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The raster graphics are horrible. I realize that redesigning the rendering system will be arduous and time consuming. But I think it wold be nice if the *nix rendering system would advance past the 70's.

Also, they weren't built for those drivers, wtf are you talking about? They use OpenGL for 3D. OPENGL. Not a direct driver interface. The whole POINT of drivers are to be a middleman between the standardized OS interfaces and the hardware.

But there are parts of OpenGL that simply don't work with free software drivers. If you make these parts a requirement for your program to work you're excluding free software users. S3TC is the most common example. Many games that should work fine with free software drivers don't because the author used S3TC by default and wrote the S3TC detection functionality in a buggy way. If I wrote software that used DRI/Mesa functionality that wasn't available in the ATI and Nvidia binary drivers I would be excluding users of those drivers in the same way.

...

And I don't. The chance that the binary drivers will EVER become opensource is about nil. I want good 3D, I NEED good 3D for my work. So no choice here. Also, I don't like an X server with artificially crippled functionality.

Then the goal you've picked is distinctly different than the goal of free software. If you're developing an X server where "crippled" OpenGL drivers will be excluded then I would be right to warn others that you're X server limits their freedom. I hope there are enough free software users who value their freedom to prevent closed drivers becomming a requirement in the X server.

Here you can find current information on cards supported by DRI. ATI Radeons up to the rv280 chipset, the Matrox cards, most of the Intel chipsets, the S3 Virge, the SiS 300 series, and the VIA/Unichrome chipsets all have accelerated drivers available. Several more are in active development, DRI is fairly new remember.

it means Google's GTalk client will be ported to Linux

Actually, it _should_ be stored in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/nautilus (or perhaps $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gnome/nautilus), according to the XDG base directory spec.

the commit
it looks suspisiously very much like a planted backdoor rather than a fix. Egbert Eich works for SuSE.

Home land security is WAY behind on things OR eweek is way behind on things. This was fixed back in March and ONLY affects X.org 6.9 adn 7.0 so Mac OS X is unaffected.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6213

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-Ap ril/014874.html

The exploit mentioned in this article cannot be exploited by a user who isn't logged into your system - you have to be able to run the Xorg command with certain options. See X.Org's advisory at http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-Ma rch/013992.html

Well he was correct check out

the diff and the notice

Well he was correct check out

the diff and the notice

The poorly-written article is all over the place, talking a little about the X11 protocol, hyping this Coverity company, without linking to the actual security advisory. The problem is in newer versions of X.org X11 (6.9.0 and 7.0.0). Apple's X11.app should be unaffected. The mention of Apple was a complete red herring thrown in by the author of the article, who clearly didn't understand what he was typing.

The relevant security advisory is here:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-Ma rch/013992.html

A new problem, announced today, (which actually affects versions of X.org X11 that most Slashdot users might actually be running) is here:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-Ma y/015136.html

Hope that helps! That steaming pile claiming to be an article sure as hell didn't!

The poorly-written article is all over the place, talking a little about the X11 protocol, hyping this Coverity company, without linking to the actual security advisory. The problem is in newer versions of X.org X11 (6.9.0 and 7.0.0). Apple's X11.app should be unaffected. The mention of Apple was a complete red herring thrown in by the author of the article, who clearly didn't understand what he was typing.

The relevant security advisory is here:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-Ma rch/013992.html

A new problem, announced today, (which actually affects versions of X.org X11 that most Slashdot users might actually be running) is here:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-Ma y/015136.html

Hope that helps! That steaming pile claiming to be an article sure as hell didn't!

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/X11R7.0/patch es/xorg-server-1.0.1-geteuid.diff

I think you owe the GP an apology.

Replying to myself here. It looks like the problem mentioned in the article was found six weeks ago:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-Ma rch/013992.html

It seems the advisory I linked to in the parent was actual news, as opposed to the press-release for Coverity linked from the Slashdot front page.

