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25 Comments
- Ramble, on 10/12/2007, -10/+26I don't see the point in being trans-gender and lesbian.
- next, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14Site seems to be running incredibly slow at the moment.
Quinn Storm discusses Beryl and her life with us
We did an exclusive e-mail interview with Quinn Storm. What follows are her answers to the interview, and personal details of her life.
Tell us a bit about yourself. We’d like to know, rather than the tech, who’s behind it. What do you do for a living. How old are you. Married? Children? Happy?*
Nope, I just missed it. I’m 24 years old, transgendered, lesbian, and single.
Not terribly interested in having kids, seriously looking for a nice smart big curvy gal to spend my life with, as for happy…I’ll be happier once I “get my life started” that is, move out, get a seriously full-time job, etc.
How did you get involved with Beryl?
This one is pretty simple, I rather fell into the situation, as it all started with some lightly modified packages of compiz I posted on the ubuntuforums with the temporary name compiz-quinn, not intending this of course to be anything permanent (honestly, despite what some say, I really do not have that sort of opinion of myself :-P).
Anyhow, people used them, and kept suggesting new things to get added in, and the c-q branch was born. Not long after, the branch had diverged to the point where a majority of the developers felt that forking was the right idea. Looking back on it, forking has caused a lot of animosity, so its hard to tell wether this is really true or not. At the moment, we are attempting to re-merge, though the process is a bit bumpy.
Has your relationship to the Beryl project had an impact in your everyday life?
Very much so. Before I got involved with c-q/Beryl, I was still trying to piece my life together. I’m 24 and living with my parents due to depression (among other things) that I have mostly under control now. Unfortunately I don’t yet have employment in the field, but I am still searching, though without a college/university degree it is harder than it should be. Thanks to the project though, I’ve gotten a chance to get out in the FLOSS community, going to events like UDS and XDC, where I discovered a great community of people I barely knew existed.
Within your project, what are your current responsibilities? Is there something particular you did that you feel especially proud about?
Well, my current responsibilities are in a bit of a flux right now with the merge. I fully expect to step down as a leader of any sort, and in general am just trying to do what little I can to smooth out the politics. With some members of the compiz community, I am a bit of a polarizing figure, so I’ve mostly lurked in the shadows, as I do truly want what’s best for the users of this software.
How does Beryl work? Our readers would like to know, in your own words, what, in essence, makes Beryl tick.
Beryl (and thus compiz) are based on some relatively new technologies added recently to the X.org X server, namely GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap, and the XComposite extension. With both of these, it becomes almost trivial to use OpenGL and 3d acceleration to draw your desktop, and thus perform all of the various effects from the simplest to the most trivial.
To tell you the truth, my personal fave features are the Scale, Thumbnail and Cube plugins, but the transparency effects have had a notorious productivity improvement effect (say, I can watch TV while typing an e-mail now, thanks guys!) since I have a 14″ monitor. Anything else juicy I can look forward to?
This one is a bit harder to answer, as at the moment the merge is the biggest thing we are working on, though I hope we do come out with some new features for everyone. We’re likely to release a bugfix release of Beryl 0.2.x in the near future, as the merge is taking far longer than expected.
How do you feel about the fact that Beryl is now either being considered or frankly included and a staple of several Linux distros?
I am very happy about this, and wish to encourage it, though should we succeed in the merge, I would want to help these distros migrate to the new project, whatever it will eventually be named.
Do you have a blog? Any other way me and our readership could follow your life?
I do have a blog, but I very rarely actually post to it, unfortunately. Consider it a character flaw. At the moment it is at http://dev.beryl-project.org/~quinn though that may change with the merge.
Thanks a lot, Quinn! - zitch, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16ramble: "I don't see the point in being trans-gender and lesbian."
Being that Quinn is a Female-to-Male trans-gender, he's biologically female. Since he's also attracted to females, he's technically a lesbian.
Personally, I'm more of "eh, whatever" on that point and seriously appreciate his work on keeping the Quinn-compiz/Beryl project organized. I've been running it on my laptop (with a ATI Mobility Radeon 9600) for more than a year now, and it's been quite stable (no less stable than Windows XP was on it. Most likely, driver issues). - spd998, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11It works perfectly with my Radeon 9250. It's pretty good with old cards.
- zitch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9arrenlex: Oh? Male-to-Female then?
Well, ignore the first half if my... erm... ramble above if that's the case. Or digg it down. Truthfully, I haven't been paying too close attention to all of that anyways.
