Planet Beryl

New home: http://dev.compiz-fusion.org/~cyberorg/

2007-09-02T10:36:21+00:00

Hello Community

My blog has moved to a new home http://dev.compiz-fusion.org/~cyberorg/

Don’t worry if there is nothing new from me on this old blog, now you know where to find the new one.

Ciao

-J

Blog moved

2007-09-01T12:00:03+00:00

To http://dev.compiz-fusion.org/~kristian/ . Please update your links/feeds.

Guillaume tried doing a more transparent solution, but we ended up with this. The old links will still work for old posts, but this will be the last post under this URL.

One Million Downloads in 4 Months!!

2007-07-15T13:35:21+00:00

Statistics started to count 4 months ago.
Sum of all downloads (whole build service): 12 747 490
Sum of all downloads filtered by project=X11:XGL: 1 033 406

Here are the statistics downloads from X11:XGL repository over at openSUSE Build Service, the repository is maintained by me along with Matthias Hopf. It is second in popularity to KDE3 only, shows eyecandy is quite sought after commodity.

Then there was a name: Compiz Fusion

2007-06-21T00:40:55+00:00

After a lot of back and forth, some fumbling with a vote and a lot of suggestions, we finally managed to find a name. Compiz Fusion. There are a lot of people relieved that we finally managed to find a name. Myself included.

We ended up weighing developer/contributer opinions higher than the users in this specific issue, after all, this is our work we’re naming. But the process was made in such a way that we found a name that the most developers didn’t dislike. Sort of the opposite of a vote for a winner. The plan was to have the users decide between the remaining names, but in the end, there wasn’t really any names remaining.

Personally, I’m very happy with this method. I never thought it would take this much effort to find a name, but the users should know that we spent a lot of time on finding this name, and every imaginable option was explored. There were a lot of concerns we had to honor: We didn’t want a name that was a “morf” between Beryl and Compiz (Like Coryl, and many also felt Coral was just this). We also had to honor the wishes of the people who will work most with the name.

There are still a lot of things we need to decide, and it’s not easy. There are still many hot debates going on, or that will have to be started. We need to decided what to do with forums, domain names and whatnot. Besides that, we have to find a more permanent way to manage the project.

Code-wise, we’re going forward, luckily. So most of this is tiresome squabbling. But we still have to deal with it, and there are some issues with how we’ve worked on code too. Many of us feel we need a more proper planning phase for the development process, this is specially true for the settings system, which was developed by a close group of former Beryl developers. This isn’t something unique to the Compiz Fusion project though, we kinda wanted to do that in the Beryl Project too, and many of us feel it’s a valid point in the Compiz development cycle too.

Now that we have a name, packagers are getting to work. Guillaume (iXce) and Alex (nesl247) on the Beryl side of things are sorting out git-renaming (yet again) and forum work, Dennis (onestone) seems to be doing the build-tuneups, and all of will probably adjust our individual code bits to fit to the new name. Because I tend to stay away from the longer arguments on the mailinglist, I haven’t really spoken to Rico lately, but I hope he can get to work too, even if he’s not exactly best friends with all the other developers and contributors at the moment.

So, for those who’re confused:

Compiz - The original project. Now only the core and a select few original plugins, located at freedesktop.org and the main developer is still David Reveman.

Beryl - A discontinued fork of Compiz, after “compiz-quinn”, a community set of patches, had drifted too far apart from the original project. Introduced many features, both in the core and outside. And attracted many developers. And the fork it self was the source of much debate.

Compiz Extras - A sort of “division” consisting of the people who worked on compiz, but the extras were not core-fixes. The concept is similar to what made Beryl what it is, but also very different. It was to include a wider set of plugins and tools. Now discontinued.

Opencompositing - A common name used for the merged project and more, does not include the core. This was meant mostly as a temporary name, but what becomes of this terms has yet to be decided. It will most likely be dropped.

CompComm - Another name for the merged project, not including core, more of a shorthand for “Compiz Community”. The opencompositing.org git repositories sported compcomm/ prefixes, this was mostly done for practical reasons. This name will be discontinued entirely.

Compiz Fusion - A community project forged by the merge between the Compiz Extras and the Beryl project. This does NOT include a core, as the core changes in Beryl are either being scrapped, or re-written for the core Compiz project. Compiz Fusion will sport settings tools, more plugins, helpfull scripts to start Compiz with the Compiz Fusion plugins, and basicly anything related to Compiz that’s not the core.

Compiz-Fusion arrives

2007-06-20T15:10:52+00:00

A new merged community around Compiz project would be known as Compiz-Fusion, details of the announcement here on Compiz Mailing List.

It is not just a new name, quitely behind the scenes developers have been working hard and have come up with some stunning enhancements.

Zoom plugin has been almost rewritten by David Reveman with cool new features like select and zoom and panning, Cube has got reflection thanks to great work by Onestone, there is now expo mode that can be used along with Cube.

Size information upon resizing any window, paint fire on your desktop and other countless useful and no so useful features have been added to plugins. We also got new animation effect “Dodge”, one of my favourite.

Compiz also now has two settings tool, users can easily tweak compiz settings to their liking.

Here is hot new name:

Naming a project, steering it

2007-06-10T14:46:45+00:00

Beryl and Compiz is merging. Compiz will remain the name for the core. For everything else we need a new name.

There’s currently a poll on the opencompositing.org forum.

There is also a lot of complaints on how this is done. Some people don’t like one name for whatever reason, others do. Some people feel they weren’t heard and their alternative should be on the vote. Many people calling for stopping the vote.

Well, as it happens, I’m all for democracy, but this is ridiculous. The people who should be responsible for naming a project, is the creators of the project. Not everyone and their dog. And we can’t wait around forever for a name. The name is important, but it’s even more important that we get one, and fast.

Personally, I voted for Coral. I’m not particularly happy with it, but in my opinion, it’s a name most people can accept. I don’t care that there are other projects with similar names. Coral is something growing in the sea, that’s where it’s from, not “stolen”. And I don’t think discussing names for a few more months is going to yield any happy results.

I am amazed by how many opinions everyone suddenly has on a decision on the name. It doesn’t change anything, except it allows us to FINALLY get a web page, wiki and more with the proper branding. I urge the people who are giving their opinions on this to think twice. We want a name, we want to hear what people have to say, but in that order.

As for claims of lack of information, that’s utter rubbish. No, we did not advertise this in your local newspaper, but the fact that we needed a new name has been well known since we started talking about a merge. The vote has also been somewhat discussed on the “compcomm” mailinglist, and there was a thread on the forum prior to putting up the post. And names like Coral, CoCo and Blitz were suggested long before the vote came up for discussion, and they have been loosely discussed among the developers. If anyone has strong feelings about this project, they’ll know how to find this information. If anything, the problem with opencompositing.org is that there is too much discussion going on, it takes forever to make any sort of decision.

There are also a lot of helpful individuals wanting to give input on how the project is steered. We do have a lack of leadership. There are two communities in play here, and neither wants the other to “take over”, thus making it difficult to find a leader we can all agree on. But it’s not like we actually need one. The Beryl project had Quinn as a leader, but in reality, she did not try to steer us. So far, we’re working on separate parts, and then there are individual leaders for each “sub project”. These are not announced as leaders, it’s just the natural way of working: Whoever works most on a project, is the one people talk to about it.

