Cannot choose Beryl as the windows manager

[Dotan Cohen]

On 06/05/07, Phil Meyer <pmeyer at themeyerfarm.com> wrote:
> The radeon driver is from Xorg and does support AIGLX.
> The fglrx driver is from ATI and does NOT support AIGLX yet.
> The radeon driver does NOT support the X1NNN (X1400 in your and my case)
> video cards.

Ah, understood now. I'm sorry I'm so dense: this is a lot of
similar-sounding acronyms in English for one day! So with an X1400
card one cannot run Beryl nor GoogleEarth in Linux at this time.

> > B) There are different graphics environments, call X servers: Xorg,
> > XGL and X11. Fedora uses Xorg 7.2, but the FGLRX drivers are only good
> > for <= 7.1. Also, despite the fact that it's really Xorg and not X11,
> > Fedora puts the files in a directory /etc/X11/. Now, I may have to
> > switch to XGL to use 3D, because only XGL uses OpenGL.
> The fglrx drivers work fine with 3D environments and 3D games on
> Fedora.  The problem is that ATI does not support the composite
> extension in their fglrx drivers.  The Beryl and Compiz window managers
> require the Composite extension (AIGLX), OR they require the Novell
> solution: the XGL server.
>
> In both AIGLX and XGL we are talking about the X windows server, not the
> 3D OpenGl libraries and drivers.

Thank you for being so clear. Redundant information is good for me at
this point. Apperently, if I can get the XGL server running, then I
can run Beryl? I'll get to google...

> >
> > C) OpenGL is the only graphics library that can do 3D on Linux. The
> > other 3D graphics library, Direct 3D, runs only on windows.
> >
> > So this is how I understand it. To use Beryl, Google Earth, or other
> > 3D programs, one must use OpenGL, XGL, and the FGLRX driver.
> The ati fglrx drivers will run all #D applications on Fedora (or any
> Linux) EXCEPT beryl and compiz, because they lack support for the X
> windoes composite extension (AIGLX).
> Xorg wrote AIGLX.
> Novell wrote XGL.
> XGL from Novell features a similar mechanism for overlays and
> transparencies as does AIGLX, but XGL does not require video driver
> support other than OpenGL.  That is why fglrx will work with XGL and not
> AIGLX, currently.

Thank you. This is getting clearer. How do you keep up with all the
letters?!? :)

> The only option you have, today, to use Beryl or Compiz today with an
> ATI X1NNN series video card is to install the ATI fglrx drivers and the
> Novell XGL X windows server.  I have done this on a couple laptops with
> good success, but it is a pain, and less stable than the commercial
> nvidia driver with AIGLX, or so it was for me.

I'll be googling that in just a few seconds.

> Us ATI X1NNN owners watch every month to see if ATI will finally support
> the Composite extension.

I'm going to write to them now. I don't like to watch, I like to pressure...

Dotan Cohen

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