What a novel concept

actual code patch:

--- programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/common/xf86Init.c.orig 2006-03-17 23:30:10.0000
00000 +0200
+++ programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/common/xf86Init.c 2006-03-17 23:29:35.0000
00000 +0200
@@ -1376,7 +1376,7 @@
          } /* First the options that are only allowed for root */
- if (getuid() == 0 || geteuid != 0)
+ if (getuid() == 0 || geteuid() != 0)
      {
          if (!strcmp(argv[i], "-modulepath"))
          {
@@ -1679,7 +1679,7 @@
      }
      if (!strcmp(argv[i], "-configure"))
      {
- if (getuid() != 0 && geteuid == 0) {
+ if (getuid() != 0 && geteuid() == 0) {
                ErrorF("The '-configure' option can only be used by root.\n");
                exit(1);
          }

Bug:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6213

The impression I get is that it shouldn't be easily exploitable. By default, Gentoo (and any sensible distro) configures X11 to disable remote connections. Also, you should have some sort of firewall blocking the relevant ports anyway. If it is really exploitable, the attacker would probably need access to the machine anyway (at which point, you're largely already screwed).

Not reading the article doesn't seem to be much of a problem. It's really not very clear. For example, is this a problem with X.org X11 specifically? Is Apple's X11.app affected? The article just says the problem is with "The X Window System", without mentioning any particular implementations.

It took some digging to find the actual advisory:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-Ma y/015136.html

So, how is this different from this? I haven't read enough of either, they could be related...

it was a missing pair of parentheses:

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/X11R7.0/patch es/xorg-server-1.0.1-geteuid.diff

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-Ma rch/013992.html

it was a missing pair of parentheses:

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/X11R7.0/patch es/xorg-server-1.0.1-geteuid.diff

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-Ma rch/013992.html

Supply full GPL/BSD licensed source code to the X.org and kernel.org for inclusion in mainline.

They're not going to do that. If for no other reason than their own texture compression technology (S3TC) which they license to other video card makers (namely ATI and Nvidia, as well as MS for DirectX drivers).

Even if they were to release the souce you probably couldn't use it unless they granted some kind of license to use the patented algorithms freely. And they haven't done that to date despite lobbying by various people (including Alan Cox).

Of course, people who actually know this have been saying it everytime someone says "open up the source!" to video card makers, and most people still don't get it. Sigh.

In this case, I totally agree with the FCC Commissioner.

Everyone should get DRM set up as soon as possible.

we have open source drivers for Nvidia as well as Ati graphic adapters. Just not for 3D. Maybe someone that actually does develope for X11 should comment here. AFAIK Nvidia and Ati release the specs for their cards to work in 2D mode on a regular basis. So everything except 3D games (many of which are prorpietary themselves) works. I also heard that Ati stopped supplying their specs for 2D for their latest offerings.

Personally I can understand both sides. AFAIK Ati and Nvidia are in a patent cold war. As soon as one of them opens their drivers the other will sue big time. Unfortunately.

I purchased an Ati Radeon 9200 for which the open source 3D drivers work very well. Ati once released the specs for their DirectX 8 line of adapters and the community quickly built drivers. Those are Radeon 8500 and the likes ( http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon ). Check I get about 2250 fps on Glxgears. I can play Quake3 and UT and they look very good. I should try the Ati closed source drivers for comparison, but have been too lazy, since my setup works very well.

I chose the Radeon 9200 based on the fact that open source drivers exist. And even though I do understand the free software movement and I think they are right I still use closed source for reasons of convenience (shame on me). The real reason why I went with open source is because they integrate so well with my Debian system. It just works. Easier than jumping through the hoops of installing all the closed source stuff. If you ever administered a Debian system you know what I am talking about when I say it's so easy when I can just pull it out of the official repository (which I often can, because it is so huge).

