So, last night I tried installing Beryl (since AIGLX and Beryl are now in gentoo portage). It seems that the beryl fork of compiz is going well (I wrote about xgl/compiz's (slow) development models a while back).

But even though the community has taken this very promising project and ran with it, there are still some issues. I followed the directions for AIGLX and Beryl, but all I get when I try to run Beryl is a pretty splash screen and then all my windows turn white and grey. I can move them around and see the smooth movement and fancy warping, I can even do the expose like effects. But it is all with white windows.

And the following error messages:

beryl: pixmap 0x4001cb can't be bound to texture
beryl: Couldn't bind redirected window 0x2800007 to texture
beryl: pixmap 0x4001cf can't be bound to texture
beryl: Couldn't bind redirected window 0xc0005a to texture
beryl: pixmap 0x4001cd can't be bound to texture
beryl: Couldn't bind redirected window 0x2000012 to texture
beryl: pixmap 0x4001d1 can't be bound to texture
beryl: Couldn't bind redirected window 0x180000a to texture
beryl: pixmap 0x4001c5 can't be bound to texture

I'm not the first one to come across this, since there is a FAQ entry here (which doesn't say to downgrade xglproto), and a post in the forums, a bug for beryl, and people hitting this outside of gentoo as well. It looks like some have successfully fixed this. Downgrading to gproto 1.4.7 didn't work for me ( emerge -1 -av =glproto-1.4.7 mesa xorg-server xf86-video-i810 beryl-core ).

Hopefully my collection of links above might help others who find themselves in a similar situation. I'll try to update if/when I get it working