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Qt4.4 is bringing in a media API with backends to DirectShow (Win), Quicktime (Mac) and a bunch of sound servers on Linux. Does gtk have anything remotely similar?

No. Why should it? This kind of stuff is handled by GStreamer and PulseAudio, each of which has its own development community (including a few companies) around it. Which means there is no single central power behind the development, for better or worse. Nokia participates in all of these projects, too.

While there have been some commits regarding the RV670 chipset, it's does not seem to be working just yet.
AMD needs to keep it's promise and release more documentation before any 2D/3D acceleration can be implemented. Let's keep our fingers crossed...

While there have been some commits regarding the RV670 chipset, it's does not seem to be working just yet.
AMD needs to keep it's promise and release more documentation before any 2D/3D acceleration can be implemented. Let's keep our fingers crossed...

Wow... some mod has your number...

Back on topic; I take exception to the example you give. Not only do KDE and Gnome work together, but KDE and Gnome both have their respective places. I know Gnome is more popular with most of the big-name distros but that does not change the fact that I cannot stand it :) I have tried to like Gnome many many times however its complete lack of configuration options quickly drives me up a wall.

I cannot stand gterm (or whatever the default terminal in Gnome is) compared to konsole. As an example, in konsole when you have multiple tabs open switching between tabs is as easy as shift-(right or left arrow); in Gnome's terminal it is some esoteric 3-button key combo. I also like having Konqueror set up with the tree view on the left and the konsole terminal at the bottom in the file browsing mode; though this is no longer available in Dolphin which I see is poised to replace Konqueror for file browsing :(

Having said this, I can see where some of the options are overwhelming to the new KDE user and I find myself setting up Gnome for new Linux converts rather than setting up KDE. This is because I am generally setting them up with Ubuntu and 90% of the posts on the Ubuntu forums assume you are running Gnome. The funny thing is, most people who see my KDE desktop after they have used Gnome for a while will usually ask about setting theirs up in a similar manner at some point. I cross that bridge when I get there though.

I can play SL on an ATi AGP x800 by checking out the latest code from the xf86-video-ati project.

Check em out here:
http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati.git;a=summary

I play flash on my 64bit computer.. natively.. in firefox.. no problems.. http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/

There's a standard for menu items - file format, storage location and some behaviour - which is I think is used by both KDE and Gnome menus already. Incidentally, the KDE menu & menu editor already do something like what you're proposing (KDE 3.5.8): Altering a system entry creates a local copy, which is then displayed in favour of the system one. I did not test to see if it handles the target program being removed gracefully, though.

One of the FD.o specs is "MIME actions".

The URL protocol registration is actually a defacto standard residing in the web client, like Firefox or IE. Both of those registries should be part of the OS, so all apps can use them - even if there's no desktop, like on a server.

One of the FD.o specs is "MIME actions".

The URL protocol registration is actually a defacto standard residing in the web client, like Firefox or IE. Both of those registries should be part of the OS, so all apps can use them - even if there's no desktop, like on a server.

Has KDE made any more progress in cross-desktop (eg. with GNOME) compatibility according to the FreeDesktop.org compatibility specs?

Other operating systems already have number 1, 2 and 6 on that list. Shows how far behind MS is!

how effective are the 3D drivers for the onboard Via Video chip.

Or swfdec

http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/

I've noticed the nouveau driver previously, but based on the status page I don't think they're ready: "Currently, there is some kind of 2D-support, and a very limited 3D support for extremely lucky developers. Yes, this statement has not changed for a long time, and yes, it is still valid. Also VT switching while X is running is known broken, if it worked for you, you were very lucky."

I agree with you on scanners. What about ATI video cards? The specs are being published. Surely there's a great demand for developers there. Or, contribute to the Nouveau project for nVidia cards.

