Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 3 has been released. Kubuntu and Edubuntu versions are available as well. There’s a list of changes in Ubuntu as well as Kubuntu. Final is expected to be released in April.
Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 3 has been released. Kubuntu and Edubuntu versions are available as well. There’s a list of changes in Ubuntu as well as Kubuntu. Final is expected to be released in April.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/67369
Herd 3 and they haven’t fixed this bug.
Fedora fixed it a long time ago.
Edited 2007-02-02 15:27
This is another embarrassing bug: Azureus, a java app, which works when installed from source, doesn’t work when installed from Ubuntu repositories.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/azureus/+bug/57875
Does anyone happen to know whether they’ve fixed the kControl issue with most of its entries ending up in Lost&Found instead of kcontrol or the settings applet?
This is a most annoying bug, and the Debian folks have had at least a temporary fix for this for a while… (although their fix doesn’t actually appear to work)
Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 3
Glad that they decided to try herding those feisty fawns a third time. Those buggers ate the weird flower that grows next to my porch every year.
Yeah, I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.
Edited 2007-02-02 15:44
I couldn’t agree more. No wonder Linux faces so many credibility challenges when people actually name something downloadable “Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 3 ”
I mean, seriously… WTF is that even supposed to mean to anyone who doesn’t know what they are dealing with? Pretend it’s not a beta release, it’s still “Ubunutu Feisty Fawn.”
“‘I mean, seriously… WTF is that even supposed to mean to anyone who doesn’t know what they are dealing with? Pretend it’s not a beta release, it’s still “Ubunutu Feisty Fawn.”‘
Well, if you’re “playing” with any beta release, one would assume you know what you’re dealing with!
And what about Leopard and Longhorn, I mean seriously!
You mean Mac OS 10.5 Leopard and Windows Longhorn?
The final version to the public will be Ubuntu version 7.04. Feisty Fawn is just the code name. I mean shoot Vista?? What does that mean. What the heck does XP mean. They went from Windows 2000 (Which was Windows NT 6.0) to Windows XP. Confused the heck out of people. Making people think that ME and XP had something to do with each other.
Plus 6.10 and 6.11 are for people who like cutting edge, 6.06 is what you would use in your business or a person who can’t deal with bugs would want.
People come up with the strangest reasons for putting down versions of Linux!
“Shoot! I am not using that crap cause it’s got a silly name. ??? LOL! Come on.”
Edited 2007-02-04 03:11
Some minors errors.
Win2k = NT 5.0, NT 5.1 => XP.
Ubuntu 6.11 ? Was there a release in november 2006 ?
Sorry to say, but code name are more used than official numbered version, at least in Ubuntu’s World and debian one !
I meant Ubuntu 7.04 (Which I wrote in the beginning of the text and then wrote wrong.)
Anyway, a non tech person that goes to Ubuntu’s site will see in BIG bold test UBUNTU 6.10 (Not Dapper Drake or whatever)
Code names are used with people market heavy with the code name. Most people I know call Mac OS X, Mac OS X not Lepoard or Tiger or what ever the new cat name is.
“Easy Codec Installation has been implemented in Feisty Fawn Herd 3, When trying to play media files, Ubuntu will try to install the necessary codecs automatically, and start playing the desired file.”
This caught my eye.
If they get it right, it will be a quiet revolution for ease of use with Linux desktops. All anyone really wants is to click on a file, have the computer get the codec for you, and play the media with no questions asked.
Automatic codec installation has always been possible, but legal issues rather than technical ones have prevented it’s adoption.
So, I’d be interested to know how many codecs will be supported. Win32 codecs for mplayer? DeCSS for DVDs? If so, does maintaining repositories outside the US and a warning in the installer that ‘the packages are restricted by copyright’ really make it legal?
The codecs issue isn’t very problematic, at least not compared to DeCSS. However, now that Hollywood is pushing for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, I don’t think they really care about DeCSS anymore.
In any case, I believe that if they were to pursue this, it might actually endanger the DMCA itself. Fair use rights are guaranteed by the constitution, and the whole DRM efforts have had no other aim than to take those fair use rights away from citizens in order to sell them back to them. I highly recommend this article about it on Ars Technica:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070115-8616.html
That’s how Ubuntu names its pre-beta releases. It’s always adjective + animal + name of group of animals + number. Ubuntu 6.10 had releases like “Edgy Eft Knot 2”, where a “knot” is a group of efts. Obviously, a herd is a group of fawns.
