Beryl and Compiz (at least the plugins part of compiz) are now merging, in the hope of a better future. No name has been decided yet but there’s a vote going on. The forums are currently at http://www.opencompositing.org and everyone currently using Beryl should check it in the next days or weeks to find information about the new merged project (setup instructions, etc) when they are available.
Thanks!
Hello there folks. Today, we have released beryl 0.2.1. There’s nothing NEW in the release. However all of the licenses have been fixed so that it can go into debian and ubuntu.
Onto more important matters though. Instead of using svn, beryl is now managed by git. The following is the new repo information
To get what used to be trunk, use this script here: http://beryl-project.org/git-checkout.py.gz (be sure to gunzip it)
So for those of you who maintain svn builds, please update them to git.
Thank you.
- The beryl team
We know the forums are down, and apologize for the inconvenience. Server maintenance is taking longer than expected. We are moving them to a better server by tomorrow, to hopefully avoid repeat occurances of this. There is a possibility of losing up to one day’s posts, but this is hopefully unlikely. Sorry again for the inconvenience.
Beryl 0.2.0 is a complete overhaul of Beryl. The last stable release 0.1, featured a very fun, and eye-candy based compositing window manager. However, since it’s release, many parts of beryl have been rewritten, replaced, or simply dropped. The Beryl team has put in numerous hours to bring you this release. It’s filled with fun, eye-candy, better user support, new features, and most of all, stability. While Beryl has had numerous developer releases, known by their 0.1.X versions, 0.2.0 has been throughly tested by many more users.
As Beryl has become more well known, our userbase has expanded exponentially. Because of this, we’ve had more bug reports than ever. So thank you to all of you who have helped us on this path. And thank you to all of those who have made Beryl possible.
During the last year, Beryl has gone through a number of incidents. Users have argued about Beryl and Compiz for a long time now. With this release, Beryl has taken a giant step apart from Compiz. While some things are similar, which is inevitable in a fork, many things are not. We at Beryl believe that starting with the 0.3 development phase, many more things will be come clearer in regards to Beryl. We are setting our focus on organization, improving user relations, making the software more bug free, and overall more fun for you!
So without further ado, I give you Beryl 0.2.0!
* New Plugins
- Thumbnail: Thumbnails on the taskbar (window list) which show a mini view of the actual window
- Snap: Allows windows to “snap” to each other, or provide edge resistance
- Opacify: Makes windows behind the active window transparent
- Group: Allows windows to be group, to easily switch between a set of windows
* New system requirements check
- The improved check has much better accuracy
- The check is a lot faster
* New Window Decorators
- Since 0.1, we have two new window decorators
- Heliodor: Uses metacity themes
- Aquamarine: Uses Kwin themes.
* Newly Rewritten Beryl-Settings
- Written in Python
- More user-friendly UI
- Better profile support
* New Translations
- Thanks to all of our foreign speaking users, we’ve had a much better time getting translations
in, and completed. So thank you!
All this and much, much more! So please enjoy,
- The Beryl Team
Beryl 0.2.0 RC2 is now tagged and released, check your repos for updates in the next day or so. This release includes minor bugfixes to issues with cube, emerald, window snapoffs have been re-added back in and are now working. Several other smaller bugs have been fixed along the way dealing with animations and window management features. Check for your favorite bug and get feedback to trac as soon as possible!
–The Beryl Team
Hey guys, changing the format of TWiB up this week a bit. I get bored enumerating bug fixes and new features, so instead I have a video to show. This is the new wall plugin that racarr has been working on, it is really quite fantastic. It allows users to do a traditional plane style viewport layout, but also to zoom back out and re-organize their windows in a birds eye view. You can also switch desktops in this manner by right clicking on the appropriate viewport. In the near future animations are going to be added to switching viewports without using expo mode. Without further delay, the video:
Thanks Racarr!!!
[Update]
There have been lots of comments about “I want this or that” or “this feature is kinda hard to work with”. Keep in mind this plugin isn’t done yet, so some things are still in broken/proof of concept form. When the plugin is in a release you can expect that to more or less be its final form. Until then, it’s still fluid.
This Week in Summary:
Wooo, it’s been a FUN month. This is the first one of these summaries I’ve written in a while and it feels rather good. This week has been focused on getting rid of some of those pesky bugs in Beryl and ready for the upcoming 0.2.0 release. Bugs from all walks of beryl are being smashed left and right and the TODOLIST is getting smaller with each passing day. Every day svn grows more and more polished, this is getting to feel like its almost ready for the public.
This Week in Bugs:
This Week in Features:
One Last Thing:
I hope you all are looking forward to the 0.2.0 release, we know we are! See you all next week.
–DBO (xplode_me’s note: DBO is *THE* blogger! 