I haven't been really impressed with the ALSA project's driver support, either. But it's probably not for lack of interested developers.

please have a look at http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/vaapi
the specs are not ready yet, but this promises to be the successor to the dated xvmc (that is basically only suitable for mpeg1/2), and intel is working hard to get it done soon.
if amd and nvidia decide to adopt it too, we may well have excellent hardware acceleration for modern video codecs (like mpeg4 and avc) soon.

unfortunately there is no roadmap on the project page. :/

How is what he said not true?

The last two releases of their Linux driver (100.14.11 and 100.14.19) haven't worked reliably for me; I kept getting system crashes and display corruption. Unfortunately, previous releases are incompatible with Xorg 1.4 and it'd be a pain to downgrade. (Since I don't really need 3D under Linux and I've got a 7300, I'm using Nouveau - it's more stable and the 2D acceleration is much better than the old nv driver.)

Note that the opensource drivers are only available in the recent releases on most distros. Some not so-recent releases did disable the R300 driver because it wasn't deemed stable enough (opensuse 10.0 come to mind).

So either the GP poster will have to update to a more recent release of his favorite distro (latest Ubuntu FF and openSUSE 10.2 have it enabled by default. I don't know about the others distro).

Or if he wants to keep his current installation for some reasons, he has to get the latest DRM (kernel drivers) and recompile them along with the Mesa3D library that corresponds to his X.org server.
(Note that older versions of Mesa3D are sensitive to versions of Xorg. If you start getting a lots of errors about undeclared stuff when compiling or missing functions at link time, then try to recompile a Mesa release with the same major and middle numbers as the one from your distro - i.e.: keep 6.5.x or 6.4.x depending on your Xorg).

If you read the instruction on Freedesktop linked above, it's not difficult at all.

Hi there ol' chap, have you used Linux in the past 5 years?

All of your points might have been valid 5 years ago, but in a modern distro, they are no longer true.

Icons looking horrible - http://tango.freedesktop.org/
Synaptic - On my Debian and Ubuntu installs, the menu says "Package manager". Ubuntu furthermore has "Install/remove programs" which is even simpler.
GIMP is Called the GNU Image manipulation program in my GNOME menu. Doesn't get much more obvious than that. Certainly clearer than Photoshop.

In short, join the 21st century - the century of Linux on the Desktop!

Is your version of Linux and actual Desktop machine? Is it one of the ones which tries to follow Freedesktop.org's guidelines? I ask because I have 2176 .desktop files, mostly in /usr/share/applications and ~/.local/share/applications. They are application launchers.The .desktop standard is on the Freedesktop.org wiki. Ten years is a long time to go without running into a .desktop file, considering KDE has been using them for as long as I can remember.

Until there's a more standardized desktop environment such that developers can target one one platform and know that they'll have broad Linux market reach, why would any company bother?

Um... there already is. OpenGL + SDL covers basically everything DirectX does (yes, DirectInput and all that). If you need environmental audio, you can use OpenAL, or roll your own as I gather Id did for Doom3 (and not just on Linux, on Windows as well - you need a patch for hardware audio). As a bonus, SDL apps run on Windows and OSX (along with several other platforms) as well.

Games don't care about the desktop, except for installing a menu item and/or an icon to run the game. And, well, there's a standard for that, too. Once they're running, they take over the screen anyway.

The issues with Linux gaming is entirely a chicken-egg market-share problem. There is just not any kind of technical barrier. Anyone doing a PS3 version is already doing an OpenGL version anyway, so a Linux port is actually quite easy at that point.