We will be working on non-developer teams soon. We’ve already put together a support team for the forum, which seems to work well (These guys deserve their own tribute-post, but that’s for a later date). When we have a name, we need wiki and web focus too.

What concerns me is the low and often negative participation in this joint effort from (former) members of the compiz community. It is not strange that opencompositing resembles the Beryl project, when all the input we get from the Compiz community is that it’s a silly idea and that we should just stop and do what the compiz community guys did before the merge (which I personally don’t think was much). I beg these individuals (you know who you are) to sign up on the opencompositing.org forum, send ideas instead of criticism to the compcomm list and help us! We can’t create a merged project if only one party has their heart in it.

I for one don’t WANT a new Beryl project. I liked the beryl project, but it’s time to move on. We can’t do that without new ideas. But let’s talk about what to do, instead of talking about what not to do.

Important News - Please Read

2007-06-05T21:15:48+00:00

Beryl and Compiz (at least the plugins part of compiz) are now merging, in the hope of a better future. No name has been decided yet but there’s a vote going on. The forums are currently at http://www.opencompositing.org and everyone currently using Beryl should check it in the next days or weeks to find information about the new merged project (setup instructions, etc) when they are available.

Thanks!

Whatever happened to the future of beryl ?

2007-05-20T15:00:47+00:00

One day I’m writing about all these changes I want to make in Beryl, and the next day Beryl is merging with the Compiz community. So whatever happened to my vision? Was it just talk? No, it wasn’t.

There were a few improvements made to the Beryl core. I consider the idea behind the “Beryl logger” important; It made debugging a lot easier. It will also help new developers, and track strange bugs that the development team can’t reproduce. It helps to increase the understanding of how Compiz works.

I also started cleaning the event code. Splitting it up. I spent a great deal of time experimenting to find out what really had to be inline and what didn’t. Looking back, I wouldn’t want the current state of the Beryl event code to be released as a stable release, but I think it’s the right way to go. The changes I made were not bad, but it wasn’t finished.

So far, these changes has not been merged. I belive what I did with Beryl in this area gave at least myself some important experience on the real flow of the code. I hope to use this to eventually improve the Compiz core too.

A few people seem to have misunderstood my ideas though. I belive David’s overall design is pretty sound, but I’m just not happy with the state of the code and the lack of documentation.

Instead of trying to explain what has been explaind countless times before, let me quote Chapter 6 of the Kernel’s CodingStyle Document, I’m sure you can find similar explanations in any document that deals with C coding style.

Chapter 6: Functions

Functions should be short and sweet, and do just one thing. They should
fit on one or two screenfuls of text (the ISO/ANSI screen size is 80×24,
as we all know), and do one thing and do that well.

The maximum length of a function is inversely proportional to the
complexity and indentation level of that function. So, if you have a
conceptually simple function that is just one long (but simple)
case-statement, where you have to do lots of small things for a lot of
different cases, it’s OK to have a longer function.

However, if you have a complex function, and you suspect that a
less-than-gifted first-year high-school student might not even
understand what the function is all about, you should adhere to the
maximum limits all the more closely. Use helper functions with
descriptive names (you can ask the compiler to in-line them if you think
it’s performance-critical, and it will probably do a better job of it
than you would have done).

Another measure of the function is the number of local variables. They
shouldn’t exceed 5-10, or you’re doing something wrong. Re-think the
function, and split it into smaller pieces. A human brain can
generally easily keep track of about 7 different things, anything more
and it gets confused. You know you’re brilliant, but maybe you’d like
to understand what you did 2 weeks from now.

So what’s next? I’m not sure I’ll be working too much on the Compiz core in the immediate future. A few multihead related things, but nothing major. I do have my zoom project to consider, after all. I hope I can get back to my original plans eventually.

As for the future of Beryl, we’ll continue to support the stable Beryl branch (Beryl 0.2.x) for some time. This means critical bug fixes to keep it running, and user-support to a certain degree. When we’re ready to release something under the “opencompositing.org” brand (No, we don’t have a name yet… sigh), I figure we’ll stop supporting installation-problems with Beryl from sources other than official packages bundled with distributions.

Input enabled zoom!

2007-05-20T03:44:16+00:00

After a little bit of hacking, I’ve got the original compiz plugin working with input enabled. Since the plugin doesn’t get MotionNotify events when input isn’t grabbed, it has to fetch the motion from other places though. So far I’ve solved this by fetching in DonePaintScreen() which works very well for me, but both common sense and early reports indicate that it’s not enough. The result is a little choppy.

The solution should be fairly simple. Either just add it to a timeout, which is what Beryl’s inputzoom plugin does, or… Ok, I guess that’s the only real option I can come up with, except modifying core.

In addition to enabeling input, I’ve also gotten basic focus tracking up. This is by no means well-implemented yet, nor am I satisfied with it. There’s two major issues:

It’s simply annoying.
The function for setting the zoom area to a specific area is bugged

The first problem is a fundamental problem that will probably take a lot of tweaking. So far I’ve added a hardcoded delay (which will be configurable soon) in when to activate focus tracking. This helps avoid jumping around when sloppy focus changes the focus, as focus tracking won’t do anything if the mouse has recently moved. This is a fairly reasonable way of doing things, that I’m happy with. I also intend to add a few other mechanism for making the focus tracking more natural. The lack of input transformation really underlines this problem too, since the mouse pointer will jump whenever the zoom area is moved. However, if input transformation was implemented, it would be trivial to disable this mouse wrapping.

As for the bugged zoom area function, that’s another story. Basicly, I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t actually do math while sitting in front of a computer. Right now, the function works after a fashion, for the first zoom level it’s also precise. For any other zoom levels, it misses a little bit. This is what I’ll be working on next.

I still haven’t decided wether this will be an entirely new plugin, or to attempt to get it accepted into the compiz core package. Since it will eventually rely on AT-SPI, I am not sure it makes sense to attempt to get it into the core compiz package, and this is exactly what opencompositing.org is for, anyway. Either way, it’ll be easily available to anyone wanting to use it.

As a last note, I’ve set up a launchpad project for google summer of code. So far I haven’t actually started using it, but I intend to use it. You can find it at https://launchpad.net/compiz-zoom.

Summer of code, and merge

2007-04-29T02:19:08+00:00

Recently, Guillaume (Known to most as iXce) and myself got accepted by Ubuntu to work on Compiz/Beryl in Google’s Summer of Code program. I’m thrilled myself, and can barely wait to get started.

We’ll both be working on accessibility features, Guillaume on color filtering and I’ll be focusing on zoom enhancements. As the situation with Beryl’s input zoom is a bit dodgy, one of my main goals will be to both provide input enabled zoom with the current technologies, and prepare for the future with input transformation. Some of the main new features to look forward to will be:

Zoom follows cursosr
Zoom follows focus
Fit zoom to window
Fit window to zoom

The idea is to make this as generic as possible, so there won’t be a need to implement major changes when input transformation is available to most users, and ideally it should work both with and without input transformation even when it is available. This will mean I’ll probably write a new plugin, which isn’t really all that much work. I’ll be using some of the existing accessibility technologies available, but still want this to work for users that otherwise don’t have to use accessibility technologies.

