On a quest to get a 3D desktop part 2

You might still wondering whether i am still on a quest to get a 3D desktop? Not really. After reading an article of Fedora Core 6 in LinuxFormat magazine, I thought I need to give it a try. Firstly, I tried it on a laptop with built-in graphic card Intel 915. It ran smoothly. 3D effects for compiz and beryl worked out of the box. I just had to activate it.

After too much coin tossing and coffee, I decided to give FC6 a try on my office's PC. After backing up all important files, I inserted the DVD and rebooted into the nice Fedora installer a.k.a anaconda. I decided to repartition my drive to give larger part for my / partition and created 3 more partitions for /home,/boot and of course a /swap. As a rule of thumb, /swap size is 2 times RAM size.

GNOME is some sort of 'official' window manager for Fedora and RedHat. That's why after booting into X, GNOME was loading. To get 3D effects, click on System -> Preferences -> Desktop Effects. This was compiz actually loading replacing metacity. Future release of GNOME and KDE will support 3D effects on the fly. As for time being, compiz or Beryl compositing window manager provides the effects. Beryl provides much more effects as anyone could imagine. Experiment it and you will be amazed what it can do. The 3D cube is superb!.

Now the quest has ended. The 3D desktop is mine!. Try it.

Some tips for beryl :
F9 or place mouse cursor at the topleft corner - tiled windows in a viewport
Ctrl+Alt+LeftArrow - spin cube to the left
Ctrl+Alt+RightArrow - Spin cube to the right
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+RightArrow/LeftArrow - Spin cube to the right or left with active window follows.
place mouse cursor at the bottomright corner - centers active window.