I agree, but let's come up with some specific examples for the OOo developers,

1. Use Tango Icons (another example).
2. Ditch the floating toolbars, dock everything by default.
3.1 Simplify the toolbar: only show toolbar icons by default that are used every hour (eg, open, save, bold/italics, etc.). Eg, I haven't tried 2.3 but in Ubuntu 2.2 there's a button to toggle AutoSpellCheck. It's not used that frequently -- move it to a dropdownlist. And then we might even see the OpenOffice.org help button.
3.2 Group toolbar items into tabs (call them the Office Ribbons if you want... the Office Ribbon is just a ripoff of Dreamweaver UI Tabs anyway and I'm sure they borrowed the idea from someone else. Stealing good ideas is a good thing).
4. Don't flicker in the spreadsheet when scrolling through lots of selected cells (eg, select a whole page and scroll)
5. Choose good default graph colours and design. Get gnome's jimmac to pick some... he may be colour blind but that guy knows colours.
6. Grey-out icons with alpha, not with a every-second-pixel-grey mesh.
7. Make better HTML output targetted at profiles of browsers... the current one doesn't understand shadows or borders, and with CSS3 you can support that stuff. For older browsers that don't support CSS3 drop shadows then fake it with nested DIVs or something.
8. Have a strict ISO OpenDocument profile to save documents as... not just ODF 1.0 but check for proprietary stuff all through the document.
9. Don't use Java for ODF... well allow it as an option but come up with some JavaScript syntax (Java is too heavy to type, prefer Javascript/Python/Ruby or something). Use a P4X syntax for accessing a document object.
10. Allow arbitrary border images. Allow acronyms and abbreviations for disabled users.

Some of these are probably addressed in 2.3... sorry for the dups :)

I think XP's pointer ballistics are the reason why the mouse feels smoother under windows -- it implements something akin to friction which assists in targeting UI elements. I doubt the XFree86/Xorg server is designed to insert a really tunable 'user experience' layer between the physical mouse and the pointer on the screen beyond the simple 'xset m'. Try the x2vnc experiment I mention in the bug and experience for yourself how mac/windows/linux differ in their mouse->pointer handling -- maybe you won't notice the difference.

I bought an Intel 965 based motherboard for my new computer because Intel have open source drivers but I've been disappointed at the lack of progress with them.

Given that 3d multimedia desktops are the new sexy which all distros seem to be getting into I'm surprised that there doesn't seem to be much progress on getting it fixed on what is (as far as I am aware) the only open-driver supported 3d hardware available (at least until AMD release their 3d specs).

Nice troll, Intel graphics are fine for desktop use and don't taint the kernel.

NVidia /ATI are okay until you hit a problem like this

I didn't say HAL was "part" of Linux, I said it was Linux-specific. From http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/hal:

Dependencies
Linux kernel 2.6.15 (or later)

The dependency on restricted non-modifiable fonts for web and print needs to be reduced....
Every script should have a free as in freedom working implementation.

Thankfully there are efforts underway to create a common open font set for the free desktop:
Check out the growing collection of open fonts released on the Unifont fontguide and the OFL font catalog". The freedesktop wiki lists the beginnings of a common open font set . The page needs updating though as some fonts have been released/freed since the last change.

We now have the community-approved license for fonts: the Open Font License , a growing community of open font designers a community of distribution packagers and a growing toolkit to do font design collaboratively.

Let's see what happens.

This package is a partial distribution of the X.org X11R7.2 release, built as a Universal package. It should run on any system running Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) or later. Please note that this is an experimental package, and has some features missing and also probably some bugs, but it's usable on a day-to-day basis. As such, it is mainly intended for developers who want to be able to work on parts of X without having to rebuild the whole thing. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. Please send any patches to x11app@bbyer.mm.st. The directory /usr/X11 will be created, and all files will be installed in that directory. This package contains all of the header files, libraries, fonts, the Xquartz server, and a new version of X11.app, located at /usr/X11/X11.app. Note that this does not (yet) contain any user applications (xterm, etc.), nor does it contain quartz-wm, so most users should also install Apple's X11User.pkg before proceeding. The latest version of this package, as well as the sources used to build it, may be found at http://people.freedesktop.org/~bbyer/.

http://people.freedesktop.org/~bbyer/

The Avivo guys (open source r500 drivers) would appreciate it I would think:

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=avivo/xf86-video- avivo.git;a=summary
http://www.phoronix.com/?page=project&q=AvivoDrive r

I can't find any indication that this is supported by DRI drivers.

Only in Linux as I understand it. There has been a few questions in the xorg@ mailing list about these chipsets and the general consensus is that the 3D portion is not likely to be implemented in BSD in the immediate future.