Linux doesn't have to be fat, it can be slimmed. That's how it runs on embedded systems. THe problem is X is huge, and not just the core X but once you add all of the things people expect, it takes a lot of ram and disk space.

The oft trotted out complaint that X is behind all the problems. I hate to break it to you but X is actually quite small if required, and highly adaptable. X is actually used for embedded systems, precisely because it is small (or can be made small). Here's a nice article on X and GTK+ in an embedded device. They managed to crunch an X and GTK+ based GUI down into only 2.9 MB, smaller than the QPE solution they were considering. It is quite possible to have X and a functioning GUI toolkit squeezed into a tiny space. The "things that come with it" that take up so much memory are things like Firefox and OpenOffice and a whole host high detail icons and whatnot. Try reading xrestop instead of top when you want to see how your memory is getting used - the figures that top reports are massively distorted.

Jedidiah.

Maybe that's why you can find this project at http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Portland

Most of what this project seems to be after is pretty simple, good idea stuff. For instance, their Integration Tasks page lays down some pretty good ideas like being able to make sure that a newly installed program has icons in both GNOME and KDE menus and desktops, having shared preferred apps so that if I love Epiphany it'll come up whenever I click on a link, irregardless of if I'm using a GNOME or KDE app, heck even a shared keyring/wallet.

I heartily embrace good, platform neutral tools like this, not just for the sake of the GNOME and KDE camps, but because portable tools would be good for XFCE, Fluxbox, and all the other apps/window managers/desktops out there. Just because I change from one program to another doesn't mean my prefences and passwords should.

Isn't that Linux desktop unification what FreeDesktop.org is supposed to do?

I've been running KDE apps on GNOME and vice-versa for years, largely thanks to the work of Freedesktop.org at getting them to use common drag-n-drop, system menus, and notification area. So based on the incredible lack of information in the article, I had to wonder... WTF does this do that isn't already possible?

The Portland project page isn't particularly informative either -- the description is too low-level: "we're going to create two interfaces." OK, two interfaces to do what?

The Integration Tasks page actually provides information about what kinds of things they want to do: make sure apps built for both desktops will talk to the screen saver in the same way, deal with power management, share preferences like default apps, etc.

Sounds like a logical continuation of FreeDesktop.org's efforts so far, and something that will improve matters for people like me who like some apps from one desktop and some from the other.

It actually looks pretty handy, like a 3D Alt+Tab.

You mean like XGL does?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xgl

http://www.freedesktop.org/~davidr/xgl-demo1.xvid. avi

Actually, Firefox 3.0 could take advantage of your spiffy GPU because Gecko 1.9 will be drawing on Cairo or WP Cairo which will be accelerated by Glitz

not to get in a nit picking war, but fribidi was started by an Israeli

http://webcvs.freedesktop.org/fribidi/fribidi/AUTH ORS?rev=1.11&view=markup

Dov Grobgeld
        * Initial author.

and is now maintained by an Iranian.

Behdad Esfahbod
        * Current maintainer, Added explicit bidi support, fixed all
        conformance bugs, changed the library to use bitmasks, rewrote
        many things, removed glib dependency.

but have they fixed the runaround that they put you through just to play MP3's?

Out of the box?

In short, no.

But here is how you do it
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/download/fedora5. html

Heh, funny that you mentioned monkeys flinging FUD. It is the Ximian primates (yes, they call themselves that) who are spreading FUD against KDE and paying [linuxtoday.com] Google to display GNOME sites when people are searching for KDE applications [kde-apps.org].

You call that FUD? Do you even know what FUD is, even though you're doing it right now? The Ximian ads didn't say KDE eats babies.

But hey, now you've demonstrated you have a clear bias and have no interest on defending freedom in software. You just want to slander a project because a company helping its development paid google ads for search terms related to your beloved desktop.

Get a life.

