Beryl + Ubuntu + ATI Mobility 9000
April 14, 2007 12:07 amSpent some time today trying to get Beryl to work on my Toshiba Tecra S1 running Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 beta with ATI Mobility 9000 graphics card. To start I used the following xorg.conf settings:
Section “Device”
Identifier “ATI 9000″
Driver “radeon”
Option “DRI” “true”
Option “RenderAccel” “true”
Option “EnablePageFlip” “true”
Option “XAANoOffscreenPixmaps”
Option “DisableGLXRootClipping” “true”
Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “true”
Option “AllowGLXWithComposite” “true”
Option “AGPMode” “4″
Option “AccelMethod” “XAA”
Option “ColorTiling” “on”
Option “AGPFastWrite” “on”
Option “GARTSize” “64″
BusID “PCI:1:0:0″
EndSection
Note that I used the driver radeon instead of fglrx and with xgl loaded. With these settings, I could get direct rendering on, can check yours by:
$ glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: Yes
After restarting Xorg, installed Beryl with the following command:
sudo aptitude install beryl beryl-manager emerald-themes
After the installation, I started the Beryl manager, however Beryl doesn’t start automatically. I ran the command beryl in the terminal it returns with the following error:
Checking maximum texture size : failed
Root window size (1280/1024) is bigger then maximum texture size (1024×1024)
From some online resources, I find out that I can use driconf to set the graphics card to have allow_large_textures = 2. However this didn’t solve the problem for me, later I found that I can set GARTSize to higher in xorg.conf. I tried:
Option “GARTSize” “256″
After restarting Xorg, I was able to run beryl without the error given before. However it returns a white screen, restarted Xorg again and find that direct rendering is off. It was found that setting the GARTSize to anything larger than 64 will set direct rendering to off. Knowing that I couldn’t get it to work on 1280×1024 on the external monitor (19″ Xerox XA7), I tried it on lower resolution 1024×768 and got that to work with the following screenshot:
Given that you are not using an external monitor, it would work on the laptop monitor on resolution 1024×768. The function shown in the screenshot is really the only function that I want from Beryl, and knowing that ATI doesn’t work very well with Beryl/Compiz anyway, don’t think there is much I can do to make it work on 1280×1024 unless new drivers come on or with another graphics card.
One Response to “Beryl + Ubuntu + ATI Mobility 9000”
I don’t understand xorg – but i did have a problem with my Toshiba Tecra S1 running Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10. It can only display 800×600. So I cut and pasted your xorg settings and now my display is 1600×1200. It’s much better but just wondering if there’s a way to make it display the native mode of 1280×1024. Nevertheless, thanks for posting your settings – it’s a great help.
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