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This is, so far as I can tell, due to the highly modular nature of Linux

Given that the same problems appear on *BSD, Solaris, etc., it's not due to the anything of Linux, unless it's "the X11-based window system of Linux".

there is no one pasteboard implementation, or even one pasteboard API that can be implemented by different libraries, that all apps can count on having available to them on all Linux systems.

Actually, there is a pasteboard/clipboard mechanism that all toolkits can count on and, if they all use it, apps can count on it as well. It's the X11 "selections" mechanism, combined with the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD selections from the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual; see the X11 clipboard convention document.

Radeon Driver Feature Matrix

The RV700 are similar to R600 series, so the rightmost columns apply to RV700 too.

Is there a place that has the current state of the Radeon support in the various drivers lined up that's possible for someone who isn't a developer to make sense of?

When I was putting together my current box last week, trying to figure out which card was better to get was a pain when it came to the AMD hardware. I ended up getting the GTX 260, because it was the best performing card that fit into my budget and I knew it would work fine under Linux.

I couldn't make any sense of the state of the drivers for Radeon hardware. I gathered that the radeonhd driver was the actively developed one, but RV7XX hardware wasn't listed as supported. The latest catalyst drivers didn't list support for the 4850/4870 either, so hearing that both drivers have working 3D support for a card not yet released is... not really odd, but the contradictions are symptomatic.

We need a REAL microkernel. You know, a kernel which has userspace filesystems. Userspace graphics. Userspace USB drivers. All the messy bits of sound (like network transparency, mixing and resampling) in userspace.

Oh, wait.

For those of you who didn't get the joke, look up http://fuse.sourceforge.net/, http://libusb.sourceforge.net/ and http://www.x.org/ for starters.

While AMD has done a good thing and released a lot of documentation for their cards, it has not been source code, and has not yet included the necessary bits for acceleration (either 2D or 3D). That said, I'm watching what I'm typing right now courtesy of the surprisingly functional radeonhd driver being developed by the SUSE folks for Xorg from this documentation release. While lacking acceleration, it's already more stable and lacks the numerous show-stopper bugs present in ATI's fglrx binary blob.

Dunno yet if this latest greatest chunk of silicon is supported, but being open source and actively developed, I'm sure that support will arrive sooner rather than later.

And the DRM kernel stuff will be getting upgrades soon

http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Linux_Weather_Forecast/hardware#The_TTM_memory_manager
http://www.x.org/wiki/ttm
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/DRI2

And the DRM kernel stuff will be getting upgrades soon

http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Linux_Weather_Forecast/hardware#The_TTM_memory_manager
http://www.x.org/wiki/ttm
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/DRI2

So it is perhaps MS that is paying for our open source radeonhd driver? See http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonhd...

Other than the specs released back in September, have AMD even released full specifications to their full range of GPU's yet?

I was speaking to a X driver developer on IRC a few weeks back, and in the course of discussion, he claimed AMD hadn't yet released specs for the 3D engine of *any* of their GPU's yet. Is this true?

... but I am as confident as I am that the Sun will rise tomorrow that it will be safe from terrorists. After all, we have the children to think about.

July 12, 2005

Copyright © 2005 Michael David Crawford.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

It seems that David Clark, who led the development of the Internet way back in the '70's - did you know there even was a '70's? - wants to create a whole new Internet that will fix many of the problems the current Internet is plagued with. The New Internet's engineers will be much more careful this time around to make sure it works better than the first one did.

I'm afraid, though, that the engineers are not the only ones who will be deciding how our New Internet will work.

If one is able to find any privacy or anonymity in this New Internet, it will be because of some undiscovered security hole, which will be quickly repaired, rather than any kind of conscious design decision. Probably one reason they are accepting proposals before rolling it out is to avoid the sort of accidental security holes that enable pr0n, peer-to-peer filesharing and left-wing political activism.

Microsoft, a leading contributor both to this nation's technology base and to the campaign coffers of its leaders, will embrace this new technology and extend it in such a way that the development and dissemination of Open Source software will be, if not mathematically and physically impossible, at least as intractible as factoring a 2048-bit public key.

