Cannot choose Beryl as the windows manager

[Phil Meyer]

Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On 06/05/07, Hikaru Amano <kagesenshi.87 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The closed source ATI driver (fglrx) doesnt support AIGLX
>>
>> you will need XGL for that .. u can get XGL packages by damaestro from
>> here -> http://files.damaestro.us/xgl/ ... its still waiting to be
>> included into the official repository though ..
>>
>> and to make life, easier , yum also for this -> livna-config-display
>> ... run the program to configure gdm to add XGL as options ...
>>
>
> Thanks, Hikaru. I'm spending a lot of time with google here trying to
> figure out who's fighting who. Could you please correct my
> misunderstandings? I'm learning, but it's tough going. This is how I
> understand the situation:
>
> A) In order to run Beryl and other 3D programs I must enable 3D on my
> Radeon X1400 graphics card. That means that I must choose a driver
> which can enable it. The possible drivers are:
> 1) Vesa. This is the standard Fedora driver, and has no 3D.
> 2) Mesa. Not sure if it has 3D or where it comes from.
> 3) Radeon. Also called FGLRX. This is from ATI, has 3D and the best
> performance of any of the drivers. Because it is closed source it
> contaminates the kernel.
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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.

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.

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

Good luck!