The second half of that ramble still stands... ;) - mercurysquad, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Works great with my intel 915, and kinda okay with my friend's intel 845! You can't go lower than that for a 3D composited desktop..
- macoafi, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10I suppose ramble's never heard the term "lipstick lesbian"? It refers to "girly girl" lesbians, as opposed to butches. That's not to say there's only butch or lipstick, because there's of course a wide variation, but just for the sake of pointing out that lesbian != manly so trans-lesbian is not an oxymoron, I'm saying it. It means she feels like a woman for all intents and purposes. She has a female personality and thought process. She interacts with society as a female. She just happened to get stuck with a penis that she wants nothing to do with. So, she'll get her chest and estrogen (I believe she's pre-op), stop getting funny looks when she goes out in heels and skirts, and date women. It's not so difficult to understand, is it? I realize I'm more heavily immersed in the trans-world thanks to my participation in the school's GLBTQ group and being good friends with a transgirl, but it shouldn't be that difficult to understand how someone can be trans and have a sexuality independent of that. Whether transgendered or cisgendered, sexuality is separate.
- arrenlex, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7zitch: Er, no. The other way.
- neuralzen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7My 2nd system has a ATi 9800 Pro running Beryl. It takes a little extra configuration, but there are How-Tos on the ubuntu forums. You can optimize it a bit with some tricks like turning off v-synch.
- RuddO, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I just enabled WordPress WP-Cache. It should help with the load. I'm really sorry guys!!!!! Everything should run fine now.
- zitch, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7Ooops, mis-type, dig down...
- EmxBA, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4It's digged ;) So we have to expect a server hog...
Anyway, I've used Beryl on Intel 845G, ATI X1300XT and (now) nVidia 6150. It works pretty fast on all three, in spite of this Intel card having only 8 MB. (yes, exactly 8)
Site works for me now. - jdmulloy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3You think the beryl stories are too much. Most of the time half of the stories in the linux/unix section are Ubuntu related.
- SanjayM, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache:http://rudd-o.com/archives/2007/04/26/quinn-storm-personally-discusses-beryl/ -- Working mirror
- jrandyw, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@jdmulloy
Agreed.
"Ubuntu now being used by my neighbor!" 4849 diggs
Note: I am an Ubuntu user, at least on some of my computers. - specialK16, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Beryl worked GREAT on my Intel 915 laptop. I don't have it anymore... :( I've heard people saying it runs wonderfully on their GeForce 4 MX @ 1280x1024... for me, that's not the case.
- jrandyw, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Can we get some more "bury" options? Something like "enough already"? Beryl is great and all, but sheesh, do we need to read about it over and over on digg?
- SteveMax, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yes, it does. I run both Beryl and Compiz on Geforce 4 MX4000s, and both feel quite snappy (Compiz feels snappier, though)
- EnderTheThird, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I had the same setup but ended up getting a GF 7600GS because I hated losing 3D accelerated apps (like Google Earth) while running XGL. Still, Beryl *CAN* be run with those ATI cards. It just might involve a little extra work depending on what applications you want to run.
- freakokalam, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Would a system using a 3.2Ghz P4 processor, 1GB RAM, and an ATI Radeon X550 card have any trouble with Beryl?
- fed359, on 10/12/2007, -10/+3yes, it's "for real," here's a video of quinn: http://www.lulu.tv/?p=4346
- fed359, on 10/12/2007, -10/+0yes, it's "for real," here's a video of quinn: http://www.lulu.tv/?p=4346
- fed359, on 10/12/2007, -11/+0wrong place, bury previous comment
- dilibau, on 10/12/2007, -14/+2great...another beryl related nyuuz reaching the main page... I'll start hating my feisty fawn if I see anymo' of these...by now, I can thank digg for promoting the linux OS in general and beryl in particular (with all the useful how-2s) but come on... this is too much
- Dayyve, on 10/12/2007, -23/+7"I’m 24 years old, transgendered, lesbian, and single." WTF is that for real or a joke? If that's real then I have to give the dude props for having the (haha) balls to so readily admit it. Kudos. (I use XP, don't know much about the Linux community outside of Linus and Stallman.)
Sidenote: Beryl looks pretty - but doesn't it take quite a performance hit to run it? What would be the lowest vid card you could use to run it? (I have an old ATI 9800 PRO AGP system I'm thinking about playing around with)
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