Beryl in Gentoo

This article is a status report on the usability of Beryl in Gentoo and KDE.

Issues

• When using Firefox there is on certain pages an annoying redraw problem which makes use of Beryl impossible. This happens for example on Grails home page. The bug is already entered in Beryl's bugzilla.

• Starting Beryl Manager under KDE seems not very stable. However the startup scripts below take care of the problem.

• On my box, Beryl degrades performance because it uses gobs of RAM: about 450 MB. So you need 2GB of RAM to work comfortably with Beryl enabled.

Beryl Manager and KDE

Do the following to get Beryl Manager properly started at KDE startup and minimized in the system tray.

• Edit /etc/env.d/99berylwm:

KDEWM=/usr/local/bin/beryl-start
WINDOW_MANAGER=/usr/local/bin/beryl-start

• In /usr/local/bin/ create the script beryl-start:

#!/bin/bash

if which emerald > /dev/null
then
    emerald --replace > ~/.emerald.log 2>&1 &
    disown %1
else
    yawd --replace > ~/.yawd.log 2>&1 &
    disown %1
fi

beryl > ~/.beryl.log 2>&1 &
disown %1

• In ~/.kde/Autostart, create a symlink to the beryl-manager program:

cd ~/.kde/Autostart
ln -s /usr/bin/beryl-manager