It’ll be interesting working on this, but it has also been interesting in a very diffrent way to see this merge between the Compiz community and Beryl. I don’t want to spark up any new flames here, there are enough of them allready, but I hope we can get something presentable out to our users soon, but it’s not looking too good. The work on core is going quite well, and there hasn’t really been any plugin issues either, it’s everything else that is causing delays. And I also belive this is causing us to loose a lot of development time. I know I haven’t been very active myself, though I’ve done a little work on porting/merging my multiscreen stuff.

I’ve been putting together a compiz-manager script which is far from finished, which I hope can help people start Compiz in their favorite way, autodetecting many of the options that Beryl does in core, but compiz doesn’t. Beyond that, I also intend to get a build-script out there for users wanting to use the git versions, but don’t know where to begin. I’m more or less just waiting for bset to get to a point where I’m happy with it, and you would be too.

My last post kinda looks strange with the merge going on, but at least something big is happening, and we’re going somewhere.

A wonderful gift

2007-04-20T19:59:12+00:00

Big, Curvy, Temperamental…these are qualities I look for in a woman, not a laptop.

This is why System76’s Darter is for me. I received it earlier today, and it is a wonderful little machine, works fine from startup, there’s a bug in feisty with it that the support team e-mailed me about *before* I even received the laptop! When else have you seen such service?

This laptop is a donation of sorts, a gift in exchange for my help in getting beryl/compiz/coco/whatever running on system76 hardware easily and in a way they like, as well as a chance to get their name out there even more. Needless to say I’ll have it with me at every event I go to.

So far it lives up to everything one might expect, the only issue I am running into is the fact that the keyboard layout is slightly different than what I am used to, but this is rather expected and should pass in a day or two as I practice on it.

That’s really all I have to write about at this particular moment, but I’ll keep you posted as things develop. So far, the extended battery does look like it will come close to the advertised 9 hours, but I can’t be sure until I run it for a while.

The ups and downs of daily life

2007-04-13T21:33:55+00:00

Well, I assume everyone is rather accustomed to hearing me whine about being unemployed at this point, so I’ll merely mention that I still am.

On the positive side, we are getting quite close to the merger it seems, and things are getting smoother the closer we get, which suggests to me that this is indeed the right thing to do. I hope it does not take much longer of course, as our users shouldn’t have to wait.

For anyone who will be at UDS-Sevilla or the preceeding Ubucon, I will be in attendance, and glad to hang out. I’ve also gotten some offer of help to attend Ubuntu Live, but I’ll need a bit more, at the moment all I have confirmed is the plane ticket there&back

And, as always, if you’ve heard of an opening somewhere, let me know. Feel free to contact me.

livinglatexkali@gmail.com is the easiest method, I’m also often on various IM services (livinglatexkali@metascape.afraid.org/jabber livinglatexkali@gmail.com/gtalk livinglatexkali/aim livinglatexkali/yahoo…a pattern doth emerge)

An event for our LUG

2007-04-13T10:49:36+00:00

We are planning an event on 22 April here in Baroda, India. So if you happen to be in my town, please join us.

Will be showcasing latest in virtualization technologies and of course awesomeness of Compiz/Beryl.

Vibrant GNU/Linux User Group

Compiz and Beryl reunited officially

2007-04-05T07:18:35+00:00

Finally the announcement is made that Compiz and Beryl communities will be joining forces.

Compiz, the core will be developed as it is currently, lead by David Reveman of Novell and hosted at the freedesktop.org, most of the Beryl developers now have commit access and are already porting over changes from Beryl.

Many of the Beryl plugins have been ported to work with Compiz and are temporarily hosted on git repository at beryl-project.org. Main technical difference between the ported plugins and plugins in Compiz core is the use of BCOP options instead of gconf schemas. There is no settings utility available yet for end user to customize preferences.

For the settings frontend a library is under heavy development called libbs which can use ini, gconf or kconfig backends to store user preferences. Its code can be fetched from here: http://gitweb.beryl-project.org/

We are obviously headed for much better composite desktop experience, wishing everyone the very best of luck.

Beryl - A Compiz Community

2007-03-31T08:44:56+00:00

Beryl - A Compiz Community

It’s not official though, sounds good?

Thanks Dennis “Onestone” Kasprzyk for the name. Logo is merged from creations of beryl logo by Corner - the Snowman and blinged up compiz logo by Jakub “jimmac” Steiner.

On the way to Beryl-Compiz Merge

2007-03-30T10:55:40+00:00

After months of talking (possibly more lines than there are lines of code in both projects) things seems to be on the right track for merged project..

One of the contentious issue is the name for merged project. I am sure as mentioned in one of the earlier posts, the new project will be based on compiz core, so I do not see any name change for the core, the name change might only apply to the merged community. Do we need a name change? can you come up with really cool name for merged compiz-community and beryl project?

While there has been talks on the side, developers on both sides have been very busy porting most of the Beryl plugin to work with vanilla Compiz core. Here is the impressive list of plugins that now work with Compiz:

3d animation annotate bench blur bs clone crashhandler cube dbus decoration desktopclick fade fakeargb flash fs gconf-dump gconf group ini inotify jpeg kiosk minimize mousegestures move opacify place plane png put quickchange regex resize-extra resize ring rotate scale screenshot showdesktop snow svg switcher trailfocus video vignettes wallpaper wall water widget wobbly zoom

Most exciting among all the above are new 3D animations, group tab and ring switcher plugins.

There is a very good feature overview of other plugins here on compiz site and here on beryl site.

Apart from all these plugins there are many developers working to make using Compiz easier, for example this fantastic firefox extension that lets you set Compiz skydome image right from the browser, gnome-compiz-preferences and opensuse-xgl-settings that makes setting up and customizing compiz painless (no gconf-editor!!).

To get the taste of new Compiz with all the Beryl goodies get compiz-git and compiz-extras-git packages for openSUSE from this repository. A word of warning though, they are test packages so try at your own risk.

Beryl 0.2.1 Released and Beryl moves to GIT

2007-03-18T00:27:41+00:00

Hello there folks. Today, we have released beryl 0.2.1. There’s nothing NEW in the release. However all of the licenses have been fixed so that it can go into debian and ubuntu.

Onto more important matters though. Instead of using svn, beryl is now managed by git. The following is the new repo information

Users: git://anongit.beryl-project.org/beryl/component where component is beryl-core, beryl-plugins, etc. There is no more trunk
Developers: git+ssh://git.beryl-project.org/git/beryl/component where component is beryl-core, beryl-plugins, etc. There is no more trunk

To get what used to be trunk, use this script here: http://beryl-project.org/git-checkout.py.gz (be sure to gunzip it)

So for those of you who maintain svn builds, please update them to git.

Thank you.

- The beryl team

Forums…

2007-03-16T23:22:32+00:00

We know the forums are down, and apologize for the inconvenience. Server maintenance is taking longer than expected. We are moving them to a better server by tomorrow, to hopefully avoid repeat occurances of this. There is a possibility of losing up to one day’s posts, but this is hopefully unlikely. Sorry again for the inconvenience.

