Well the heck with upgrading the video card with an nvidia, this intel card runs beryl so much smoother than I thought it would. Certainly not as smooth as my desktop with the Nvid card, but I can live with it !!

http://en.opensuse.org/Beryl

This page has great info, and it works great.

Thanks to all for your input and help !!!

Glad I could help, and saved ya some money around the xmas season

Just thought I would mention this all though i'm sure you already know about it:

# Intel
All intel graphics chips need the newest packages of Xgl and compiz for running flawlessly.

* i915, i945
Accelerated XVideo is broken on these cards. See Troubleshooting.
* compiz --replace will most likely crash the Xserver due to a long standing DRI bug.


http://en.opensuse.org/Xgl_Troubleshooting

Just in case you want to try and tweak it to run a little smoother. Sorry just a protectionist :P

One strange thing that is happening, is that when I log into my own account, everything is normal. No xgl effects or anything, until I launch beryl-manager. But when I log in as root, all the xgl effect are in place upon startup. I then launched beryl-manager in root and it seemed to start up so much faster and even run a little smother. I must have done something as root that didn't affect my main username

In other words, when I log into my account, even though xgl is enabled, it is not functional, as far as using a cube or the window picker. And the window manager is kde

Is your user a part of the Video Group? That group gives that users permissions to the area / files that XGL and other video effects pull from. It sounds like your user account does not have video permissions and that is why it won't work as your user but will work as root, as root has permission to everything.

Once you add your other user into the Video group it should work. I forget where that is in SUSE as i only use SUSE at work :P and servers have no real reason to be super purrty :P

I know you can do these from the command prompt / shell:

useradd -G cdrom,floppy,sudo,audio,video,games,users,camera username

or if you use the bash shell

useradd -m -G cdrom,floppy,sudo,audio,video,games,usb,users,camera -s /bin/bash roughneck

you can also edit the user with usermod but if the user doesn't have anything setup as of yet you can just blow that account away and re-create it.

If i remember correctly you can change the user groups in User and Group Administration in YaST. I could be wrong on that so don't hold that against me :P

I just checked, it says I am part of dialout, video, and users. This must be a default setting because I never added anything upon installation. Certainly sounded like a good point though. I will poke around for a while.

By the way I checked this in Yast, under User Management

Just wondering if you set your user up as a SuperUser does it help at all?

Just trying to figure out if it is permissions issue or a setting somewhere.

Just wondering but when you go into the desktop>effect settings is it turned on / enabled for that account? i know in gnome you have to go into
Desktop > Control Center > Desktop Effects Settings and make sure its enabled for that account. As its a account specific setting. Not sure about KDE

How do I do that? I went into yast, under users and didn't see anything to make me a 'superuser'?

Thanks for your help by the way !

By the way, yes, xgl is enabled for me, but none of the desktop effects are working

Try these few things and let me know what happens:

1.) Create a new user called test:
useradd -m -G cdrom,floppy,sudo,audio,video,games,usb,users,camera -s /bin/bash test

and login with that account and see if it runs smooth.

2.) Try running beryl from the command line by typeing su "the executable for whatever your trying to run". It will prompt you for your root password to go into super user mode. If it runs fine like this then we know its a permissions issue on some folder or group somwhere.

Hmm, well I did that, logged out and tried to log in as test, but no password so couldn't login. Went into yast and looked at users and teat wasn't listed. I must have done something wrong.

Edit: I'm kind of doubting it's a permission thing because I cant start beryl-manager without having to be su

Another thing that might help is that when I first log in, the graphics are sluggish. Scrolloing web pages is choppy, but once i run beryl and get it going, then it's pretty smooth. Maybe this info may help

in the shell you can type:

passwd -e test

Then set the password for the test user account.

If its not a permission issue the only other thing I can think of is there is a file that KDE and gnome load when X windows starts and this file works like a boot.ini or kind of what msconfig does in windows. It loads apps when the xwindows session into memory and loads them in the background. I used to put my VMtools app into this file so it was easily to use vmware to go from the vmsession to the desktop without having to hit ctrl+alt but I forget what the file is. Let me try and find it again.

Found it.

http://suseroot.com/suse-linux-tweaks/load-startup.php

First, open your file browser (konqueror for KDE, Nautilus for GNOME, etc.) and navigate to your home folder (you'll likely be there automatically). Then right-click on .xinitrc.template and open it with your editor of choice (Kate, KWrite, etc.). Then save it as ".xinitrc"; go back to the file browser, right-click on .xinitrc, go to properties, select the "Permissions" tab, and check the "is executable" box. You now have a script that will execute whenever you start X.

Now to modify it so it starts the application of your choice. Scroll down near the bottom of the file and find a line similar to

#
# Add your own lines here...
#

Below this hash mark is where we will add our applications. Assume you wanted to launch an xterm window at startup, you would add the line xterm &; the "&" makes the application load in the background so the rest of the script can continue to execute.

If you wanted ksetispy to launch, you would add ksetispy & as a new line. So if you wanted both to launch, you'd have a section of code that now looks like this:

#
# Add your own lines here...
#
xterm &
ksetispy &

We used xterm and ksetispy as examples, but you can do this with nearly any application. If you are not sure what command is used to launch your application, go to edit the KMenu (instructions found here in the "KMenu" section.), navigate to the application you want launched, click on it and whatever is in the "Command" field is what you want to use.

*** See link for more info ***


Check your root xinitrc and see if it has any entries if it does just copy that xinitrc to your users home folder or copy its contents into your users initrc file. I have a feeling it is loading your graphical apps in the background on bootup for root and this is why it isn't loading automatically for your user.

I am not trying to start beryl upon login, if that's what you are thinking. I just want the desktop effects to start when I use my account, as they do start in the root account, but not mine. In fact I can't get desktop effects to work in my account at all. Could it be because I have installed beryl here? And not in root? Are you saying I should put something in that file to start 'xgl' upon bootup? Only thing is that it is enabled. I'm a little confused, and right now gotta get out of here. My daughter wants a digital camera for xmas and I haven't shopped a bit yet.

Out.

Yeah take a breather and we will re-cap.

Let me make sure i'm understanding the problem correctly:

So your Root account everything works fine:
Your KDE starts fine and loads all the effects

however.

Your user account doesn't work fine:
Loads KDE but won't load any of the XGL effects?

Am i understanding this right?

You got it perfect !!