Care to name which? KDE is building a backend-independent multimedia framework called Phonon which will be ready by the release of KDE4. This framework will allow KDE-based multimedia apps:

Kaffeine
AmaroK
KMPlayer

to work well with backends such as Xine, which are GPLed and which have copyleft protection against DRM. GNOME, on the other hand, is stuck with DRM-crippled GStreamer.

Blah, blah, blah. Changelog from Amarok 1.4beta-2:

Equalizer for the GStreamer-0.10 engine

And juk, kaffeine, kiss and more are listed here. Go to their webs and notice they have a GST backend too, it's not an invention on the gstreamer page.

About your wonderful phonon that will save everyone from evil gstreamer, there's no guarantee that it will be used in KDE 4. Hell, it's not even sure it will ever be finished, since it's another product of the NIH syndrome some paranoid KDE hackers seem to suffer ("gstreamer is used in gnome! let's not use it although many KDE apps already proved it's worthy!").

P.S.: Thanks for the link to the gnome google ads news. Read here:

Ximian CEO Defends Google AdWords Campaign, Will Not Create New Ads

Noting the past history of the the KDE and GNOME organizations, Friedman said the ads are "not the first volley over the wall", citing an incident in 1999 where Friedman and Ximian co-founder Miguel de Icaza purchased the "gnome-support.com" domain preparatory to launching a company centered around professional support and services for the GNOME desktop (what eventually became Ximian). According to Friedman, within weeks of purchasing the domain, KDE developer Martin Konold purchased "gnome-support.de" and redirected traffic to the KDE web site. Though Konold still owns the domain, it no longer redirects to KDE's pages.

You know, thanks to zealots and brainless fanboys like you, cases like those two ones are easy to find on the two projects. So let's stop the FUD flinging, huh?

Unfortunately for GNOME, they can't remove all choice; I can still choose to use KDE, because KDE chooses to let me customize it any way I want instead of being forced into the defaults GNOME wants. And, please, don't point out GConf, unless you can point to a list of what every single key (at least for a given application) in GConf does.

I swear, every release of GNOME adds to the eye candy, and removes from the usability. And to think I once advocated GNOME over KDE.

I'm saddened to hear of the suffering that the ongoing changes in GNOME have caused in your life. I, also, have experienced some frustration at desktop environment features that didn't work to my liking. However, when I encountered this situation, I simply moved on and chose a tool that worked better for me. The alternative I chose was XFCE.

This page links to the web sites for many of the alternative desktop environments for Linux. Perhaps one of them will provide a more satisfying experience for you.

Even if none of those have what you need, take heart. I understand that both Apple Computer, Inc. and the Microsoft Corporation sell software with similar desktop features....

Having seen Novell's demo on XGL, I'm utterly impressed. It will be great if Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 comes with Compiz and XGL.

I liked how in one of the videos apps that freeze or are unresponsive turn black and white to indicate they're "dead". It seems that with depth of field and lighting you could do quite a bit with the UI to hint at an application or window's state.

For example, as a dialog boxes pops up, at the same time the underlying windows might drop back and fall into a zone that is out of focus, or perhaps individual windows might literally "pop" up (growing larger with larger shadows). The shadows themselves could be "real" I would imagine, and the shadow could be generated via a virtual light source which could be moved manually or automatically throughout the day.

In short, some of the stuff I've seen seems to have been brought over from OS X, but the power of GLX and AIGLX seem seem to open up a whole new world of GUI possibilities. The zoom effect, combined with vector graphics seems to offer quite a bit to those with visual impairments, for example. Is there a place where UI gurus are talking about new effects that may not only provide eye candy, but increase the usability and even suggest new analogies or interactive effects to make computing easier/better?

As a Novell employee I disagree on all of your arguments but one - the kde versus gnome - I wish we could pick one but that ain't happening.

Yast and Redcarpet: Integrating redcarpet into yast was the right way to go. Since redcarpet (from Ximian) and Yast (from Suse) were able to collaborate and come out with a better solution shows that they have vision and execute the vision.