These are just code-names anyway. Feisty Fawn will be called “Ubuntu 7.04” when it’s released.
Interesting. I’m glad they will drop ‘Herd’ because it only adds confusion. It sounds like GNU ‘Hurd’, the kernel which someday may compete with the Linux kernel, GNU/Hurd vs. GNU/Linux.
GNU/Hurd? I’ll skip an update cycle and wait for GNU/DukeNukemForever!
Seriously, Hurd was around before Linus made the comp.os.minix post that started it all.
Edited 2007-02-03 03:30
I have no investment in the Hurd kernel, or any big expectations but it is a player in the same name space occupied by Ubuntu. It is wise for developers in the free software arena to avoid confusion with names, and generally they do.
BTW, apparently it is still being actively developed since last month there were two news items at http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/.
I quite like the names, although I had never heard of an Eft before. What’s after Fawn? Galloping Gazelle? Gargantuan Gargoyle?
I quite like the names, although I had never heard of an Eft before. What’s after Fawn? Galloping Gazelle? Gargantuan Gargoyle?
Gamboling Gopher would fit their naming scheme better. They generally choose an out-of-the-way first word that implies being assertive or cool and combine it with a relatively recognizable real-world animal.
I would have picked a Gnu as the animal, as “Gamboling Gnu Implausibility 3” would be a great release name, but they won’t pick Gnu for obvious reasons.
They promised everybody that the final version will have all the none free graphic card drivers (binaries) but it seems like they have not started working on that yet. I think Beryl will be also the default one. Is there any NEWS regarding 3D graphics ?
Thanks
From my readings, a decision hasn’t been made over Beryl versus Compiz yet. My guess is that they’re waiting for Beryl 0.2.0 to get released before doing an eval on stability, usability, etc. There’s still time to make a decision but it does seem that the Beryl developers are pushing hard to get Beryl into Ubuntu while the Compiz developers seem pretty low key about support. So IMO, Beryl (if they don’t mess things up and if they keep showing their interest in filling the needs of the Ubuntu community) will be the likely choice.
Also from my readings, it appears that both Metacity and Beryl/Compiz window manager will be installed and it will be easy to switch between them on the fly. Low powered hardware and hardware without a suitable graphics card will default to Metacity while all others will default to Beryl/Compiz.
What I haven’t heard any resolutions on, though, is how proprietary graphics drivers are handled. I hope they handled them the same way they handle codecs and give people a choice rather than assume that you’ll want it (i.e. An open source driver exists for your graphics card, but it will not take full advantage of your graphics card. Would you like to install a proprietary driver? [click here for more information]).
Anyone have any inside info on how this issue has been resolved?
I’ve just read an update. Composite by default has been deferred:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/composite-by-default
It’s a bit disappointing, but it seemed like a pretty big leap for something that’s usable but not finished yet. (e.g. Metacity wouldn’t be necessary if Emerald were perfect). Fortunately, the two key dependencies of composite-by-default have good progress, so I’m guessing they’ll be ready in time. Unless I’m mistaken, that should allow Beryl/Compiz to be only an apt-get away without having to modify X config files.
Well of course its buggy… they insist on using Beryl witch is little more than bugware! I would love to have a chance to have a little chat with the bastard responsable with this shameful push of crapware down every Ubuntu users throat and smack some sense into him… really, he should know better! If they actualy ship edgy with beryl I swear I’ll go Debian and I’m never coming back!!
I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again: Beryl offers NOTHING thats not available on Compiz! Compiz does EVERYTHING beryl does (yes it does the stupid flame animation to) minus the transparent cube (which is going to be ported anytime soon) and a themable window manager, witch is being developed “as we speak”… and don’t tell anyone Compiz actually supports metacity themes better than beryl, someone might actually end up ditching beryl and nobody wants that….
This really pisses me off. BERLYL SUCKS! Use compiz god damn it! Beryl is a sub standard fork of compiz that was started for all the wrong reasons! the FUD quinn spread about compiz not being as extensible as one would like are nothing but lies… every single feature thats available on beryl is available on compiz as well, plus compiz is WAY faster and more stable… Check it and don’t let yourselves be blinded with bling!
