Widescreen Woes are over, Bring on the AIGLX

I wish I could say I solved my widescreen issue. After having several issues with packages I needed at work, I ditched Ubuntu and switched to Fedora Core 6. Deciding I was best served having the same distribution at home that I have at work, I decided to install it there as well. To my complete surprise, it installed without incident and booted to a beautiful 1440×900 widescreen desktop on it’s own.

Now let me clarify that my friend and I spent over three hours last Saturday fighting this same machine to display this resolution in Ubuntu and Kubuntu. We created custom modelines, we hacked and diced the xorg.conf file every way from Sunday, and the best we could do was a somewhat distorted 1440×900 that refused to line up correctly on the monitor, and some fuzzy lines that made it look like it was swimming.

The painless install was a breath of fresh air. Updating Firefox to 2.0 wasn’t exactly intuitive, but after a quick trip to Google, I had directions and had installed it. I was looking through the features of Fedora 6 on the site and realized that it had the capability to use AIGLX, the Open GL based 3D desktop variant for X. I tried to enable it but unfortunately it failed. After a little more research, I found that you had to upgrade the nVidia drivers for Fedora for it to work and a quick tutorial had me add a new repository and it was updated without a hitch.

I restarted Gnome and I have to tell you, wow. The desktop effects were pretty cool. The virtual desktops rotated in 3D glory, the windows wobbled when you moved them, true transparency was abound, but it still wasn’t quite what I wanted.

Enter Beryl
If you have not seen this already, and you run Linux, it’s about time you take a peek at it. Compiz, the default 3D engine for Fedora, can be replaced by a more capable one called Beryl. A decent video card and the latest drivers are obviously prerequisites, but the powers of Beryl’s engine and the Beryl-Manager/Emerald Effects combination is truly beautiful. Dawn, a true Microsoft die hard was sitting there giggling along with me at the beauty of Linux under this configuration. After tweaking awhile, I had windows erupt into flames, I had the most graceful task switcher ever conceived, I had a truly elegant theme, and most of all, I had a Linux box I actually wanted to use. Forgotten was all of the install headaches and pains I had been through with previous distributions.

No Powerhouse Needed
Now you are probably asking me, ”But what kind of machine is it taking to do all of these incredible things?” Oddly enough, it’s a hand me down. I was wanting to play with Linux at home, and Dawn’s dad gave me a 1.7Ghz Athlon XP with 768mb Ram in it. I added in a 128MB Pci Geforce FX5200 card that I happened to have laying around, and that was it. It’s snappy, it’s beautiful and it’s even, gasp, fun!

A last word
I wish I could give you screenshots of this thing in action. Some of the effects are amazing and the amount of configurability is mind boggling. I am not always the easiest to impress and I was sitting at home last night with a plastered grin on my face saying “Oh My” and “I am amazed” over and over.

Can a Windows guy love Linux this much?

I wish I could give you screenshots of Beryl but they truly would not do it justice, all I can recommend is to take yourself to YouTube or Google Video and search for some videos, you really need to see it in action.

Link to RenderingProject/aiglx – Fedora Project Wiki

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