Beryl 0.2 packages for SUSE

2007-03-15T11:32:14+00:00

Finally Beryl 0.2 is released after a long wait. Tons of new features since 0.1.4 release.

Checkout the new feature overview here: http://blog.beryl-project.org/?p=29

Packages for SUSE can be found at it’s usual place on openSUSE Build Service repositories and its mirrors:

http://software.opensuse.org/download/X11:/XGL/

Make sure to uninstall all -snapshot packages before installing 0.2 packages. Consider 0.2 as stable release and keep a copy if you intend to checkout snapshot packages later.

From this release on there will not be any updates for SUSE Linux 10.1/SLED 10 due to many updated package requirements.
Have fun!

Beryl 0.2.0 Released!!!

2007-03-15T01:22:48+00:00

Beryl 0.2.0 is a complete overhaul of Beryl. The last stable release 0.1, featured a very fun, and eye-candy based compositing window manager. However, since it’s release, many parts of beryl have been rewritten, replaced, or simply dropped. The Beryl team has put in numerous hours to bring you this release. It’s filled with fun, eye-candy, better user support, new features, and most of all, stability. While Beryl has had numerous developer releases, known by their 0.1.X versions, 0.2.0 has been throughly tested by many more users.

As Beryl has become more well known, our userbase has expanded exponentially. Because of this, we’ve had more bug reports than ever. So thank you to all of you who have helped us on this path. And thank you to all of those who have made Beryl possible.

During the last year, Beryl has gone through a number of incidents. Users have argued about Beryl and Compiz for a long time now. With this release, Beryl has taken a giant step apart from Compiz. While some things are similar, which is inevitable in a fork, many things are not. We at Beryl believe that starting with the 0.3 development phase, many more things will be come clearer in regards to Beryl. We are setting our focus on organization, improving user relations, making the software more bug free, and overall more fun for you!

So without further ado, I give you Beryl 0.2.0!

* New Plugins
- Thumbnail: Thumbnails on the taskbar (window list) which show a mini view of the actual window
- Snap: Allows windows to “snap” to each other, or provide edge resistance
- Opacify: Makes windows behind the active window transparent
- Group: Allows windows to be group, to easily switch between a set of windows

* New system requirements check
- The improved check has much better accuracy
- The check is a lot faster

* New Window Decorators
- Since 0.1, we have two new window decorators
- Heliodor: Uses metacity themes
- Aquamarine: Uses Kwin themes.

* Newly Rewritten Beryl-Settings
- Written in Python
- More user-friendly UI
- Better profile support

* New Translations
- Thanks to all of our foreign speaking users, we’ve had a much better time getting translations
in, and completed. So thank you!

All this and much, much more! So please enjoy,
- The Beryl Team

New Beryl Snapshot(r4296) packages

2007-02-28T06:48:07+00:00

This release includes many minor bug fixes and improvements to Wall, switcher and group plugins.

Disable cube and enable wall plugin from beryl-settings.

Video in this post here: Beryl Blog

Packages are available from the openSUSE Build Service repositories.

pt_PT updates!

2007-02-26T14:05:57+00:00

Finnaly I managed to make some time up in my schedule to update the pt_PT translations of beryl…..

Currently i’m only missing beryl-plugins-unsupported.

Have some time / wanna help? Mail me at joelcalado [at] gmail [dot] com.

Thanks!

PS: When you’re lagging 500+ fuzzy translation strings behind, translation scares the hell out of you

New improved Kiba-Dock packages for openSUSE

2007-02-16T10:34:29+00:00

Check out the new packages of kiba-dock. Kiba-dock has come a long way from the prototype developed by Kristian Høgsberg.

The project developed very rapidly at beryl-project to become useful application launcher. Now the kiba-dock project have their own website at www.kiba-dock.org.

Latest version of kiba-dock features application launcher, preview of running applications, memory status, and a clock. It is highly configurable so that some of the fun physics can be toned down or enhanced as you like.

Packages for openSUSE are available HERE.

Installation instructions and getting the code HERE.

Beryl 0.2 usability features(including videos)

2007-02-16T05:24:06+00:00

We would soon be releasing Beryl 0.2, here is a look at usability
features(including videos) that will come with it.

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=17276

If you cannot wait for the 0.2 release, get the latest snapshot
release(r4048) with even more cutting edge features and eye candy here:

http://software.opensuse.org/download/X11:/XGL/openSUSE_10.2/repodata/

How to Beryl on openSUSE:

http://en.opensuse.org/beryl

Cheers

-J

Beryl 0.2.0 rc2 Released

2007-02-13T20:38:09+00:00

Beryl 0.2.0 RC2 is now tagged and released, check your repos for updates in the next day or so. This release includes minor bugfixes to issues with cube, emerald, window snapoffs have been re-added back in and are now working. Several other smaller bugs have been fixed along the way dealing with animations and window management features. Check for your favorite bug and get feedback to trac as soon as possible!

–The Beryl Team

Beryl, where do we want to go?

2007-02-13T13:29:43+00:00

Here are jotting down some of the ideas about the role that Beryl should be looking to play in future of Linux Desktop development.

Leave the core to Compiz project to develop and maintain.

I don’t believe core is the identity of Beryl or any major work by the project has gone into it to say we cannot give up its maintenance. Compiz project maintaining the core and Beryl developers helping improve it would serve several purposes that I will list down shortly.

Compiz core should be treated as infrastructure like x.org that we are using to meet our aims. Obvious question that would arise out of this is what is the identity of Beryl if we don’t duplicate core work?

I suggest redefining ourselves and creating another niche for Beryl than to compete and duplicate efforts of Compiz project. There are more important things we can put our efforts into and make Linux Desktop pleasure to use for everybody.

Some time back some developers floated idea of creating another Desktop Environment around composited WM, I think we can aim for something close to it, but not quite full DE.

Same as GNU applications and Linux kernel makes up GNU/Linux OS, we could aim for being something like GNU. Beryl should focus on the following to accomplish that goal and define its place.

1. Create repository of all sorts of plugins, usability as well as eyecandy ones. Let them be known as Beryl-plugins with dependency on Compiz-core. Let’s not just stop at that.

2. Brings together various projects such as kiba-dock, gnome-dock, Awn, Screenlets etc creating a project with such components that has compositing as fundamental requirement.
3. There are some fantastic ideas here on Gnome 3 and KDE 4 goal pages, we can help achieve those.

These are just personal ideas, please don’t take it as official Beryl road map, I just think we should move on from where we started.

I am sure many of you would have other ideas of what we can/should do, do share (no flame wars please ).

Have a lot of fun!

The future of Beryl

2007-02-12T20:13:31+00:00

There have been a lot of discussions lately about the future of Beryl, and our relationship to Compiz.

Let me just start this by saying that I appreciate the work David has done, and continues to do with both Compiz and now X.org. He has an immense amount of knowledge, and he is responsible for getting us where we are today with a proper composite window manager. And he keeps giving to the community through is code. For that, I thank him. I do not belive, at this point, that anyone on the Beryl team has that same amount of knowledge of X and related libraries.

Beryl is very much a direct result of his work. We are gratefull for that.

