Ubuntu and ATI and Beryl, Together at Last!

Thank farking Christ-almighty — I _finally_ got Beryl working with Ubuntu on the Titan! And let me tell you… it looks *great*. I’ve been playing around with these effects on our older computers (which were luckily running nVidia cards), and they worked, but they weren’t as fast as _this_…

For the past few months, trying to get it to work has been a _major_ pain in the ass — nothing seemed to work. Of course, I haven’t been the only one with this problem — practically anyone else trying to get any kind of advanced 3D effect to work in Linux with an “ATI”:http://www.ati.com card has been faced with the same difficulties. It all stems from ATI’s poor support of Linux when it comes to video drivers — they release one, but it hardly works.

Well, either they’ve released a new version, or the programmers at “Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntu.com have done some tweaking with their new version (7.04), because it works now! “This tutorial”:http://wiki.beryl-project.org/wiki/Install_Beryl_on_Ubuntu_Feisty_with_XGL was a great help — pay close attention to the instructions on how to _downgrade_ the beryl-core to a version that’s released directly from the Beryl group. It turns out the version that’s included with Ubuntu is a wee bit buggy.

Hey, nobody’s perfect.