AppArmor vs SeLinux: see security wars Summary: Novell buys a best of breed security solution, then gives it to the community. RedHat wines: "In my opinion, Novell wants to split the market...".

Xgl vs Xegl: I don't see any confusion here, I think maybe you mean aiglx Xegl is a completely new Xserver. So to compare the three projects: Xegl = really hard, Xgl = hard, aiglx = easy.
I think the confusion around this comes from redHat. Novell chose Xgl, RedHat chose aiglx, Novell gets the credit, Redhat complains. Xegl is still a ways off.

Novell is putting significant investment into open source software (OpenOffice, Hula, Evolution, Xgl, AppArmor, Yast, iFolder, Gnome, KDE, SAMBA, and the kernel itself, and I'm sure other projects I'm not aware of) Despite the complaining from RedHat they deserve some respect.

With all that, it will it takes time to build momentum. Without a doubt the momentum for Linux from Novell is building, investors are simply upset that Novell is not there yet. The fact that Novell is number one in China is a signficant accomplishment that will result in revenue in the future.

A full OpenGl desktop will be problematic when you want to run a 'windowed' version of Quake in for example,

Ekhm....
1. Download http://www.freedesktop.org/~davidr/xgl-demo1.xvid. avi.
2. Skip to 6m 55s.
3. Observe.
4. Guess what accelerated indirect GL mean.

Let's see. The GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap extension was developed jointly by David Reveman and some guys from nVidia, according to the credits on the spec. So not Red Hat. Reveman and Matthias Hopf have been everywhere on the X/Mesa mailing lists developing Xgl. The discussion and debate on the xorg list was all about Xgl and whether it should be the main focus instead of Exa. People who don't seem to be associated with any corp like David Airlie and Jon Smirl have been working on Xgl. The plan had seemed to be to move various parts of the driver code to do with initializing the cards into the kernel, use EGL as a simple GL interface that Xgl then ran on top of, with Xglx being a short term hack until that work was completed.

Now Red Hat appear, apparently with the backing of nVidia, saying that actually this plan - which had been discussed for ages - is a bad one, and they have a brilliant new plan. Oh and by the way Evil Novell have been hoarding code and not working with the community.

So when did this AIGLX work appear in CVS then? I don't recall reading about any such branch. Let's find out shall we? Hmm, looks like it was committed in a massive checkin about a month ago. Did Kristian just magic this out of thin air one afternoon? I rather hope not.

So anyway, my point is that from my perspective what Red Hat are saying appears to be the exact inverse of the truth. Novell have been far more visible in the X community doing this sort of work than Red Hat have, they've done a lot of the upstream Mesa work necessary for it to be efficient, they've been demoing it at conferences and so on. And now Red Hat is here trying to claim they went off and did their own thing, with no real evidence to back it up.

And it's not just Red Hat, somehow Novell went off and created an entirely new window manager as they were testing what Xgl could do instead of extending an existing one. Oops! Bah. Huge, massive communications failure at best. Blatant NIH at worst.

Gtk uses cairo to render everything (buttons, etc). Cairo is a vector graphics library. Thus, it is already all vectorized. Many Gnome and KDE themes are also vectorized, with SVG icons and window decorations.

As of Qt4, KDE will also have a vectorized toolkit.

And, really cool, Cairo has something called glitz, which uses GL to render. Therefore, all of these really cool scalable desktops will get measurably faster once the X server starts using GL in a big way. Check out the following links for more info on vector stuff:

• http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9609
• http://www.stellingwerff.com/

I don't mean to troll, but what the heck is wrong with the Fedora-type people that they think incrementally improving the X server is a good idea? I've looked into the source and its full of 30-year old code. The 'best practices' for a 0.1 MIPS machine is just cruft on a 1000 MIPS one.