(this are the repos for edgy, check the page for the feisty repos)
go here:
http://gandalfn.wordpress.com/
and this to your sources.list:
deb http://gandalfn.club.fr/ubuntu edgy dev
install this:
gnome-compiz-manager-extra compiz-extra (edgy)
If beryl keeps the current trend of being…well… a piece of shit… and ends up being chosen over Compiz, I’m switching to Debian, because that would be proof the Ubuntu team doesn’t give a f–k about the quality of the distro and just want to support what’s hip.
Choosing Beryl over Compiz is a rational as choosing Lada over a Lamborghini under the argument that they both start with the letter L…
Sorry about all the curse words but this is how i feel.
If you read my response, neither Compiz nor Beryl have been chosen and the integration into Ubuntu by default has been deferred. Deferred, in Lauchpad means: “There is no chance that this feature will actually be delivered in the targeted release.”.
From what I’ve read, *both* have problems over plain Metacity. The reason I figured that Beryl would be adopted is because Beryl’s web site and forums seems to mention Ubuntu and the work they’re doing to try to win over Ubuntu nearly every post, whereas Compiz seems more focused on OpenSUSE. Given the choice between someone who is eager to work with you and someone who can take you or leave you, most people would choose the former. The Novell-Microsoft deal also leaves a bad taste in many people’s mouths, so many want to avoid anything currently being developed by Novell, lest they put in code that is useable by Novell (because of the agreement) but not anyone else.
I happen to agree that the technical reasons stated for forking Compiz were more excuses than fact, but there were social reasons (Beryl’s and Compiz’s lead developers didn’t get along). It’s a sad fact of life that most problems in the world are not technical, their social. The fact that you’re still holding a grudge and are willing to switch distros over something that you should be able to install manually without much effort shows how strongly the human emotion plays a part in technical issues.
One thing is clear though: compiz seems to be a lot less of a community project than Beryl is. For instance, if you want to track compiz’s progress on the next release, where would you go? With Beryl, you just need to look at the blog or planet section ( http://blog.beryl-project.org/ ). Compiz seems more interested in working quietly behind semi-closed doors (mailing lists are available but you have to hunt through them for progress), churning out releases with little fanfare. Neither approach is *wrong*, but they both suit different types of developers and users.
The reason I figured that Beryl would be adopted is because Beryl’s web site and forums seems to mention Ubuntu and the work they’re doing to try to win over Ubuntu nearly every post
Lol… ok… so now you’re telling me that they’re trying to win over Ubuntu by kissing ass, not technical merit? nice…
From what I’ve read, *both* have problems over plain Metacity.
Well of course they do, you silly goose!/big_gay_al
Metacity is under development for… what?… 5/6 years now? Whereas compiz hit the big time in what, 2005/2006? Don’t you think its natural that compiz is still less stable than metacity, given that it’s been under development for a fraction of the time?…
The Novell-Microsoft deal also leaves a bad taste in many people’s mouths, so many want to avoid anything currently being developed by Novell, lest they put in code that is usable by Novell (because of the agreement) but not anyone else.
Bull… if that was the case then they wouldn’t be shipping any application based on mono. And IF they tainted the code the community would fork it, but that time it would be for the right reasons… and even then, Novell would have to comply with the “Freedom of Death” clause in the Gnu GPL, so I guess they really don’t want to do that. but lets keep on topic…
I happen to agree that the technical reasons stated for forking Compiz were more excuses than fact, but there were social reasons (Beryl’s and Compiz’s lead developers didn’t get along). It’s a sad fact of life that most problems in the world are not technical, their social. The fact that you’re still holding a grudge and are willing to switch distros over something that you should be able to install manually without much effort shows how strongly the human emotion plays a part in technical issues.
Well, I tend to be over emotional sometimes :|… Fact is, I’m just an individual trolling away on my laptop and I’m not setting the course of the most popular Linux distro ever… I can afford the luxury of making stupid decisions based on whim alone, but rest assured that if I was in control I would stick to whats best for the majority, and as it stands, Compiz is the best for the majority… If you don’t believe me check it out and me amazed.
For instance, if you want to track compiz’s progress on the next release, where would you go? One thing is clear though: compiz seems to be a lot less of a community project than Beryl is.
http://www.go-compiz.org/index.php?title=Discuss ??
from the page:
* 1 Forums
* 2 Users’ IRC Channel
* 3 Mailing Lists
* 4 Developers’ IRC Channel
* 5 Bug reports
Neither approach is *wrong*, but they both suit different types of developers and users.