Thank him if you *really* like to get your weekly dose of beryl! ;))
–xplode_me
Server crack:
The first few days of 2007 were marked by an unfortunate incident. An attacker, member of the Compiz community, obtained access to the Beryl mySQL server through phpMyAdmin, using a password he found in an unprotected configuration file that had been available to public access during a few hours at the moment of the hard drive crash. Once access was gained the attacker dropped all of the databases, including Beryl blog, wiki, developers blogs, and some non Beryl related data. Thanks to a good backup policy, we managed to recover most of the lost data, including even the latest changes thanks to mySQL binary logs. Despite this the attack represented a time sink to the Beryl team and an unfortunate example of aggression at the Beryl project due to long seated hostilities. Based on IRC logs from freenode.net channels and access logs from the forums and web server the attack was quickly traced, and confessed after contact with Compiz community leaders and an announcement on our front page. Beryl has decided not to seek legal or financial recourse understanding that everyone makes poor decisions at times. The attacker sent an apology, including a
description of his motives.
On January 4th 2007 I gained access to phpmyadmin on the beryl servers from passwords I had found on the site previously. I deleted several databases related to the wiki, blog and some personal data.
I did this because of frustration I felt over the beryl project, I felt that some mis-information was spread about compiz particularity the reasons for the fork. The trigger was some of the jokes/comments I read on IRC.
I have let down both the compiz and beryl community and I apologize greatly for that and I will be stepping down as the compiz forum administrator. It is also important to note that my actions don’t reflect the beliefs of the compiz project and are certainly not condoned by them. I hope compiz and beryl can work better together in future.
As of now Beryl considers the issue largely closed. We would like to thank the compiz community (in particular imnotpc) for working with us to ensure the incident caused a minimum of a PR mess for both projects. The Beryl team hopes that this can serve as an example of the ends of the meaningless and petty FUD exchanged between the two communities; BOTH WAYS.
0.1.5 - 0.2.0-beta1 - 0.1.99.2 - What is all this? :
As many of you are now aware the 0.1.5 release as planned in the roadmap was supplanted by the 0.2.0-beta1 release. Due to the merging of several new plugins, such as Group with Tabs, and Thumbnail the Beryl team felt this release could be considered unstable compared to past releases and chose the 0.2.0-beta1 version to make this point. However this release (as many of you are also aware) was not error free, with issues ranging from version numbering, dependencies, and python versioning we felt it would be beneficial to push a 0.2.0-beta2 release as soon as possible
to fix some of the oversights. Part of this was the adoption of a new naming scheme (hence 0.1.99.2), .99.x is the xth beta, and .9999.x is the xth release candidate. This will be continued in further releases.
Reorganization:
Due to the afore enumerated issues with the 0.2.0-beta1 release Beryl has begun a process of reorganization to not only ensure the smoothness of future releases but also make general improvements to better improve the flexibility in event of unforseen issues.
New release policy:
Preliminarily we have established several new release protocols:A team member from Plugins, Core, and Settings will sign off each module as technically ready for release, with no outstanding showstopper bugs, stability problems, or other pressing issues.
A majority of the release team will certify the tarballs build, run, ensure upgrading goes smoothly, and help the maintainers for various distributions to have correct dependencies.
For large releases branching will be done 2 days before release to prevent last minute issues from delaying the release. Further bug fixes and updates will be merged on a case by case basis.
Artwork will be ready 1 week before release.
If a release is delayed by more than a day it will be delayed by at LEAST 3 days to give a chance for developers not to miss the release.
Team changes:
During the process of reorganization the decision was made to reorganize and trim the Beryl teams in an attempt to increase effectiveness. Teams such as the blog team have been folded in, and a public relations team added. The Beryl council we be expanded from 3 to 5 members, and will
hopefully assume a more active role in the decision making process.Bug tracker changes:
Bug tracker will now be followed by team leaders, assigning and triaging bugs on a daily basis. Please make sure to select the appropriate component and report type to ease their task, and check twice if the bug hasn’t already been reported, solved, or is not a fully driver/platform related problem.
New modules:
Upcoming for 0.1.999.1:
beryl-extra-plugins:
In the hope of encouraging development and distribution of new plugins while still maintaining a solid and usability focused core release the decision has been made to to create a beryl-extra-plugins module to host plugins too niche or new for inclusion in beryl-plugins.
beryl-extra-artwork:
Due to user demand for pleasurable snowflakes, cube caps, and skydomes we have decided to distribute a beryl-extra-artwork package.Featured in 0.1.99.1
beryl-settings:
The former beryl-settings had become a real mess, requesting several clicks to access options due to the addition of plugins categories, options tabs and so on. Consequently, beryl-settings was rewritten from scratch, taking advantage of the new Python bindings to libberylsettings, and based on user mockups, mainly Franz Rogar ones. Bindings are now separated from the rest of the options. Screen Edge bindings have also gained their own usable section.
beryl-settings-simple:
Alongside the new beryl-settings, beryl-settings-simple is a very simple and straight forward tool to configure Beryl : a simple slider allows you to choose the effects level, from a very light mode to a heavy amount of enabled features. Hotcorners configuration, animations, cube caps, skydome and three toggle options, are all featured in an attempt to enable quick and easy configuration of common settings for the non power user.
