Same here! Trawling around forums and mailing lists to try and get Beryl working on my old desktop with a cheap-ass SiS integrated motherboard was quite a learning experience. Dead-ends all around.

Also learned what hardware acceleration was all about and that my motherboard's VGA chip specifically didn't support it. The first thing I did after saving up for a new laptop was install gentoo+beryl+gnome on it and rotate my desktop cube in all its hardware accelerated glory. Fun times!