So why the fork? So far there isn’t really a significant difference between Beryl and Compiz, so did we do it just to further our careers? Did we do it because we want the glory? Did we do it out of ignorance? Did we do it because we prefer IRC over mail? Well, I wasn’t on the team at the time of the fork, I was, however, a user of Compiz, and a user of compiz-quinn. And I have been a member of the free software community since 1999, and I am a true beliver. I have also been programming since 1992. At which point I was 9. I have not been directly involved in free software as a developer on some elses project until I started working on Beryl. So what do I know?

Well, I am a purist. My code is probably far from perfect, but I want it to be in all possible ways. I strive to master whatever I spend my time on. And I love knowledge, and I respect it. But I also realise knowledge is not everything. Attitude is just as important. Where would the free software community be without the attitude of the folks who started it all? Nowhere.

This brings us to the core of what I personally consider the main reason why a fork was necesarry. Attitude. Compiz is developed as a one-man project, and that could be a good thing, but it would require that it is done because of an attitude. Not because it is convenient. If the code was clean and smooth, I would surely have no problem understanding why someone would want complete control over every part of it. They would want to make sure it remains clean. However, this is not the case with the compiz code, nor is it the case with the Beryl code. There are som ingenious solutions in Compiz and Beryl, but the implementation is not pretty. There are functions that makes you forget C is a procedural language half way through reading them, it looks more like a dirty script. And these are central and crucial parts of the code.

When you add to the mix that this code is virtually undocumented, and only one person really knows what the code does, you have a problem. Sure, it’s free software so you can read the code and EVENTUALLY you’ll figure out how it works, but we all know “it was tough to write so it should be tough to read” is an example of a bad attitude. A really good programmer documents his code, because he knows it will help him in the long run. It’s not just a way of helping others, it’s about helping yourself. Because if you document your code, others will help you improve it, and thus, you help yourself.

Getting back to the core issue: How does this affect Beryl?

What I want to do with Beryl is clean it up. Make it better. I want to use the good ideas David had, and implement them properly. Make the code sustainable over time. Open it up to other developers who might not have the entire day to decode a single function. I want to increase the flexibility of the code, and make it more robust.

And I intend to do that. It takes time, however. And I can’t spend all my time working on Beryl, I have school and other projects going on too that requires my attention. And I want to do it right, and to do it right, I have to cooperate with my teammates. Luckily, trunk has been unlocked, and we’ve slowly started. We are trying to reach an agreement on what specificly we want to do. We all know we want to clean up, but that’s not really specific enough.

I belive that the Beryl 0.2.0 release will not make or break Beryl. Surely there will be flames and rants about how good/bad it is, all depending on who’s writing. But in the end, I don’t belive it matters. The real work will happen in 0.3.x and the future releases. If people still sais compiz/beryl in the same breath by the time we release 0.6.0 for instance, then I’ll be worried. Right now, I say let people criticise us all they want. The Beryl team gets blamed for a lot of things we are innocent of and some things we are guilty of, but what will that matter if it turns out to be a great thing in the end? We get blamed for lying, stealing and beeing unethical. We also get blamed for what others say about us. If someone sais that beryl is more innovative than Compiz, then suddenly Beryl are the bad guys for creating a false impression of Compiz. I don’t want to say wether we’re more innovative or not than Compiz. David, surely does some amazing things that I’m gratefull for, like working on input redirection in X.org. So far, Beryl has mostly focused on Beryl. Our plugins haven’t been that radical and most of them will still work on Compiz. So no, we’re not really that much better yet, are we?

I can understand when others question the reason for our existence, but I say give us time. So far, we’ve mostly worked on getting our act together and cleaning up our OWN code, and getting some structure in the project. We haven’t even started with the real fun. It takes time to get to know the source code of a program, at least a couple of months if it’s big. We’ve finally had that time, and I at least finally feel confident when working on core. I can start doing what I set out to do.

So please, flame my comments, but remember: Rome wasn’t built in one day, just like Beryl won’t be built in one stable release.

A week of 0.2.0rc1 …

2007-02-08T21:36:28+00:00

Currently, all I have are stats for the repositories I run; since they’re in DNS round robins with some others, I can make some (generally good) inferences about the sort of traffic they’re receiving. 0.2.0rc1 was released to the repositories around the morning of the 1st Feb (my time), and this data covers the period up to ~3am today (8/2/2007), so that’s 7 days.

ubuntu.beryl-project.org

We have six mirrors for this particular repository which serves Ubuntu Edgy and Feisty packages for Beryl, xserver-xgl and a patched libwnck.

So, starting with the easiest repository - the one on limitless - so far, it’s served ~17GB of data, at a rate of around 2GB/day. In terms of downloads of beryl-core 0.1.9999.1, we have:-

Edgy i386: 2,052; Edgy amd64: 159
Feisty i386: 128; Feisty amd64: 11

Total: 2,350
My second mirror (on lupine) has a similar level of data usage, so we can safely assume that the remaining mirrors also get a similar level of traffic (with one small caveat). This gives us 14,100 installations of beryl-core 0.2.0rc1. There’s also the primary mirror to consider, which experience tells us gets a higher level of traffic than any of the others. Exactly how much higher is unknown, but 15,000 to 17,000 installations in total wouldn’t take me by surprise. On top of this, we have SVN installations to consider (which, I have no doubt, is quite a large number), along with all the people still using 0.1.99.x or 0.1.4 - again, I would guess at a fairly large number.

debian.beryl-project.org

This is somewhat, erm, smaller - but the repo is a lot newer, and so less well-publicised.

Etch i386: 68; Etch amd64: 15; Total: 83

Four mirrors, so at least 332 users (bearing in mind the primacy effect again).

What I’d like to do next is to firstly, attempt to verify the (minimal) assumptions above; and secondly, get stats for non-Debian-based distributions - particularly from Gentoo (+ derivatives) and Red Hat (+ derivatives).

This Week in Beryl — Wall Plugin

2007-02-08T09:29:32+00:00

Hey guys, changing the format of TWiB up this week a bit. I get bored enumerating bug fixes and new features, so instead I have a video to show. This is the new wall plugin that racarr has been working on, it is really quite fantastic. It allows users to do a traditional plane style viewport layout, but also to zoom back out and re-organize their windows in a birds eye view. You can also switch desktops in this manner by right clicking on the appropriate viewport. In the near future animations are going to be added to switching viewports without using expo mode. Without further delay, the video:

Thanks Racarr!!!

[Update]
There have been lots of comments about “I want this or that” or “this feature is kinda hard to work with”. Keep in mind this plugin isn’t done yet, so some things are still in broken/proof of concept form. When the plugin is in a release you can expect that to more or less be its final form. Until then, it’s still fluid.

Linuxforum.dk and 0.3.x-work

2007-02-04T16:25:09+00:00

We’ve finally gotten 0.2.0rc1 out the door and branched 0.2. Though this doesn’t mean work on 0.2 has stopped, it does mean that the freeze on trunk is over and we can start breaking things again. The first thing I’m gonna break is most likely multihead support. Or rather, the first thing I’ll start working on. While Beryl has what I would call a very good support for xinerama-hinted multihead, the more traditional multiscreen support has received more or less no work, and is, at the moment, non-functional.

