I installed Beryl/XGL on Ubuntu Dapper over the weekend using these instructions. I then selected the Wombat theme and customised it to look like the image above. As you can see, you are able to create some really cool glassy effects with your window manager. If you are interested in the Sunrise theme, then feel free to download it from here, and import it into your Emerald Theme manager. You can download the background image from here.
Beryl provides some eye candy for the linux desktop. If you are a Mac user, then you’ll feel right at home… well almost. You can minimise windows with the genie effect or select a running application a la Exposé. Switching desktops is similar to switching user accounts on the Mac, which is done through a rotating cube effect.
Something different is the wobbly effect that seems to turn your windows to jelly when you move them around the screen. This was cool for like 2 minutes, until I started feeling nauseous, so I disabled it.
For a 0.1 release, Beryl is quite impressive. However, it seems to crash a lot. In fact it crashed twice whilst I was trying to write this blog entry.
