Cannot choose Beryl as the windows manager

[Dotan Cohen]

On 06/05/07, Hikaru Amano <kagesenshi.87 at gmail.com> wrote:
> The closed source ATI driver (fglrx) doesnt support AIGLX
>
> you will need XGL for that .. u can get XGL packages by damaestro from
> here -> http://files.damaestro.us/xgl/ ... its still waiting to be
> included into the official repository though ..
>
> and to make life, easier , yum also for this -> livna-config-display
> ... run the program to configure gdm to add XGL as options ...
>

Thanks, Hikaru. I'm spending a lot of time with google here trying to
figure out who's fighting who. Could you please correct my
misunderstandings? I'm learning, but it's tough going. This is how I
understand the situation:

A) In order to run Beryl and other 3D programs I must enable 3D on my
Radeon X1400 graphics card. That means that I must choose a driver
which can enable it. The possible drivers are:
1) Vesa. This is the standard Fedora driver, and has no 3D.
2) Mesa. Not sure if it has 3D or where it comes from.
3) Radeon. Also called FGLRX. This is from ATI, has 3D and the best
performance of any of the drivers. Because it is closed source it
contaminates the kernel.

B) There are different graphics environments, call X servers: Xorg,
XGL and X11. Fedora uses Xorg 7.2, but the FGLRX drivers are only good
for <= 7.1. Also, despite the fact that it's really Xorg and not X11,
Fedora puts the files in a directory /etc/X11/. Now, I may have to
switch to XGL to use 3D, because only XGL uses OpenGL.

C) OpenGL is the only graphics library that can do 3D on Linux. The
other 3D graphics library, Direct 3D, runs only on windows.

So this is how I understand it. To use Beryl, Google Earth, or other
3D programs, one must use OpenGL, XGL, and the FGLRX driver.

Dotan Cohen

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