I was showing off my comp earlier today to some relatives and dropped their jaws with some uber beryl features. It crashed my comp, but I played it off cool with a ctrl, alt, backspace and they never knew anything went wrong.

I got home, and for some reason beryl isn't working right anymore. I have to run it through the terminal. It doesn't matter if I have it set to load on boot or not. I HAVE to open a terminal for it to work (and leave the terminal open). I have no idea how to fix it, and I have to present it as a graduation project either this week or next. Do you have any ideas to try before reinstallation? I can't reinstall at home because of the dial-up, so it might take a few days until I get the opportunity.

And I'm not sure if I have a few days...

What sort of output do you get from it when you run it in a terminal?

Do you have the icon in the panel? If so, use it to change the window manager to 'beryl' - by default, when it crashes, it switches back to Metacity (the default Gnome one). Also, do remember you are supposed to have beryl-manager auto-starting, not beryl (the icon in the panel is a part of beryl-manager, double check that you are running that and not running beryl directly)

anyway, the reason you have to leave the terminal open is because it doesn't fork into the background, meaning the task is tied to that terminal. If the above doesn't work (or doesn't change anything), just add a ' &' after the command in the terminal, and then you can close the terminal (the & tells the terminal to run the program in a new thread, allowing you to close the terminal and still have the program run). eg, type "beryl-manager &"

Well, you see, I have beryl manager as auto-start, not beryl. When it boots, I get the little beryl icon on my tray up by my clock, but I don't have any cool beryl effects. When I run beryl-manager from terminal, it just opens up the beryl manager options menu (like I right clicked on the system tray icon). Running beryl itself through the terminal is what makes it work.

Yes, I know what beryl-manager is. Try READING my post in its entirety

First part says to use it (it being beryl-manager) to switch to the "Beryl" window manager. Eg, step-by-step n00b-proof instructions: 1) right click icon. 2) Move your mouse over "Select Window Manager". 3) Select "Beryl" - I realize I summed that up into one line in the previous post, but I figured you would be able to figure that out, as its not hard

Oh, and beryl-manager =/= beryl. beryl-manager is just what it says, a manager for beryl. It handles the dirty work, and provides the necessary fallbacks and crash-gaurds so that if beryl goes down (highly likely due to its beta nature), you don't lose everything. Hence the reason that you can have beryl-manager running without the beryl effects. (and the reason it allows you to reload beryl in the event that beryl crashes - which is what happened for you)

I did read your post... Apparently I just didn't understand it.

Haha, sorry about that, Kllrnohj. I guess I'm still a n00b at heart. >_<. Anyway, switching it back to beryl from the menu fixed it, and it autostarts just fine now. Thank you. I would never be able to handle this linux migration without you.

but you were always our favorite noob

No problem - just try and go slowly over information-packed posts such as my ones on dealing with linux problems - I tend to gloss over the 'givens' as I call them (aka, the otherwise obvious steps to fixing the problem once you are moderately familiar with it)