FYI, here is the DRI Wiki page dealing with Unichromes and such. You'd have to read it in conjunction with man 4x via to know it isn't just the CLE266 chipset it's referring to.

There's also the OpenChrome project here for more information about this chipset's 3D support, particularly this page which suggests a certain version of the Mesa source is required.

The problem with linking to the sf.net page is that Swfdec is no longer hosted on Sourceforge and you cannot remove projects from Sourceforge. The correct link with all the hot working stuff (including Youtube video playback) is on http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/ . You will probably not get any of the new hotness from the stuff hosted on Sourceforge.

And thanks for pimping my work,
Benjamin

• Gnash - (project development page)
  an open-source project which develops a Flashplayer which can be run stand-alone, be swallowed inside web browser using appropriate plug-ins, or integrated in bigger project using extensions. Supports OpenGL and Cairo as hardware accelerated renderer. Also, has an option not to auto-start playing the flash crapnimations.
• SWFDec
  an open-source library for decoding flash, which also comes with a browser plugin.

and TFA has a Flash ad...

Have you used a Linux desktop in the past few years? The freedesktop.org specs require a certain amount of metadata for application "shortcuts", which are used by KDE and Gnome to categorize and describe nearly every application in the menu. If you're willing to spend five seconds looking at your options, you'll have no difficulty finding a Linux equivalent for any common task.

It's easier to get Creative Audigy support in Linux that it is in any version of Windows in my experience. The drivers are already there in the kernel, so there's no need to deal with Creative's godawful driver mess they have. I would go as far as to say that Creative cards "Just Work(tm)" in Linux. You can also use them for audio mixing (i.e., in a DAW) via Jack and a realtime-patched kernel (I haven't gotten it to work with the lowlatency patch, but that might be because it isn't written for that yet; just stick with some multimedia Linux distro for a good realtime kernel). Also, expect many games in the future to rely on OpenAL (fully supported by Linux) for 3d sound since DirectX 10 and Vista have basically dropped the concept of hardware-accelerated 3d sound in favour of some new Vista sound system crap (software-mixed).

And NVidia supports their cards on Linux just as well as on Windows (minus the shitty replacement for the video settings). Sure, you might not be able to get support the day of release for a new NVidia card, but the support comes within a reasonable time. Also, the Nouveau project is working on a fully 3d-supported open source NVidia driver, so someday in the near future, you won't even need to download nor depend on NVidia's blobs.

Note that I said "fully open source", not "fully working", since bugs and gotchas still occur especially with hardware revisions that are not used by the developers; at least the bugs are fixable in OSS. However, I am nevertheless surprised that you have problems with Radeon 8500, which is certainly old enough that it should be both stable and fully working (see here for OSS radeon driver status). My own Radeon 9250 works perfectly, and it's a couple of revisions later hardware than the 8500. However, the default x.org configuration used AGP 1x, and when I tried to maximize performance I couldn't get it to run stably at AGP 8x, although AGP 4x works. There's no telling if the reason is my el-cheapo VIA motherboard (VIA is well known for hardware bugs) or some compatibility problem in the kernel or the radeon drivers. But nevertheless it worked out of the box on Debian unstable and has kept working for nearly two years now. Perhaps you could try updating to the latest x.org or even the nightly builds.

About 10 hours ago I put down a deposit on having an Intel Core 2 Duo based computer built for me so this is a bit late!

I chose Intel (Core 2 Duo CPU and 965G motherboard) because of the open video drivers they release (and I enjoy reading about them on planet.freedesktop.org). Hopefully these CPU bugs are just something that is theoretically scary but won't end up posing practical problems for me as a user.

