Messy Beryl? Screen artifacts on other sides of cube?

Anybody? Help please? Does anybody recognize the symptoms I'm describing and what might be causing them?

My only thought is that you are taxing your GPU. What are the specs of the system?

Dell Optiplex GX260 1.8 GHz Pentium 4, Intel 82845G/GL graphics with built-in 64 MB Video RAM, 2 GB system RAM, 40 GB HD.

The computer at home is the same model but the processor is 2.53 GHz with 1GB system RAM and 100GB HD.

I'm having the same issue with screen artifacts happening on both systems but only ever occurring on the non-primary workspaces on the cube.

I have a theory (well, more of a guess really). This is an interesting question and I'd like to know the answer too. Anyway, one thought is that the "other" desktops are not "real" desktops. They are virtual and as such require more juice to run. When you start moving things around that also causes a spike in the CPU and probably the GPU too (not too sure how these things actually run).

Try a little experiment and see what happens. Open up a terminal (nothing else, just the terminal) and run the "top" command. Watch for a few seconds and note how much CPU is being used by beryl and maybe xorg too. Then grab the terminal window and start moving it in a steady circle or something and note what happens to the CPU usage for beryl and xorg. Then repeat the experiment on one of the other desktops. If you see a big difference in the CPU usage then I'd say the problem is lack of resources maybe combined with the way beryl implements things. I've heard comments that beryl kind of "cheats" to get some of the effects. I'm not entirely sure what that means but some people felt it wasn't real good coding. That might have contributed to why beryl forked from compiz as the compiz developers wanted to stick with better coding rather than solve problems with tricks. Don't quote me on that. It's just the impression I got from reading interviews and such. However, beryl and compiz have rejoined now and if you can't solve this problem you might consider switching to compiz which is now called compiz-fusion. It's not any harder than beryl to install and might be more stable with fewer problems. The other option would be to turn off some of the effects in beryl. The blur effect for example seems to be more resource intensive so if you have that on try turning it off. Turn off other effects too and see what happens.

If you want to try compiz-fusion there is a decent how to here -> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=481615

Hope that helped some. Let me know what happens with the experiment. I have compiz-fusion and a dedicated graphics card (the 7600gs I mentioned in another thread) and a fairly decent dual core CPU so it was hard to tell if there was a difference but it did seem like the CPU usage was a bit lower on the primary desktop. Your results might help confirm or disprove my hypothesis.

I'm going to second Jim's response to this... And depending on what version of Beryl you are running, there is a good chance that it's just buggy (There are so many repos with Beryl out there saying they're legitimate that you're bound to find a bad build half of the time).

You should definitely give compiz-fusion a try. Also, you should try looking for support in #ubuntu-effects (especially from a guy named crdlb , he knows EVERYTHING when it comes to beryl and desktop effects).

Thanks guys, I'll give it a try when I get home!

I tried compiz here on my computer at work. It was a difficult thing to set up, for a while I couldn't get into my account.

But I got into Root, removed Beryl and Compiz, then reinstalled Compiz.

Now I can use my account. I put in "Sessions" the entry for Compiz, on the command line I just entered "compiz" so it starts up when I log-in. I hope that's correct, can anybody please tell me?

But how do I make it remember settings? It doesn't remember which ones I click to select.

And how do I make the cube desktop work, it doesn't work anymore!

For compiz the command to start is

compiz --replace

Because it replaces metacity. You can use emerald too but give metacity a try. It looks pretty nice if you pick a nice theme.

Not to brag, but here are a few screenshots of my desktop with compiz using metacity

http://nococomp.com/misc/08072007.png

http://nococomp.com/misc/25072007.png

http://nococomp.com/misc/julywcube.png

Well I went through the steps outlined in:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=481615

and I have it installed. But I'm very disappointed, I'm not seeing any effects at all, even though I have the control panel configured as such.

I tried it at home and at work and both the same. The screenshots above are beautiful but I just don't see how I'm ever going to make this compiz do anything when it won't function.

Oh boy, compiz crashed my machine!

I was puzzling over it. I launched gnome-terminal and at the command prompt I typed compiz

I saw the message saying that another window manager (Metacity) was already running and I should type "compiz --replace" instead.

So I did. And the whole machine froze up. Compiz can't be very useful if it does that. The only way out was by hitting the power button, none of the keyboard salutes (CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE or CTRL-ALT-DEL) would work.

I tried to restart normally but it couldn't run the GUI. So I had to restart in recovery mode, login as Root where I could "startx".

From there I was able to yank compiz out by it's roots. I reinstalled Beryl instead, it doesn't hang my machine.

Although compiz and beryl are both still alpha level software (might be beta now, not sure), that is not normal. I can't speak for all hardware, but it seems most people have had very good luck with compiz. It was the more stable of the two. Did you completely remove beryl before installing compiz? I don't know to what extent the two could conflict but that could be a reason. Also, I wouldn't set either to auto start until you are sure they work okay. You might scan through that thread too to see if anyone had a similar experience and solution.

It's possible that neither compiz nor beryl will work well for you. I assume you have 3d acceleration on your graphics chip but it may not be robust enough to run these effects well. Compiz has a comparable set of effects to beryl and some new ones beryl didn't have. I also don't know if now that they have rejoined if beryl will continue to be developed or not. It might be worth finding out how to get compiz working if beryl won't be around much longer (or at least not being developed). Another, albeit less fun option, would be start from a clean install to ensure beryl and compiz are not conflicting.

As far as I knew, I did completely remove Beryl. Then I restarted and then I installed compiz and restarted again. compiz never started automatically even when I set it up in "sessions" to compiz --replace. It was only when i did this on the command line that something tried to happen. :( Big nasty!

Beryl seems to work ok for me, not perfect but ok. compiz was a huge disappointment. I think I'll stick with Beryl.

I noticed that (on the Beryl website) there is a newer version available. But I have no idea how to install it.

Do you need any more help with this? I don't think you got the answer you were looking for or even a good answer, but I'm not sure what else to offer at this point. If you can think of anything, let us know. Otherwise, can we consider the question closed?

I think I'll be fine with it the way it is. Compiz didn't help me so I'll stick with Beryl. In the future if I can update my graphics, it may prove to be helpful but for now consider it closed.