Visually Stunning Linux Anyone?

[Stephen8454]

All,

I have played around w/ Fedora Core 6, Red Hat, Ubuntu and Mandrake. I am currently building a "gaming" pc for Vista and wanted to play around with some versions of Linux...

That being said what is the most visually stunning? I am a nut for shinny things and cool tricks to show people and know some basic's to linux but its been awhile...

Any Idea's?

 

[silverpig]

They're all basically the same, and you can install the same software on all of them.

That being said: ubuntu.

 

[magomago]

Just get beryl installed....and then turn everything up its pretty amazing. Not sure about the others, but installing beryl is VERY simple on Ubuntu just open up "synaptic" and search for "Beryl" and then install it.

 

[Stephen8454]

WOW! I went to http://www.beryl-project.org/features.php and looked at the features of Beryl and boy thats exactly what I am looking for! Thanks guys!

____________________
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[Stephen8454]

Has anyone gotten all the features of Beryl working on a virtual machine, specifically VMware Server?

 

[Robor]

Originally posted by: Stephen8454
Has anyone gotten all the features of Beryl working on a virtual machine, specifically VMware Server?

Probably not going to work because AFAIK you're not going to get 3D acceleration inside a VMWare virtual machine.

 

[drag]

Yep. You need to have it runnning natively and have 3D acceleration.

Beryl and Compiz will work best if you have a Intel onboard video card or a Nvidia video card that is supported under the 9xxx drivers.

With ATI video cards you can get Free software drivers that work acceptably well for most (not all) R200, R300, and R400 series video cards. These support AIGLX and therefore Beryl and Compiz Free software drivers do not work R500 series video cards.

You can tell if your using a R500 series video cards because they are all numbered above X1000 in their names. So like the X1300 is a R500 card. The proprietory ATI drivers work with most R500 series video cards and they support R300 and R400 series video cards (dropped support for R200). But ATI proprietory drivers do not support the OpenGL extensions needed to support AIGLX. Without AIGLX you will be restricted to only using XGL, which isn't as nice.


If you want to try Compiz or Beryl your best bet is going to be Ubuntu Feisty. Keep in mind that Beryl is BETA-quality software. It is NOT stable and may cause some issues. But for most people it does work ok.

Also Fedora or OpenSuse are good choices.

Be sure to read any aviable documention on which distribution you choose. It is VERY usefull and will have guides to dealing with most common issues and hardware that people run into problems with.

Ubuntu and others have very good Ubuntu-specific forums and faqs. Take advantage of it, search through the forums if you have problems. Chances are that somebody else has the same problem and they already figured out a fix for it. Make sure that anything you find applies to your specific version.. Fedora and Ubuntu release new versions every 6-8 months, so a lot of stuff may be out of date.

On youtube you can find a crapload of videos and such things.
Beryl Videos:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=b...client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-USfficial&um=1&sa=N&tab=wv

Compiz (mostly older. Pay attention to the dates as it's been around longer)
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=Compiz

Beryl is a fork from Compiz. So they basicly do the same thing. Compiz and Beryl are now merging again, or at least are trying to.

Compiz was created by people working for Novell by the same people who made XGL. And you can find it aviable under Suse.

Metisse is favored by Mandriva. I think it deserves more attention as it's doing very creative things that are not possible under any other OS. I don't know how well it's all supported under Ubuntu or Fedora though.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=Metisse

 

[Stephen8454]

Thanks for that detailed breakdown that is friggin sweet.

A friend told me about ATI drivers not being fully up to par for OpenGL. I have a SLI board and plan to use 2 x 8800GTS's in SLI eventually... Im an enthusiast so we will see how it goes.. Im going to check out that Metisse now...

 

[Nothinman]

Probably not going to work because AFAIK you're not going to get 3D acceleration inside a VMWare virtual machine.

Actually you can get some basic 3D acceleration by setting mks.enable3d to true and svga.vramSize to up the memory size of the guest in the .vmx file, but it's still beta quality IMO.

 

[Stephen8454]

Yeah I was reading about that before. What I am doing is building a PC and want to be able to do all kinds of fun things with it. I am going to dual boot Ubuntu w/ Vista Ultimate x64 and OC alot of it. Now, hopefully I can OC it successfully...

 

[Alone]

Ubuntu with beryl.

 

[Nothinman]

While I'm all for more people using Linux I still think dualbooting sucks and should be avoided as much as possible. You'll likely put up with it for a few weeks or maybe even months but eventually you'll get tired of rebooting just to do one thing and you'll stick with the OS that does the majority of what you want and since you're building a gaming machine that'll be Windows.

 

[Stephen8454]

haha you know that is my biggest complaint... I friggin HATE dual booting... If only VMware gave direct access to the video card w/ all its 3d features... I am huge xbox 360 gamer and am looking to do more gaming on the pc i built.

That being said... Has anyone had success using WINE on linux to install windows software like games and such?? I bet my wife would kill me if I had only linux but hey, ITS MY BOX!

 

[Nothinman]

WINE works great for some things and not so great for others, it depends on the application.

 

[Jay]

I recommend PCLinux for the most complete out of the box distro I've come accross. Beryl works like a charm with it and I've tried almost every major distro.

 

[gus6464]

Ubuntu Feisty also works pretty well compiz right out of the box. Just enable GL Desktop in system preferences and you are good to go.

 

[Kaervak]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
WINE works great for some things and not so great for others, it depends on the application.

Agreed. I'm running WINE on my OpenSuse 10.2 install and it works quite well for a majority of things. However there are a few programs that really don't want to run under it. If you're going for gaming, I've heard a lot about Cedega being pretty good. I think there's another one but I can't remember the name at the moment.

 

[DaiShan]

I personally use Ubuntu Feisty with KDE and Beryl, but it is NOT lightweight, so only run that if you have the resources. You can find all kinds of cool eyecandy for KDE including app docks similar to Mac.