• is closed source software
• is widely deployed and tested on other platforms
• has a stable well documented API
• uses COM for communication
• has a large brand recognition and there will a demand for it
• calls analyzer plugins based on file extension
• has a limited, unexpandable list of categories for files
• identifies files by mtime + uri
• uses wchar_t internally
• is file based
• has a documented API for querying the search daemon ( I do not know which protocol )
• has no command-line tools

This means that just as the existing programs are starting to come to terms, Google comes and returns the chaos on the desktop search scene. While I like Google internet search, their desktop offering has me feeling eerie. I would prefer using Mono over Googles closed source program. But even better is the ultra-efficient Strigi which will be part of KDE4 and indexes streams instead of files.

I don't see your point. You talk about ethernet drivers which are ususally low complexity drivers and use this as an argument to support your 3d driver claims.

People have *talked* about developing 3D drivers for modern GPUs for *years* and go figure they don't exist or are even anywhere near existing today. Its a horizontal market and there is a lot of demand for 3D so I don't see the excuse. I'll believe it can be done when someone actually does it.

As far as Intel... lets see Intel sells general purpose CPUs that need to interoperate within a wide range of operating environments. Intel has to release the specs in order for this to be achivable to the mutual benefit of all parties.

NV and AMD are interested only in winning their bloody GPU war and have no interoperability requirements or constraints. Giving away their secrets/work/whatever you want to call it at this level is of no advantage to these companies and I think this is all pretty obvious. Why is this so hard for some to understand?

[Considering] the fact that the "nv" driver is buggy there is a lot of room left to improve on here.

Definitely. Having a high-quality open source drivers is not just about having 3D support. As is, there's simply a choice between a mostly-good proprietary driver and a horrible, incomplete open source driver.

"nv" driver does not support all cards, has bad artifacts on my GeForce 6150, and fails to use DVI on large video modes with "NV(0): Mode "1920x1200" is larger than BIOS programmed panel size of 1280 x 1024. Removing.". (See bug 3654.) The nvidia people on the bug (look at the email addresses) said that they couldn't fix it with any but the latest GPU. That's obviously false...the proprietary drivers work fine.

nVidia won't fix the open source driver or give anyone else the information to do so, so a reverse-engineering effort is necessary.

More information on the S3TC software patent stupidity:

http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/S3TC

> Intel "getting it" and releasing Open Source drivers and full specs.

Actually, Intel has not released docs for their GMA X3000. Their current stance is that the driver is the documentation. That's fine and good, except the driver is still very incomplete (missing OpenGL features, no XvMC, no tv-out, etc.). See here:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2007-Ma y/024582.html

Yes, that's another good option. Similarly the nouveau project for reverse-engineering Nvidia's closed, proprietary, probably-infringing-patents hardware is coming along nicely. But ... if buying new hardware then the chance for the market to reward an OPEN piece of hardware and simultaneously save on power is too good an opportunity to miss. Intel are really doing the right thing right now and it would be good to see the market confirm their strategy.

Or you could use an R100, R200, or R300 based ATI card. They're not hard to find, relatively inexpensive, and still powerful enough for a casual gamer (at least R300s are, possibly R200). Oh, forgot to mention that they have mostly full open source drivers written already.

It's not Xorg 7.3 that's packaged with Fedora, but Xorg 7.2 with the xorg-server 1.3.0 release. It still features very interesting software, like, for example, noveau, a free reimplementation of NVIDIA's hardware-accelerated 3D-drivers (still work in progress, of course), as well as a kernel patched with the all-new and highly anticipated mac802.11-subsystem that whould yield much better compatibility and performance for all things WLAN. I also like this idea of "Revisor", an application easily allowing for building customized bootable (install-)media with specific packages only.

Intel graphics cards have historically been bad options for OpenGL and 3D apps in Linux.

That is most definitely not the case now. Intel cards are certainly not speed demons, but they work quite well as they have good open source drivers written by Intel themselves. Intel employs several of the main X.org hackers, including Keith Packard. Also see this announcement.

I would recommend an Intel graphics card over an Nvidia or ATI for a Linux machine unless you plan on playing demanding games like Quake 4 or Doom 3 (for which I'd suggest an Nvidia). I would never recommend an ATI card that requires the use of fgrlx (that's any X1000 or X2000 series card at the moment).