[conspire] Knoppix 5.1.0 and Beryl

[Edmund J. Biow]

Knoppix 5.1.0 was released last week, the first Knoppix release since 
June.  As I'm sure you all know, Knoppix is a German live CD based upon 
Debian testing/Etch these days. 
  http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/knoppix51-en.html

 I gave the CD version a spin and I started it with:

   knoppix desktop=beryl

It was the first time Beryl/Compiz really worked nicely with my lowly 
Radeon 7000 video card with 32 MB of RAM, using the open source radeon 
driver, no less.  All the effect that I tried worked perfectly, very 
smooth (it doubtless helps that I have 650 MB of RAM).  I  hereby 
formally withdraw my snide observation a week or two ago that Beryl has 
real limitations with underpowered video cards.  In fact, the Beryl 
setup in Knoppix actually apparently runs best on such anemic video cards:
  "The most successful candidates with DRI and transparency in our tests 
were "older" ATI^® cards (i.e. Radeon Mobility) and Intel^® onboard 
graphics chipsets. With these cards, many features of beryl worked 
flawlessly and stable."

However Knoppix is free software and can not include the proprietary 
Nvidia driver, so if you have an Nvidia display adapter and don't want 
to install the proprietary driver and still want to play with Beryl 
there will be a Games-Knoppix distro released that will include some 
proprietary drivers with the permission of the manufacturers. 

It was a very pleasant experience, complete with a lovely picture of 
Spitsbergen as a background.  NTFS-3G worked like a charm writing to my 
Windows 2000 partition.  Apparently if you install the DVD version of 
Knoppix it will plant about 10 GB of programs on your hard drive.  I am 
really looking forward to the release of Etch as Debian stable.