I never said beryls approach is wrong, but the motives for it’s existence certainly are… you don’t fork a project because you don’t like someone… compiz-quinn was nothing like compiz-vanilla… there was no need for at least 2 config applications, one for each project… well, back in the day there was no config applications at all, but you get my point… bottom line is, there was no need for a fork, especially when the said fork has 98% of it’s code based on the parent project and what’s even worse is that you won’t find compiz mentioned a single time the beryl project front page. Be well… I’m going out now… Friday night fever.
Edited 2007-02-02 22:49
I never quite agreed with this notion that a fork “needs” a reason for its existence otherwise it should be left on the wayside. GNOME started as a poor “response” to the fact that KDE was not Free enough but it kept growing and improving even after KDE was made completely Free.
Now, I don’t like GNOME at all but I think that it cater to large portion of users that enjoy its simplicity and I don’t see why it should be left behind.
A few developers did not agreed with the way that Compiz was being developed and started a fork… Big deal. It happens all the time in the OSS world. One heck of a good reason is the already mentioned excess of dependencies on GNOME. I would not like to have too many dependencies on GNOME just to have a core feature of my X windowing system working properly. That’s a good enough reason for ME.
If a fork is worthy, it will slowly replace the original project as time pass by (See XFree86 / X.Org). If not, it will fail to gather interest and will gradually fall to the wayside until it dies (See the ill-fated GoNEME project).
Beryl fulfills a purpose the way it is. Leave it be.
The Compiz devs are a little slow moving, but they make clean code. The Beryl devs picked it up after the Compiz guys abandon it for several months… they prefer to get features in first and fix errors later.
It’s a matter of which personality you have… the Compiz guys will take too long, and we’ll lose interest, but it “Will Be” Great. The beryl guys prefer to keep moving ahead and clean it up later. In the OSS community with lots of eyes, stuff really doesn’t get throughly tested until it’s “released”.. early and often is better. Being a guinea pig is the “price” of Open source.
The Compiz devs are a little slow moving, but they make clean code. The Beryl devs picked it up after the Compiz guys abandon it for several months… they prefer to get features in first and fix errors later.
Beryl is still crashing left and right after all this time… Emerald is still fscking up the window titles when you resize or maximize or minimize a window. When you resize windows, you get the following extra features:
– Colossal lagging of the window borders behind the mouse pointer;
– When you resize a window, a grayish/whitish/blackish area appears between the original frame position and the current one. The content of the window is only rendered when you slow down or stop moving the window border.
Your mileage may vary. This happened on a laptop with an nvidia 7300 go running beryl on AIGLX. It’s not much, but hey, its an nvidia, bought it on purpose to run Compiz/Berryl, otherwise i would have chosen ATI…
If you’re thinking:
“Well, but that’s just the way it goes, beacuse the the composition manager has to grab a texture of the whole window every time the window size changes and that’s an intensive operation that requires lots of bandwidth”
I’ll say that you’re right… however compiz does it. Why can’t beryl? Because it’s buggy? after all this time, it’s still THIS buggy? The question is, do the guys even do any bugfixing at all?
It’s a matter of which personality you have… the Compiz guys will take too long, and we’ll lose interest, but it “Will Be” Great.
Men, compiz is great Now… it does (almost) everything the other does, plus you can use it everyday, and not just to impress others with your ubber linux boxen. The mith that Beryl is far ahead of Compiz is just that: a mith. And no, I’m not the kind of guy to wait around for the debian style stable release either.
In the OSS community with lots of eyes, stuff really doesn’t get throughly tested until it’s “released”.. early and often is better. Being a guinea pig is the “price” of Open source.
Humm.. no it’s not. You don’t just throw bugware at the most popular distro around hoping the tinkle fairy to come along to kiss it and make it better, you compromise between what has less features and you can use 24/7, and what has 2 extra features but crashes after 2/3 hours… After putting things in prespective I for one think the right choice is quite obvious.
When you ship something, it’s supposed to work. Sure you should still keep beryl handy… though I think it shouldn’t have been a beryl in the first place, what’s done it’s done and it should be available in the repositories.
I think that if they’d stuck with compiz, it could have been possible for them to ship feisty with a 3D desktop enabled by default, be it on top of AiGLX for nvidia/intel based chips or XGL for ati.