I reckon it will take anything from a day to a couple of weeks to get it in a state where I can actually use it without beeing annoyed by it. Luckily, the basic framework has been there for as long as I can remember, but I doubt many of the developers realise what it’s for or how to use it properly.

Other developers (Robert comes to mind) have started looking at things like plane-replacements (The “wall” plugin), WRAP/UNWRAP and other things. We still haven’t put up a real roadmap for 0.3.x though, but hopefully we’ll get one soon.

On an other note, I’ll be at Linuxforum 2007 in Denmark in march, talking about Beryl, so if you’re in the area, grab a ticket and drop by. There are some interesting speakers on the program besides me too, so it promises to be an interesting weekend.

XDC

2007-02-03T22:40:39+00:00

Well, I’m gonna make it to the Xorg DevConf after all!

Anything anyone wants me to ask about, feel free to let me know here, and if you’re coming and want to say hi, that’s fine by me.

I’m really looking forward to it, to meeting more of the wonderful (and crazy) minds behind X and so many other things. I’m sure I’ll feel outclassed.

The XDC Wiki mentions SCALE afterwords, and I would love to attend that as well, but I could not possibly afford it on my own…however…if anyone reading this wants to sponsor me, I’d be glad to stop by. Hint hint.

As always, still searching for employment, but I hope XDC will give me some opportunity there too.

Also, just for fun, my lazy cat.

Oh yeah, one last thing before I sign off, yes there will be an rc2, not sure exactly when yet, but look for it in a day or two

Testing 1 2 3

2007-02-01T22:09:19+00:00

Etc. So yeah. Blogs. I’ve never been good at them , so don’t expect frequent updates.

What I’m mostly going to be exploring in this blog is the size, distribution and characteristics of Beryl’s userbase, as it’s a topic of some interest to me. Sandwiched inbetween that will be occasional notes on $stuff I do to beryl’s source. I don’t want the jpeg plugin to be the only thing with my name on it, after all

A little bit more about me… I’m 21/m, based in York, England, doing a degree in Biology. Computers, linux and the like are a hobby for me, and I’m essentially self-taught in all aspects of it. An OOP fanboi, I cut my teeth on Object Pascal (see Lazarus for an example of the powah of this language), moving on to C++ when everyone laughed at me for using Pascal . I’ve been learning C on and off as well, but I’m not as confident with it as I am with the wonders of Object Pascal. Still, I’m getting there.

For Beryl I mostly build and release the Ubuntu Edgy/Feisty (and, lately, Debian Etch) packages. I also have two mirrors, serving beryl goodness to the masses. I code whatever I can, and take a stab at bugfixing on an irregular basis - usually stuff in trunk/distro-specific-build-files, although I’ve made incursions elsewhere. I’m a member of the -plugins and -PR teams, so do work in those areas as well.

If you want to grab me at any time, I’m always on IRC (Freenode: #beryl and #beryl-dev) - ping me. Or just email.

Wait. Cut that last part ou….

Metisse on openSUSE

2007-02-01T16:47:04+00:00

After learning that Mandriva has shipped Metisse on one of their new release, I decided to give Metisse a try on my machine running openSUSE. It was easier to build and than I imagined.

Here is how it looks:

To install:

wget http://insitu.lri.fr/metisse/download/0.4.0-rc4/nucleo-0.6.tar.bz2
tar xjvf nucleo-0.6.tar.bz2
cd nucleo-0.6 &&  ./configure –prefix=/usr && make && make install

wget http://insitu.lri.fr/metisse/download/0.4.0-rc4/metisse-0.4.0-rc4.tar.bz2
tar xjvf metisse-0.4.0-rc4.tar.bz2
cd metisse-0.4.0-rc4 && ./configure –prefix=/usr –enable-glx-x86 && make && make install

Only thing other than build requires for beryl I had to install mDNSresponder-devel and libstroke.

To run:

init 3

Xmetisse -ac -geometry 1024×768 :1 >& /tmp/Xmetisse-log &

X :1&

DISPLAY=:1 xterm&

Control+Alt+F8

Now in xterm run:

metisse-start-fvwm -wd :1 >& /tmp/compositor-log &

That's it. Play with it take some screenshots and impress the guys who paid $$$ for that other OS.

Hopefully we would soon have some of the stuff that is possible in Metisse in Compiz and Beryl (Quinnstorm is already in dialogue with metisse devs)

Here is some help:

Its getting close to stable

2007-02-01T02:34:01+00:00

Well, 0.2.0-rc1 is out at least to maintainers, and this is wonderful news. So far things look quite good, the release was mostly without hassle, as usual there are always the bugs that pop up when you aren’t looking…but generally things look good.

Yes I’m still job-hunting, see my earlier post for info on that, hoping to get something soon, no solid leads just yet. Anyone who knows anything, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Generally though, life is good. Hoping to hear back soon from XDC about sponsorship. If you run a convention/summit and want me, just gimme a plane ticket a room and some food…and you got me.

With rc1 out the pressure is slightly off but its still going. It seems the ubuntu spec for composite by default has been deferred. I think this was the right decision. It also reduces pressure on us slightly, especially certain specific features, but in general things haven’t changed much, we’re still pressing forward at insane speed.

I also want to note, we’re taking a more proactive stance now toward reducing instability in our released code, with initiatives like beryl-plugins-unsupported.

Anyhow, off back to trying to get kexec+kdump to work.

gnome-effects-preferences

2007-01-30T18:59:06+00:00

This is a UI prototype for a gnome applet by Lazesharp.

Be shure to post some feedback over @ http://forum.beryl-project.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2834

New SUSE packages (r3419)

2007-01-30T18:09:21+00:00

New packages (r3419) should be up in the repositories
A whole lot of new improvement.

Update:

- New 3D animation effects

- beryl-settings-simple and beryl-settings-tool (commandline beryl control) is part of beryl-settings package

- lot of bugs squashed

- bit better emerald

- discover new things yourself

Sorry no changelog as there have been over 300 commits since last update. The beryl-devs don’t sleep ever.

First post, new animation features! :)

2007-01-30T16:38:55+00:00

Hi there everyone! This is my first post at the planet!

Have you seen the pretty features cornelius pushed out yesterday? Be sure to check them out! Also, they’re on svn /trunk now

YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEDtRV1fHoU

Digg it! - http://digg.com/linux_unix/Beryl_s_new_3D_animations

Beryl Desktop Manager

2007-01-30T13:30:46+00:00

iXce Quinn and I have been putting a lot of work in to the Beryl Desktop manager I mentioned in the last post and I thought I would provide a few previews. As far as we know BDM is the first desktop manager to natively support ARGB transparency. This means you can load a transparent PNG or SVG and get something like…

Yes the transparency works when not moving the cube I just moved it to get some perspective.

BDM also has some exciting work on desktop widgets, come back for more on that later!

This Week in Beryl — The return of lists!

2007-01-29T23:34:05+00:00

This Week in Summary:
Wooo, it’s been a FUN month. This is the first one of these summaries I’ve written in a while and it feels rather good. This week has been focused on getting rid of some of those pesky bugs in Beryl and ready for the upcoming 0.2.0 release. Bugs from all walks of beryl are being smashed left and right and the TODOLIST is getting smaller with each passing day. Every day svn grows more and more polished, this is getting to feel like its almost ready for the public.

