I had a look at beryl, since it seems to be attracting a lot of attention. I use KDE with Debian and installed the package. It does not seem to play all that nicely with KDE. I haven't yet figured out the best way to use it.
I got the white screen, and various other errors initially. Just to make sure I updated all xorg and mesa related packages I could find.
To use beryl I get a console login, log in as a user and start X with 'xinit'. This gives an empty screen, except for an xterm at top left. In the xterm I enter 'beryl-manager' and then either 'beryl &' or 'beryl-xgl &' (both seem to work).
This is a pretty minimal setup. Applications need to started from the command line in the xterm. Do NOT exit the xterm! - this locks the machine completely. But you can play with all the fancy features and decide if you really want to use it.
It would be nice to integrate it with the standard KDE desktop, but I don't know how conflicts over keyboard shortcuts and so on would be resolved. Perhaps I should read the manual
Update: Here's what I did to get it working reasonably well with KDE. As well as updating all relevant packages I made the recommended additions to /etc/X11/xorg.conf - added
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "True"
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
to the Section "Devices", and put
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection
at the end of the file. Following advice at
http://wiki.beryl-project.org/index....ntu/Edgy/AiGLX
I added beryl to the kdm login menu. This gives me a red beryl icon in the system tray. Right-clicking on this I can switch between Kwin and beryl.