I think they’ve deliberately chosen to stick with beryl behind semi-closed doors. Now, they find it to unstable and not ready for production, and feisty got fscked.
My 2EUR.
I really hope they fix this issue:
I have one on board sound and a Creative one, Ubuntu get confused here and that was the only reason why I stoped using it. During installation Fedora simply detect both cards and ask you to make one of them your default and everything work just great. I really hope Ubuntu do the same with sound card too !!!
Waith no more, download UBeryl, its an Ubuntu based distro with Beryl enabled, Ive tried and works very well.
System->Preferences->Sound, sounds tab -> default sound card
Does anybody know if Herd 3 finally boots on a laptop with a RTL8139 network card? I own an Averatec 2460, Centrino chipset with this network card, and all versions of Ubuntu I have tried fail to even boot from it. The reason is the 8139too module, which has a MMIO and a PIO mode to load, and one of this modes (don’t remember) freezes the whole system. I’d so much like to switch back to Ubuntu, but I can’t because of this showstopper bug.
Try disabling ACPI.
Thats one of the first things I’ve tried. Indeed I tried really all boot options I could imagine, Ubuntu would just never work. The only way of putting Linux on my laptop is to boot Gentoo with disabled hardware detection. I can then install Gentoo just fine and build a custom kernel which loads the 8139too module in PIO mode. The one and only reason why all versions of Ubuntu fails seems to be that they load 8139too in MMIO mode, if I choose this mode in Gentoo then Gentoo freezes too.
I wish there was a way to simply tell the Ubuntu LiveCD to NOT load a certain module – this would solve all my problems. But unfortunately right now this bug is a complete showstopper for me, and I know of other people having the same problems with this NIC.
Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu 6.06 all install correctly on my Toshiba laptop using (output from FreeBSD):
pciconf:
rl0@pci2:7:0: class=0x020000 card=0xff101179 chip=0x813910ec rev=0x10 hdr=0x00
vendor = ‘Realtek Semiconductor’
device = ‘RT8139 (A/B/C/810x/813x/C+) Fast Ethernet Adapter’
class = network
subclass = ethernet
dmesg:
rl0: <RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX> port 0xa000-0xa0ff mem 0xd0000000-0xd00000ff irq 18 at device 7.0 on pci2
miibus0: <MII bus> on rl0
rlphy0: <RealTek internal media interface> on miibus0
rlphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
rl0: Ethernet address: 00:a0:d1:b0:d7:e0
I had Kubuntu 6.06 on this laptop for about 4 months, worked quite nicely. Had lots of problems when I finally upgraded to Kubuntu 6.10, though, which is why I moved it back to FreeBSD.
i don’t think they will choose compiz it is not as friendly to KDE as beryl.
compiz uses gconf and other gnome dependencies, beryl is more desktop neutral
This is a common myth.
Compiz is plugin based system. There is a plugin for storing the settings in gconf. This plugin is optional, and not part of the core.
The truth here is actually funnier than fiction. One of the justifications for beryl was to make it less dependant on GNOME, so one of the first pieces the beryl devs implemented was a new setting manager.
Instead of doing this cleanly as a compiz plugin – like how david designed it to be, they fscked the whole core up and created a text file writing behemoth and beryl-settings-manager.
Then to address to concerns of Ubuntu, which is GNOME based, and would like to use gnome technologies they were forced to add back gconf support. So what they did was make their own settings infrastructure support loading different backing plugins. They then abstracted this behind libberyl settings.
So, they started with a plugin based system, hackishly changed compiz core to write their own settings infrastructure, then re-implemented gconf as a pluggable backend to their settings infrastructure.
What do we have to show for it? duplication of effort, division of communities, BUGS! and a lesson on how software should be designed before one starts coding………
Seriously, I wish I was making this stuff up.
If you are really concerned with making compiz work with no gnome deps you are welcome to contribute a text bsed configuration system to compiz in the form of a plugin.
Here is a hypothetical question. If beryl hadnt of forked, and the beryl devs would of instead worked on adding a text file based configuration settings plugin to compiz, do you think that we would have seen this Ubuntu released with an awesome composited desktop?