General development news:
This will not be a TWIB as far too much has happened to enumerate small details as a TWIB, but hopefully it covers large development items in a very broad fashion. Many things will likely be missed.
Plugins:
Creation of thumbnail plugin: The thumbnail plugin displays thumbnails (who would have guessed?) of windows when their taskbar location is under the mouse. Compatible with multiple taskbars and visually appealing, thumbnail adds a useful and visually appealing usability enhancement to Beryl.Rewrite of trailfocus plugin: A rewrite of the trailfocus plugin using the new window attributes system has resulted in a more stable, less resource intensive, and more compatible trailfocus plugin.
Group with tabs: Group with tabs is also new in this release featuring the ability to group windows such that they can be interacted with in unison. Furthermore the windows can be ‘tabbed’ and the current window changed by selecting a thumbnail. Thumbnails can be dragged and dropped from group with group, and tab switching features an appealing animation. Group with tabs is a large work by 3 developers and represents a significant
investment of effort.Creation of text plugin: A plugin has been made in branches to explore the idea of ‘library’ plugins that act to provide utility to other plugins. In the future support will be added for this in core.
Creation of snap plugin : Already featured by wobbly plugin, edge resistance and attraction is now available outside wobbly, in a cleaner and more configurable fashion : edge attraction is optionnal, and snapping can be restricted to either windows or screens edges.
Core:
WRAP/UNWRAP replacement: In branches a WRAP/UNWRAP replacement featuring doubly linked lists of procs, removal of procs by plugin, the ability for a plugin to remove and reinsert itself from execution, and the ability for a plugin to see the ‘bigger picture’. Exists and works to a large degree. Finishing this and merging it for the 0.3.0 release is a priority as it enablesa wide variety of new possibilities for plugins.New locking based attribute system: Window attributes (opacity, saturation, brightness) are now modified via a locking based system enabling better interaction with other window managers, greater effeciency of attribute modifying plugins, and in the future user configurable priorities for plugins ‘lock’ over an attribute has been implemented and plugins have been modified to use it.
While more a part of libberylsettings than core a GConf settings backend has been implemented and is largely functional. It is hoped that it will be finished within a few days and be usable for the 0.1.9999.1 release. Integration will be created with metacity keybindings enabling Beryl to seamlessly drop in to a GNOME desktop with a minimal number of issues for new users.
All of beryls settings functionality now exists entirely in core enabling more effective management of settings. Ranging from storing active plugins on a plugin by plugin basis to simplifying plugin dependencies this represents an architectural improvement for Beryl.
Authors: (thanks guys!)
Check this video out to se our beloved beryl controlled by a wiimote 
This Week in Summary:
Well I seem to have failed, I just can’t seem to find the time to get these out on time. No matter, it is going to be a good week anyhow. We saw the release of 0.1.4 this week which has been well received by the community and have begun moving toward our next release of 0.1.5, which will be followed up by the infamous 0.2.0. Lots is in store for the community, work has been going into a large number of branches to bring much needed updates into Beryl without destroying our current working trunk for 0.1.5. New user intefaces, new compatibility measures, new usability features, and new accessibility features are all in the works. In the end it should all shape up to really polish the Beryl package in some of its rougher areas.
This Week in Bug Fixes:
This Week in Features:
One Last Thing:
0.1.4 marked the beginning of the end for the 0.2.0 Beryl release line. 0.2.0 was the original goal set out by the project and the first major endpoint after which the direction and goals of the project would be re-evaluated heavily and new goals laid out. 0.1.4 marks the first major plugin freeze, which will be followed by 0.1.5 marking the first feature freeze. The only exception may be the possible inclusion of the jpeg plugin which would need to pass heavy testing to be merged in after the freeze. This is a point where we need the support of the community, both in spirit and on the forums. Your suggestions and wishlists do not go unheard even if they often do go unanswered; please continue to post them, make it clear what it is that YOU want. Be radical, try to imagine what really can be achieved, but also keep in mind that we are still working within the constraints of todays hardware. Give us your suggestions so we can properly lay out the future of the project, this is your time as our community to decide where we go. We will write a new roadmap, based on your ideas, and execute it, based on your feedback.
The new year will be upon us shortly, and it is tradition to make a new years resolution. So I resolve to be more involved with our community, to better hear their wishes and complaints, and to better ensure those are responded to in a more timely manner. And to start that off, I would like to hear your new years resolutions, whatever they may be. Happy New Year, from everyone here at the project.
Authors:
DBO
P.S. - A Note From the Web Team:
Beryl Planet is now open to the world. Feel free to leave your thoughts and feedback on the blogs. All of your favorite developers have been granted access to their own blog and with any luck will be leaving both their personal and professional thoughts for the world to see. We hope this will provide a new window into the Beryl development process.