Eyecandy

In my first few posts I gave some quick tips of setup and install of Slackware, if your system is mostly stock it used to be very painful to get Beryl working. This is not so anymore. Beryl Slackware packages are readily available. I will assume you've made it to Slackware-current, or already have Xorg 7.1+ on your system. From the link above, download beryl-plugins-unsupported, beryl-settings-simple, beryl-settings-bindings, beryl-plugins, emerald, emerald-themes, beryl-settings, beryl-manager, beryl, pycairo, pygobject, and pygtk. I would also pick up hal and the kdebase package listed there but that's unrelated to eye candy, more of a function candy.

Okay, so with your packages downloaded, installation consists of entering the folder where you saved these packages and

upgradepkg --install-new *tgz

Voila! Software installed. Configuring is a little more difficult, it requires some modification of the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. The /etc/X11/xorg.conf file is made up of several Sections, the first of which is the modules section. My modules section looks like this

Section "Module"
SubSection "extmod"
Option "omit xfree86-dga"
EndSubSection
Load "type1"
Load "freetype"
Load "xtt"
Load "dbe"
Load "glx"
Load "dri"
EndSection

The only lines to worry about are the last 3, ensure that you are loading the dbe, glx and dri modules. Also, we need to be concerned about the device itself, so locate the Section about your graphics device. This will need some specific values for your card. In my case, with an Intel graphics card, the following modifications are requried

Section "Device"
Identifier "intel"
Driver "i810"
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "True"
#VideoRam 65536
EndSection

Also, the ServerLayout and DRI sections need to be configured, and we need to add at least one Extension to the server. Again, from my configuration:

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Simple Layout"
Screen "Screen 1"
InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"
Option "AIGLX" "True"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

Restart your X server, and you should have the compositing window manager in place. Run beryl-manager --no-force-window-manager and prepare to spend some time reading the awesome Beryl wiki.