XGL is a technology that Novell has funded to have X11 graphics rendered on OpenGL accelerated surfaces. This allows cool and sometimes useful graphic effects on the desktop like the things you see in Mac OSX. Here is a link describing how to XGL on SUSE 10.1 if you happen to be running that. XGL is still very beta, so it might be difficult to setup on other distros. I would guess that you will probably be compiling it from source. We would still like to check out XGL and see if our hardware runs it well before we trek off working hard to build beta software that may not even work well on our machines, so we'll try the Kororaa live CD. Now there are some issues that some people in the open source community have with this CD. Basically the Kororaa live CD contains the binary video drivers for the ATI and NVidia graphics cards. The Kororaa guys do this to allow the most optimized 3D hardware acceleration for your video card so that the 3D desktop performs well. The issue that some people have is that the NVidia and ATI drivers are binary only (no sourcecode), and they say that distributing closed source drivers with GPL code may violate the GPL. I'm not up on the GPL enough to know anything about it, but I do prefer to use open source drivers when possible. I am not above using closed source drivers if they perform better (these do). I respect the right of ATI and NVidia to protect their market advantage by not releasing the details of their platforms and I thank them for supporting Linux. Now if a company came along that had cards that performed as well as these and had open source drivers, I'd be switching cards quickly.

Enough GPL and loyalty, let's look at some cool stuff.