Compiz 0.8.2 fully released!!

Packages for openSUSE 11.1 users running KDE4 Factory and GNOME 2.26 are available from here.

Bugs/enhancement requests as always goes here.

Have a lot of fun, Shane would have wanted that!

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.

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:

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.