This Week in Bugs:

System compatibility checks are much more complete
Fixed white shadows on some graphics cards
Fixed issue with thumbnails being generated for the wrong window types
Fixed text fade issues with group
Fixed build issues with beryl-xgl
Many many group management bugs/fixmes smashed in Group
Fixed shadow clipping issues in emerald
Fixed 0 resize bug
Stencil replacement patch from upstream
Fixed bug with resize and maximized windows (Reveman)
Fix bug with placement and dock type windows
Opacify now has a more intuitive time delay
“Copyright header, dead code, jesus saves, etc” (racarr)
Upstream love to dbus
Mipmapping disables properly now in group
Text texture in thumbnail fades properly
Text plugin on by default
Tile plugin is now offscreen window aware
Water plugin wont draw waves for offscreen windows anymore
jpeg finally builds nicely
input zoom clupping fixed in multicube mode

This Week in Features:

Ring plugin is now on beryl-plugins-extra
Window thumbnails are now painted transformed
Initial work with beryl-desktop-manager (Multiple wallpapers anyone? :p)
Added Fade Desktop plugin as a less troublesome replacement to Show Desktop
Some image-related love (new icons for beryl-settings, aka bsm)
Add option to stick sticky/dock windows to the screen instead of cube
Added a Magic lamp 3 ONLY enabled for close/create with a minimum waves
Group supports dragging tab bar slots over viewport borders

One Last Thing:
I hope you all are looking forward to the 0.2.0 release, we know we are! See you all next week.
–DBO (xplode_me’s note: DBO is *THE* blogger! Thank him if you *really* like to get your weekly dose of beryl! )
–xplode_me

Beryl desktop manager

2007-01-27T15:06:53+00:00

This morning I started on the Beryl Desktop Manager, a standalone program (not a plugin) that handles selection and drawing of desktop backgrounds. Heres the fun part, it supports different wallpapers on different viewports.

Here is a preview:

This Month in Beryl

2007-01-22T21:39:21+00:00

Server crack:
The first few days of 2007 were marked by an unfortunate incident. An attacker, member of the Compiz community, obtained access to the Beryl mySQL server through phpMyAdmin, using a password he found in an unprotected configuration file that had been available to public access during a few hours at the moment of the hard drive crash. Once access was gained the attacker dropped all of the databases, including Beryl blog, wiki, developers blogs, and some non Beryl related data. Thanks to a good backup policy, we managed to recover most of the lost data, including even the latest changes thanks to mySQL binary logs. Despite this the attack represented a time sink to the Beryl team and an unfortunate example of aggression at the Beryl project due to long seated hostilities. Based on IRC logs from freenode.net channels and access logs from the forums and web server the attack was quickly traced, and confessed after contact with Compiz community leaders and an announcement on our front page. Beryl has decided not to seek legal or financial recourse understanding that everyone makes poor decisions at times. The attacker sent an apology, including a
description of his motives.

On January 4th 2007 I gained access to phpmyadmin on the beryl servers from passwords I had found on the site previously. I deleted several databases related to the wiki, blog and some personal data.

I did this because of frustration I felt over the beryl project, I felt that some mis-information was spread about compiz particularity the reasons for the fork. The trigger was some of the jokes/comments I read on IRC.

I have let down both the compiz and beryl community and I apologize greatly for that and I will be stepping down as the compiz forum administrator. It is also important to note that my actions don’t reflect the beliefs of the compiz project and are certainly not condoned by them. I hope compiz and beryl can work better together in future.

As of now Beryl considers the issue largely closed. We would like to thank the compiz community (in particular imnotpc) for working with us to ensure the incident caused a minimum of a PR mess for both projects. The Beryl team hopes that this can serve as an example of the ends of the meaningless and petty FUD exchanged between the two communities; BOTH WAYS.

0.1.5 - 0.2.0-beta1 - 0.1.99.2 - What is all this? :
As many of you are now aware the 0.1.5 release as planned in the roadmap was supplanted by the 0.2.0-beta1 release. Due to the merging of several new plugins, such as Group with Tabs, and Thumbnail the Beryl team felt this release could be considered unstable compared to past releases and chose the 0.2.0-beta1 version to make this point. However this release (as many of you are also aware) was not error free, with issues ranging from version numbering, dependencies, and python versioning we felt it would be beneficial to push a 0.2.0-beta2 release as soon as possible
to fix some of the oversights. Part of this was the adoption of a new naming scheme (hence 0.1.99.2), .99.x is the xth beta, and .9999.x is the xth release candidate. This will be continued in further releases.

Reorganization:
Due to the afore enumerated issues with the 0.2.0-beta1 release Beryl has begun a process of reorganization to not only ensure the smoothness of future releases but also make general improvements to better improve the flexibility in event of unforseen issues.

New release policy:
Preliminarily we have established several new release protocols:

A team member from Plugins, Core, and Settings will sign off each module as technically ready for release, with no outstanding showstopper bugs, stability problems, or other pressing issues.

A majority of the release team will certify the tarballs build, run, ensure upgrading goes smoothly, and help the maintainers for various distributions to have correct dependencies.

For large releases branching will be done 2 days before release to prevent last minute issues from delaying the release. Further bug fixes and updates will be merged on a case by case basis.

Artwork will be ready 1 week before release.

If a release is delayed by more than a day it will be delayed by at LEAST 3 days to give a chance for developers not to miss the release.

Team changes:
During the process of reorganization the decision was made to reorganize and trim the Beryl teams in an attempt to increase effectiveness. Teams such as the blog team have been folded in, and a public relations team added. The Beryl council we be expanded from 3 to 5 members, and will
hopefully assume a more active role in the decision making process.

Bug tracker changes:
Bug tracker will now be followed by team leaders, assigning and triaging bugs on a daily basis. Please make sure to select the appropriate component and report type to ease their task, and check twice if the bug hasn’t already been reported, solved, or is not a fully driver/platform related problem.

New modules:

Upcoming for 0.1.999.1:

beryl-extra-plugins:
In the hope of encouraging development and distribution of new plugins while still maintaining a solid and usability focused core release the decision has been made to to create a beryl-extra-plugins module to host plugins too niche or new for inclusion in beryl-plugins.

beryl-extra-artwork:
Due to user demand for pleasurable snowflakes, cube caps, and skydomes we have decided to distribute a beryl-extra-artwork package.

Featured in 0.1.99.1

beryl-settings:
The former beryl-settings had become a real mess, requesting several clicks to access options due to the addition of plugins categories, options tabs and so on. Consequently, beryl-settings was rewritten from scratch, taking advantage of the new Python bindings to libberylsettings, and based on user mockups, mainly Franz Rogar ones. Bindings are now separated from the rest of the options. Screen Edge bindings have also gained their own usable section.

beryl-settings-simple:
Alongside the new beryl-settings, beryl-settings-simple is a very simple and straight forward tool to configure Beryl : a simple slider allows you to choose the effects level, from a very light mode to a heavy amount of enabled features. Hotcorners configuration, animations, cube caps, skydome and three toggle options, are all featured in an attempt to enable quick and easy configuration of common settings for the non power user.