Edited 2007-02-03 03:31
thank you for your reply, i was ill informed, thank you for being so civil- thom holwerda (or ugeynia for that matter) would have blown my head off for making a mistake like that
PS heres sommin interesting http://www.kde.org/announcements/changelogs/changelog3_5_5to3_5_6.p…
KDE is providing more support for compiz, beryl is not mentioned-looks like kde is going with compiz
as a question how will KDE plasma react to BERYL/compiz
Plasma will merge Kwin and kicker but how can you have plasma without giving up compiz/beryl
after all the new Plasma is not just a window manager it will incorporate kicker.
so if we boot plasma then kicker goes with it
after all the new Plasma is not just a window manager it will incorporate kicker.
so if we boot plasma then kicker goes with it
Hmm that is very interesting.
Edited 2007-02-03 10:35
KDE is providing more support for compiz, beryl is not mentioned-looks like kde is going with compiz
The support merely involves the pager app being viewport aware and an end to the occassional taskbar weirdness; the mods work with beryl.
It’s also worth pointing out that beryl has an alternative window decorator for KDE users called aquamarine. It uses the standard KDE window themes (the ones selectable through kcontrol) to render the window decoration, making beryl look much more native for KDE than beryl/emerald or compiz/anything does.
as a question how will KDE plasma react to BERYL/compiz
Plasma will merge Kwin and kicker but how can you have plasma without giving up compiz/beryl
Plasma collectively represents the graphical elements that will comprise the KDE4 environment.
Kwin and kicker are elements of plasma, meaning they’ll be dependent on it, but do not equate to plasma.
At any rate, kwin/KDE4 already has compositing support and the svn version is currently capable of the usual trickery like opacity, shadows, scaling and (I believe) the wobbly effect.
Right now, beryl and compiz will likely be obsolete with KDE4, kwin is expected to pretty much do the same thing natively. Frankly metacity is headed in the same direction, so if either project is going to survive long term they’d be better off working together to establish some sort of joint interface specification for plugins and such.
I have found the complete opposite. Beryl is very stable for me. After I installed compiz, I had to read, read, and read some more to figure out everything that it did or could be done with it. Not so with Beryl (again, for me) . I read the Ubuntu how to, flipped through the beryl-manager GUI, and set it how I like it. Simple. I don’t really care about who codes what, or who codes cleaner(although I probably should). All I want is a clean interface and a functional desktop, which Beryl does in spades, for me. Also, I like that it asks me which one to fall back too. Cool, and it’s worked every time . I realize that some folks like to go through gconf and play with the settings, but have had below average luck with it, myself. It’s enough that I can always fall back to cli for me. I never had luck with windows registry either , go figure.
Maybe I’m mellowing with age (40), but I really don’t get too worked up about who’s right , and who’s wrong when it comes to software. I just want it to play nice with my hardware.
Xeon 2.8ghz , 2g ECC ram, Nvidia 6200 OC scsi drives
http://shots.linuxquestions.org/?linux_distribution_sm=Ubuntu%2…
I used both, and I stay with Beryl because :
1) It is more alive
2) I can run it with any Deskop I want
3) It is smoother than Compiz on my computer
4) It is simple to tweak than Compiz
5) It is not a bugware, sorry for you, compiz fanboy n0xx
Well, as we say in France (yes, I’m a french dirt bag !) : “tout le monde voit midi à sa porte”.
Sorry, but I don’t know english version of this.
Edited 2007-02-03 20:58
I’ve been using Beryl on Edgy without any problems (other than occasionally Beryl doesn’t load properly on startup and I have to reload it). It was easy to install, and easy to configure. Compiz might be great too but I see no need to use it.
Before either Compiz or Beryl can even be considered, both projects need quite some development. Yes, eye candy is nice and it can boost productivity when done right (Aqua) or it can kill it when done wrong (Aero Glass). But Apple and Microsoft have had quite some time and resources to develop their 3D-accelerated UIs. Compiz/Beryl have had neither. Eventually at least one of the projects will reach some stability and maturity but they are not there yet.
First and foremost, Ubuntu should aim to put out solid releases at least once a year. IMO Ubuntu 6.10 was rushed and full of annoying bugs (which later on might have been ironed out) due to the short development cycle of that release. I’d like to see Ubuntu doing business-grade, solid releases every spring and somewhat more experimental releases every fall.
With that reasoning in mind, 7.04 should stick to whatever works, whereas 7.10 would be a good candidate for enabling Compiz/Beryl by default (given that the hardware is fast enough of course).