My frequent trips to the Ubuntu forums often bring me in contact with posts about the visual wonder that is the Beryl composite window manager (now known as Compiz Fusion). I decided to take the plunge and see if my experience lived up to all the hype. In short, it has. I now find working with a regular desktop window manager limiting. Though I love the Gnome desktop environment, 3D desktops are so freeing it’s difficult to go back to anything less.

Installing XGL + Beryl on Ubuntu Edgy Eft with an ATI card is relatively easy once you get the fglrx video driver working properly (that can be the tricky part). By the way, I use Trevino’s Beryl SVN repository. However, when I tried to enable the ANIMATED SKYDOME feature in Beryl-Manager under Desktop / Desktop Cube / Skydome, I had trouble. Browsing the Beryl forums led me to the realization that I needed to use a PNG image with a specific resolution ratio. I’m still at a loss as to the specifics beyond that but I have found a formula which works for me on my laptop with a screen resolution of 1280×800. The formula: a PNG image at a resolution of 4096×1024. That’s it.

FYI: I’m on a Dell Inspiron e1505 with the Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo processor/s, an ATI Radeon Mobile X1300 video card with a 15.4″ TrueLife Wide Screen. I dual boot WindowsXP (soon Vista) and Ubuntu Edgy Eft.

And now, for your skydoming pleasure, I have created eight 4096×1024 PNG images for you to use freely. A few of them would work well on a dual screen set up (big desktop) as well. Download them and try them out. I bet you’ll fall in love with at least one. Enjoy and please leave a comment of thanks if you use them or if you have any questions. ~Seamus7

1. Mystery Mountain

2. Cloudy Moon

3. Bucolic Beauty (hat tip: KoL, StudioTwentyEight, stock.xchange)

4. Blue Marble Tiles

5. Peacocks Feathers

6. Mind Buddha

7. Golden Buddha

8. Silver Slices