beryl + ubuntu edgy on dell latitude d600

Tuesday Dec 19, 2006

I spent 5 hours trying to make beryl works on Dell Latitude D600 laptop's ATI mobility radeon series 9000. As you may imagine problem was not installing and setting up beryl but how to make Ati Radeon Mobility 9000 series to work properly with either open source radon driver using AIGLX or ATI proprietary driver fglrx using Xgl. Open source driver is more stable than ATI driver is, which means that you will be experiencing much less lockings and that behavior of applications that are using video output (e.g. mplayer) is will be more expected. However stability's trade off is speed, since fglrx driver is much faster than radeon. In this guide I will cover both radeon and fglrx installation and setup.

All credit for this goes to bunch of nicknames on ubuntu forums, especially to misha680, who actually fixed Xgl server so it's not crushing anymore on ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 series.

I decided to write this howto, because I was unable to find installation and setup guide on one place on the Net. So let's begin the begin:

open terminal and assume root privileges:

sudo su -

change to tmp dir as we are going to download some packages manually:

cd /var/tmp

add beryl and emerald ubuntu repository to sources.list and update packages list:

echo "deb http://ubuntu.beryl-project.org/ edgy main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv 3FF0DB166A7476EA
gpg --export --armor 3FF0DB166A7476EA | apt-key add -
apt-get update

install beryl and emerald themes:

apt-get install beryl emerald-themes

from this point you can choose whether to proceed with flgrx/Xgl or radeon/AIGLX. Let's first see how it works with flgrx/Xgl (for radeon/AIGLX scroll down):

install fglrx driver:

apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx

instead of installing xgl server from the ubuntu repository use misha680's patched xserver-xgl:

wget http://misha680.googlepages.com/xgl-edgy.zip
unzip xgl-edgy.zip
dpkg -i xserver-xgl_7.0.0.git.20060725-0ubuntu2.1.fglrx.r200_i386.deb
						# or whatever the name might be
						# in the time you are installing
apt-get -f install # fix broken dependencies

switch from ati to fglrx video driver:

sed -i -e 's/"ati"/"fglrx"/' /etc/X11/xorg.conf

disable composite:

cat >> /etc/X11/xorg.conf << EOS
Section "Extensions"
   Option "Composite" "false"
EndSection
EOS

next step is to create launcher script for starting xgl server. Create file /usr/bin/startxgl with the following contents:

#!/bin/sh
Xgl :1 -fullscreen -ac -accel xv:pbuffer -accel glx:fbo &
DISPLAY=:1
exec dbus-launch --exit-with-session gnome-session

make it executable:

chmod +x /usr/bin/startxgl

create login session entry /usr/share/xsessions/xgl.desktop with the following contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Xgl
Comment=Start an Xgl Session
Exec=/usr/bin/startxgl
Icon=
Type=Application

Add beryl-manager in startup programs. Click on System -> Preferences -> Sessions, choose Startup Programs tab, click on Add and type beryl-manager, click OK and Close

That's it. I would suggest you to reboot now, since AFAIK rmmod radeon && modprobe fglrx can lead to system lock. After reboot choose Xgl session in GDM. Dandy, isn't it :) ?

Radeon/AIGLX:

First what we need to do is to make sure that we don't have fglrx drivers installed. It's mandatory to remove them before going further with installation and setup of AIGLX. To uninstall them execute in root shell:

apt-get remove xorg-driver-fglrx
dpkg -P xorg-driver-fglrx

Edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add following to Section Device:

Option "DRI" "true"
Option "ColorTilling" "on"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "true"
Option "AccelMethode" "EXA"
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
Option "RenderAccel" "true"
Option "AGPMode" "8"
Option "AGPFastWrite" "on"

and this to Section Section "ServerLayout":

Option "AIGLX" "true"

Create file /etc/drirc with the following content:

<driconf>
  <device screen="0" driver="r200">
   <application name="all">
    <option name="allow_large_textures" value="2" />
   </application>
  </device>
</driconf>

Add beryl-manager in startup programs. Click on System -> Preferences -> Sessions, choose Startup Programs tab, click on Add and type beryl-manager, click OK and Close

Restart X/GDM and give it a try. Slow, but smashing, isn't it :) ?

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Posted at 07:06PM Dec 19, 2006 by bilke in Sun Microsystems
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