zorak]

I agree that it is a bit ostentatious and it uses a lot of resources, but the idea here is that I we are able to do anything that vista and osx can do WITHOUT having to drop ~$2 grand on a new rig, so that makes it all the more worth while. The fan part is unfortunate, but I think it is nice that your laptop is grabbing people's attention. The more people that turn their heads and learn about how cool linux is, the better. Unless of course you don't like explaining about linux, in which case that is too bad.

Of course, if you don't want to use hardly any system resources, you could write everything in vi and surf the net on links2 and not even use a gui and then you will really have people wondering what you are doing!

Just pulling your leg a bit

-Zorak

 

[knightrous]

I've had Beryl installed for two days and love it 8) Have all those classy Vista looks, with out the invading DRM and resource munching OS!

But.... I have a problem... When ever I crank up VMWare and I flick over to fullscreen to run Windows in VMWare, my screen just becomes black and I only get a cursor :? I want to get some work done in Solidworks 2007, but I can't do it with a black screen

I'm not sure what information to provide you with, so ask and thou shall provide

 

[linux_0]

Are you getting any errors or warnings?

I would advise you to use WINE instead however it does not appear to work under WINE very well at this time, but maybe it's worth a shot.

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=6207

Have you tried QEMU? Just to see if it works.

It might be helpful if you could post your specs as well.

I believe bmouring and MU_Engineer may be able to offer more advice on this.

GL :-D

I've had Beryl installed for two days and love it 8) Have all those classy Vista looks, with out the invading DRM and resource munching OS!

But.... I have a problem... When ever I crank up VMWare and I flick over to fullscreen to run Windows in VMWare, my screen just becomes black and I only get a cursor :? I want to get some work done in Solidworks 2007, but I can't do it with a black screen

I'm not sure what information to provide you with, so ask and thou shall provide

 

[knightrous]

I managed to fix the issue. I just open the Beryl manager up and switch back to the Gnome Window Manager and then run VMWare.

Thanks for replying Linux_0

 

[linux_0]

Good to hear you found a solution :-D

 

[Zorak]

Ok, has anyone here ever had one of those "WTF" moments? I have no idea why this just happened to me, but all I did was boot into FC6, and suddenly my resolution is now 800x600. No reason at all, it just changed. So... I try to change the screen resolution back to where it was (1280x1024 although I wish i could get it to 1600x1200), but now it won't let me change the resolution any higher than 800x600 !!! I haven't installed any new software or drivers of any kind, and as a matter of fact, the last time I used FC6 it worked just fine! I don't know why this is happening, but I really wish I could find a fix to these graphics driver problems

Even before when things were working , the graphics driver was only partially working because I KNOW for a FACT that my card is good enough to support 1600x1200 resolutions and I run my desktop at that res under windows, so why all the trouble under linux? People say ATI drivers are bad, but I really don't think they could be THIS bad, unless ATI and the livna repositories have something against me personally. Whenever i try to install the livna driver via yum, it fails citing something to do with the download, and this happens despite the fact that I can download and install virtually anything else.

Please, can somebody help me figure out why my computer has all of the sudden decided to politely show me the finger? And furthermore, can someone help me finally get my graphics drivers working all the way? I really appreciate any and all help.

-Zorak

EDIT: I forgot to mention that all of this JUST happened to me right now. at 9:30pm on tuesday, february 27 2007.

 

[Zorak]

Well, I have been pretty busy lately, but i finally got a chance to try and reinstall the rpms. For some reason, when I use yum every package BUT packages having to do anything w/ the fglrx driver will download and install just fine. So, I decided to manually download and install the RPMS, and so far I have made mediocre progress on this problem. Beryl will run now with higher resolution, but with slower response time than before. Granted I am running at a higher resolution now, but I scaled back the res and still had some latency issues that were not there prior to my driver breaking (for no apparent reason). Before, I had access to an incredibly crippled ati control panel utility, but now it is no longer there (even though I was using RPMs from livna in both cases) and glxinfo now says that I am using indirect rendering . I am trying to solve this problem on my own, but there is only so much that I am able to do with the little experience that I have: has anyone here run into a similar problem before?

I must say that there have been a couple of positive side effects. Namely, when I was installing the RPMs, I decided to kill X first and do everything from the CLI, which forced me to learn how to use links2 in the process. That and I can also run my desktop at the 1600x1200 that I want just like I have in windows. However, I really wish i could just finally get a fully functional graphics driver. Having a fully working driver always just out of reach like a carrot on a stick is beginning to wear me out

Thanks in advance for any advice you guys can give.

