I breathed some new life into my work laptop yesterday. I downloaded Ubuntu (currently 7.04, Feisty Fawn) and I was surprised at how easy it was to setup and configure with Bery as the Window Manager, and to get the transparent cube effect complete with zoom.

There’s probably more than one way to do this, and this may not be the best way. These are the steps I took.

Post OS install:
After the Ubuntu install completes and you remove the disk and reboot back into the desktop, enable the Desktop Effects, by clicking System – Preferences – Desktop Effects . Click the button and tick both boxes.

Install Beryl Applications
Next we want to install the Beryl Manager, and Beryl Settings Manager. This enables us to have much more control over the configuration of the Beryl Window Manager.
Click, Applications – Add/Remove…. Make sure the Show: drop-down is set to “All Available Applications” and type “Beryl” in the Search: box.

Place a tick in the boxes against the two required applications and click OK. Step through the acknowledgment dialogs to get the software installed.

There should now be a red jewel shortcut located under Applications – System Tools. Clicking on this will cause the Beryl Manager to launch in the tray.

Right-click on the jewel and select the first item in the menu, Beryl Settings Manager.
This is where we want to configure our options. There’s a lot in here, but in this example we’re just going to configure the zoom, and transparency options.

Configuring Transparency
Click on the Desktop icon along the top of the window, and from the left pane, select Desktop Cube, and then the Transparency tab.

Place a tick in the box for Transparent Cube.

Configuring Zoom
To get that nice zoom-out effect when you’re moving between windows, from within the Beryl Settings Manager, make sure you’re still within the Desktop section, and click Rotate Cube from the left pane.
Expand the General option out and move the zoom slide all the way to the right.

Placing a tick in the Zoom Before Rotate, causes the Desktop to zoom away from you when using the keyboard shortcuts, which I think is a nice effect too!

Anything Else?
One last thing to do is to put an entry in under System – Preferences – Sessions – Startup Programs, so that Beryl will automatically startup when we log in.

Other nice features to check out are the Caps and Skydome tabs under Desktop – Desktop Cube, however I was unable to get any of my own images to work there (though to be fair I didn’t really look into it).

The Result?