The xgl people are actually rewriting the X server from scratch to use opengl. That is a much, much better idea, and it shows with what they can *already* do:

* virtual desktops on a cube
* popup effect for menus
* "gummi-bear" window effect when moving, sticks to other windows / side of screen
* translucenty
* gl screensaver on root window
* shadows
* fading
* magnification
* apple-style expose (show all windows non-overlapping)
* accellerated 3d games (quake) and movies
* make non-responsive windows go grey
etc

You can see the video at:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-Ja nuary/011922.html
(click link for the movie)

This is I think using an existing Xserver to give an opengl window, which can be running a software opengl for unsupported cards, and then their xgl server using that as the opengl backend until the drivers are ready. Which basically means people will be able to get the eye candy slowly on computers and force nvidia/ati/intel to support the server with a driver. Eventually xgl gets a native opengl driver for you hardware and runs as a 'normal' X server (only without all the crap from 30 years of evolution).

"XGL is a different X server. This is a more incremental change which is slated to become part of Xorg. We don't believe that replacing the entire X server is the right path, and that improving it incrementally is a better way to modernize it. After talking to people at xdevconf, it felt like much of the upstream Xorg community shares this view. You can search Adam Jackson's notes for "large work for Xgl" to get the blow-by-blow or NVidia's presentation from XDevConf 2006 on using the existing model.

We've been working on the AIGLX code for a some time with the community, which is in direct contrast with the way that XGL was developed. XGL spent the last few months of its development behind closed doors and was dropped on the community as a finished solution. Unfortunately, it wasn't peer reviewed during its development process, and its architecture doesn't sit well with a lot of people.

The other question is Wait, can I use compiz? The answer there is a theoretical yes, although no one has actually gotten it to work. We love compiz and we think it's great stuff and is well polished, but it's often confused with the underlying architecture of XGL. Much like the code that we've added to metacity, compiz is a composite manager. With a bit of work, it should be possible to get compiz working on this X server. There's an excellent post from Soren on the topic of compiz vs. metacity."

For most distributions you will need to complile e17 modules. They can be found here: http://enlightenment.freedesktop.org/ I have done this for my Slackware 10.2 distro and seems to be operating well. There one distribution I know of with enlightenment installed and it is Vector Linux SOHO edition.

The new GNOME looks great, but it certainly doesn't match the effects of Vista. Check it out: 3d window stacking, hardware alpha blending with blurring, etc. It'll be a long time before the freedesktop guys get Cairo and XGL working to the compatibility, quality and speed of DirectX. Xorg composite still crashes for me frequently.

You are wrong of course, but you knew that before you posted.

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Home

Many of the Linux desktops are as usable if not more usable than M$ Windows. I have many non-computer literate users with Linux desktops happily operating.

Heck even my three year old can start the computer boot Linux, select the correct KDE menus and run Supertux, enter the game and start playing.

Are you really saying you are less able than a three year old to operate a computer running Linux?

http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/

rgds

Actually, they might be up to more than you'd imagine ;)

Though strictly not a 'gnome' thing, the Luminoscity/Compviz development-trials for XGL are _quite_ entertaining (talk about eye-candy), try http://www.freedesktop.org/~davidr/xgl-demo1.xvid. avi

Have fun!

Also, Jon Smirl's excellent roundup of Linux graphics is worth reading.

Also, Jon Smirl's excellent roundup of Linux graphics is worth reading.

"Yet that Novell lacks the balls to openly admit that it's inspired by OS X and Expose goes to show what losers they are."

Have you looked at the code?

http://cvs.freedesktop.org/xorg/app/glxcompmgr/plu gins/expose.c?rev=1.2&view=markup

The plugin is called, let's see, expose. (it will probably be renamed due to legal reasons though).

"Xgl has already been checked into the public repositories, Compiz will be checked in after David Reveman's presentation at the X conference."

Which is Feb, 8th at 10am PST.. Also the XGL code has been available for some time. Browse the CVS. I'm somewhat expecting an update of the code tomorrow too.