-Zorak

 

[bmouring]

Unfortunately, when I setup the fglrx driver for my laptop (a MR 9700), I always run up against a few nagging problems but the are usually quickly overcome. The problems you are running into fall into a whole different realm.

The only advice I can give is when you have the drivers responding well in terms of direct rendering and response/framerate (these should go hand-in-hand), if the resolution is insufficient, crack open the xorg config file (/etc/X11/xorg.conf, usually) and hammer on the monitor mode lines or HSync/Vsync values to specify a resolution range. The sync values can be found in detailed specs of your monitor, the modeline is based on those but needs to be calculated (there are online apps to help you with this, e.g. here)

Save the results, restart X, if better resolutions aren't available, check the Xorg log files (usually something like /var/log/Xorg.0.log) to see if you can get any clues about what's going on (might be something like the driver claiming that either it or the monitor doesn't support it, may need to tell the driver to ignore EDID values or prevent EDID testing)

 

[Zorak]

bmouring, thanks for the suggestions/strategies and the link. I'll be sure to see what I can get accomplished after my major test this thursday (on a side note, probability is an EVIL subject!).

I am wondering, however, if you have any idea why it is that when i try to use yum to install the fglrx driver from livna, it refuses to download?

Below is what happens when I try doing either an update or an install of "kmod-fglrx"

[code:1:fe74f25c94]

[root@Odysseus ~]# yum update kmod-fglrx

...

Downloading Packages:
(1/1): xorg-x11-drv-fglrx 100% |=========================| 6.4 MB 00:11
http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/6/i386/xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-8.34.8-7.lvn6.i386.rpm: [Errno -1] Package does not match intended download
Trying other mirror.
http://livna.cat.pdx.edu/fedora/6/i386/xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-8.34.8-7.lvn6.i386.rpm: [Errno 9] Requested Range Not Satisfiable
Trying other mirror.
http://wftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/livna/fedora/6/i386/xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-8.34.8-7.lvn6.i386.rpm: [Errno 9] Requested Range Not Satisfiable
Trying other mirror.
http://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/rpm.livna.org/fedora/6/i386/xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-8.34.8-7.lvn6.i386.rpm: [Errno 9] Requested Range Not Satisfiable
Trying other mirror.
http://mirror.atrpms.net/livna/fedora/6/i386/xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-8.34.8-7.lvn6.i386.rpm: [Errno 9] Requested Range Not Satisfiable
Trying other mirror.
(1/1): xorg-x11-drv-fglrx 100% |=========================| 6.4 MB 00:00
ftp://mirrors.tummy.com/pub/rpm.livna.org/fedora/6/i386/xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-8.34.8-7.lvn6.i386.rpm: [Errno -1] Package does not match intended download
Trying other mirror.


Error Downloading Packages:
xorg-x11-drv-fglrx - 8.34.8-7.lvn6.i386: failure: xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-8.34.8-7.lvn6.i386.rpm from livna: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.

[/code:1:fe74f25c94]

This is the ONLY package this happens with. Any other package will work just fine. This is really weird because first the package doesn't match the package i am trying to download, and then it runs completely out of mirrors to try

Has anyone ever encountered such an issue?

-Zorak

 

[bmouring]

Hrm, that sounds like a mismatch in whatever Yum uses to checksum/verify downloads. This is a bit of a shot in the dark since I haven't run into this problem before, but here's what I'd try:


[*:e72deaff85]Perhaps removing then installing the livna drivers instead of updating. I know this should make no difference, but it's worth a shot.
[*:e72deaff85]Try downloading the RPM yourself (maybe using wget since you shouldn't in X when updating X drivers.... right?) and install via rpm-i rpm-name.rpm
[*:e72deaff85]Sacrificing a goat to the ATi gods?


Again, these are shots in the dark but I have seen tricks like those work before. With any luck, linux_0 will stop by and save the day, since he seems to have more experience in this area than I.[/list]

 

[Zorak]

Well, I have tried removing and installing the drivers with yum instead of using the update command, but I still get the same results, unfortunately

Also, as I mentioned above, I have had to manually download the rpms and I try installing them with the "yum localinstall" option, which i think should have the same effect if I were to manually install the dependencies first using rpm and then install kmod-fglrx using the rpm command. Unfortunately, when I do this, things "work" i.e. I have beryl support, but now things are really slow and glxinfo still says that I am using indirect rendering.

That only leaves me option number 3... TO THE GOAT STORE

If i knew it would change anything, I would try reinstalling fc6. But at this point i don't know if that would do much good. Perhaps its time I persue a distribution w/ a somewhat less problematic package management system (even though yum has been good to me).

-Zorak