General development news:

This will not be a TWIB as far too much has happened to enumerate small details as a TWIB, but hopefully it covers large development items in a very broad fashion. Many things will likely be missed.

Plugins:
Creation of thumbnail plugin: The thumbnail plugin displays thumbnails (who would have guessed?) of windows when their taskbar location is under the mouse. Compatible with multiple taskbars and visually appealing, thumbnail adds a useful and visually appealing usability enhancement to Beryl.

Rewrite of trailfocus plugin: A rewrite of the trailfocus plugin using the new window attributes system has resulted in a more stable, less resource intensive, and more compatible trailfocus plugin.

Group with tabs: Group with tabs is also new in this release featuring the ability to group windows such that they can be interacted with in unison. Furthermore the windows can be ‘tabbed’ and the current window changed by selecting a thumbnail. Thumbnails can be dragged and dropped from group with group, and tab switching features an appealing animation. Group with tabs is a large work by 3 developers and represents a significant
investment of effort.

Creation of text plugin: A plugin has been made in branches to explore the idea of ‘library’ plugins that act to provide utility to other plugins. In the future support will be added for this in core.

Creation of snap plugin : Already featured by wobbly plugin, edge resistance and attraction is now available outside wobbly, in a cleaner and more configurable fashion : edge attraction is optionnal, and snapping can be restricted to either windows or screens edges.

Core:
WRAP/UNWRAP replacement: In branches a WRAP/UNWRAP replacement featuring doubly linked lists of procs, removal of procs by plugin, the ability for a plugin to remove and reinsert itself from execution, and the ability for a plugin to see the ‘bigger picture’. Exists and works to a large degree. Finishing this and merging it for the 0.3.0 release is a priority as it enablesa wide variety of new possibilities for plugins.

New locking based attribute system: Window attributes (opacity, saturation, brightness) are now modified via a locking based system enabling better interaction with other window managers, greater effeciency of attribute modifying plugins, and in the future user configurable priorities for plugins ‘lock’ over an attribute has been implemented and plugins have been modified to use it.

While more a part of libberylsettings than core a GConf settings backend has been implemented and is largely functional. It is hoped that it will be finished within a few days and be usable for the 0.1.9999.1 release. Integration will be created with metacity keybindings enabling Beryl to seamlessly drop in to a GNOME desktop with a minimal number of issues for new users.

All of beryls settings functionality now exists entirely in core enabling more effective management of settings. Ranging from storing active plugins on a plugin by plugin basis to simplifying plugin dependencies this represents an architectural improvement for Beryl.

Authors: (thanks guys!)

iXce
Racarr

A little more offtopic

2007-01-21T05:35:00+00:00

Well, starting at the top, 0.1.99.2 (beta2 in the simple versioning scheme) has been released, and has gone far more smoothly. There are still some issues to iron out, but I think we’re getting close. Management of a project is never easy, especially during size changes (we’ve grown a lot in the past few months, and are on that uneasy line between small and large, well, mid-sized)

On a more offtopic, I’m just sitting here watching nonsense on youtube, specifically laughing at Mr. Bill O’Reilly, and I dunno, as this is my blog, I guess I feel like mentioning that I’m proud to be a secular progressive. Tradition is just another word for fear of change, and fear of thought.

Anyway, not much of a rant, but I guess I’m kinda curious what the community is like. I wouldn’t be surprised to find people from all over the political spectrum, really.

Life.

2007-01-17T02:40:42+00:00

Well, beryl 0.2.0-beta1 (formerly known as 0.1.5) is going to be out shortly. We know its going to be a bit buggy, but we hope by releasing a beta, we can get a cleaner rc out without sacrificing features, because with a beta we will get more than just in-house/some svn testing.

I’m still job-searching, for those who haven’t yet heard. Looking to relocate to…well almost anywhere in California, but preferably around San Francisco / the Bay Area. My resume is available at http://metascape.afraid.org:13666/~quinn/resume.html if you are interested.

Bugsquashing and paint attributes

2007-01-15T02:55:49+00:00

Ok, so we tried arranging a bug squashing weekend and we did get a noticeable ammount of bugs squashed, but the turnout wasn’t quite as good as we had hoped for. We fixed a few tickets, closed a few invalid ones, classified a few and got more assigned. We might do this again in the future though, but for more than just a few hours on a saturday.

It became more and more obvious that we would have to delay 0.1.5 a day or two, for a couple of reasons. One of them is trailfocus 2, which strictly speaking would be trailfocus 3. It’s a complete rewrite from scratch of trailfocus motivated by the excessive CPU usage of the trailfocus that lie in trunk at the moment. It did, however, revive a discussion I had with onestone at the time I wrote opacify about methods of changing paint attributes. Basicly, we both agree there needs to be a proper way of doing it, but we’ve yet to agree on what way we should do it. See http://lists.beryl-project.org for the discussion details. (dev-list)

The idea is to make it easier for plugins to deal with opacity-changes(or saturation/brightness) in a natural way. So far, there hasn’t been much of a standard, I went a bit against the wind with opacify to avoid having to calculate opacity on every paintWindow, which is how it is done on the old trailfocus-rewrite. We hope to also agree on a solution to make it easy and natural for state to override paint-changes (like exclude windows from opacify or trailfocus)

A few other reasons for the delay is snap and awaiting a unified decision on thumbnail2. Strictly speaking we’re beyond a new plugin freeze, but snap is a release criteria for 0.2.0 so that has been known all along, and there are compelling arguments for thumbnails2 too. Either way, 0.1.5 will be important, and the feedback we get from it will be vital for the quality of 0.2.0.

Bug smashing weekend

2007-01-13T01:13:39+00:00

Starts tomorrow, stop by #beryl-bugs on irc.freenode.net!

A Note for Quick & Speedy po file translations

2007-01-07T09:12:59+00:00

Translation tools are devised in such a way that not only they help you in speedy translation, but they help you in maintaining consistency across your work and with find & replace tool if you want to correct your common errors. They also provide machine assisted auto-translation features that help you translating strings as much as 30 to 40 % automatically depending upon your available translation database. Some tools are platform specific and some are available cross platform.

Here is the review of some of them available to you as a translator:

http://raviratlami1.blogspot.com/2006/07/tips-for-linux-localization.html

Bug smashing weekend

2007-01-06T22:18:18+00:00

With the 0.2.0 release quickly approaching and a large number of outstanding issues in Trac the Beryl team feels a ‘Bug Smashing weekend’ would be beneficial for everyone. This is an event open to everyone, not just established developers, or even those with coding skills (or nunchuck skills).

All of the tickets at http://bugs.beryl-project.org/report/1 need to be:

Assigned to a milestone

Closed if non issue, solved, or not related to Beryl.

More information gathered if the problem is currently not reproducible.

Accepted and assigned if it needs to be fixed and is reasonably fixable.

If you have been looking at getting involved in Beryl development, or just want to contribute to a project you enjoy using this would be a great way. If interested stop by #beryl-bugs on irc.freenode.net next Saturday January 13th and get smashing! Contributors will be credited on my blog, more specific instructions available on Saturday.