Imagine, if you will, Trusted Computing implemented at the router level, in such a way that any packets that go farther than one hop are certified not only to support protocols whose patent licenses are fully paid-up and on file with the legal department in Redmond, but whose content is compliant with the Windows standard. The faintest whisp of a Public License, GNU or otherwise, will result in the dropping not only of the individual packet, not only in the cancellation of the entire file transmission, but, within microseconds, the reporting of the physical location of the offending server to responsible law enforcement personnel. The identities of its rogue administrators will be fetched instantly from the database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. (You will have to submit fingerprints and DNA samples to obtain a Windows server license, as after all, Internet servers can be used to disseminate explosives r

My complaint is more that X11 does not seem to have moved forward with the rest of the system and has remained in the same state as it was in Tiger rather than adopting the new colorscheme of Leopard. X11 windows are darker when they're in the background than Leopard windows (making them seem to be active).

Does the latest Xquartz from http://www.x.org/wiki/XDarwin fix that?

You might not have heard, but these days the X.Org Foundation is the one running the show and making the reference implementation (latest being X11R7.2 as of now). If you've used a desktop-oriented distribution of Linux within the last five years, chances are that it came equipped with it as the default choice.

In any case, I'm not exactly sure about what cause would be served by changing the base protocol.

You might not have heard, but these days the X.Org Foundation is the one running the show and making the reference implementation (latest being X11R7.2 as of now). If you've used a desktop-oriented distribution of Linux within the last five years, chances are that it came equipped with it as the default choice.

In any case, I'm not exactly sure about what cause would be served by changing the base protocol.

``You could implement something similar to this today with an X10 system or the like...''

Dude, we've been using X11 for some time now! X10 has been obsolete for almost exactly 20 years...

I have a hard time imagining why you would think there could be things that could not be done remotely.

As others have pointed out, you can do a lot of things (I would say every kind of maintenance) remotely over SSH. That basically allows you to do everything that doesn't require a graphical user interface. If you do need the graphical user interface, you're in luck, though. One of the hidden strengths of Unix is that GUI is provided by X, which can be accessed over the network. A convenient and secure way to do this is by tunenling it through SSH (try ssh -X user@host xterm, for example). Even if that isn't enough (e.g. because you're on a machine without an X server), you can even access your desktop through RFB.

Of course, you can't perform any maintenance that requires physical access to the machine remotely. However, in all my years working with *nix systems remotely, I have never needed physical access.

You don't have 11R7.2 yet?

"We would still be thankful for RMS though. "

Thank you, Richard!

Thank you, Richard!

Thank you, Richard!

Thank you, Richard!

Thank you, Richard!

Thank you, Richard!

Thank you, Richard!

Thank you, Richard! And happy birthday!

The current development release is 7.3, currently scheduled to be released in May.

There are some details on the release page on the Freedesktop wiki.

From that page:

X11R7.2 supports Linux, BSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and GNU Hurd systems. It incorporates significant stability and correctness fixes, including improved autoconfiguration heuristics, enhanced support for GL-based compositing managers such as Compiz and Beryl, and improved support for PCI systems with multiple domains. It also incorporates the new, more extensible XACE security policy framework.

Release notes should be on the download page, they're marked 'forthcoming' at the moment, but wait a day or two and they should appear.

Why don't you go read the X11R7.2 changelog?

The inclusion of XCB is one of the major changes. It replaces the fuctionality of Xlib, but offers an Xlib compatibility layer. XCB is the way of the future, my good man.

There have been some major code cleanups. There is Intel i965 chipset support. There are numerous workarounds to support the shitpile that is Fedora Core. The built-in keyboard driver has been removed.

But many open source projects can't even predict a release date accurately. Take the X.org project. X11R7.2 was scheduled for release on December 11, 2006. Of course, it's now nearly half-way through February of 2007, and we have yet to see this release. Does anyone know when this will actually be released?

Keep in mind that the open source developers basically have some control over when they release their software. Contrast this to the weather, which in many instances is quite unpredictable, even with years of data to work with.

X.

(Alas, the purity of the answer must be diluted with sufficient text to subvert the system.)

Its Bill's old tried and true: "you must be a luddite if you can't operate X"

Wouldn't this be bigger?

The nouveau project is actively working on a free software driver for nVidia cards that will hopefully replace the nv driver one of these days. They could use some help.

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/nv

X-Windows *IS* a mess.

GUIs were mostly an afterthought.

No, your distro or X packages, since it is modular, got updated versions. Read http://x.org/ The press release even states they are released the same except for the changed the build system.

I wish I had mod points. Your comments about X.org are spot on. The resultant binaries are the same. X.org 7.0 is just the modularized source for X.org 6.9. I mean, geez. It's the second item on their web page!

Um, there is no body that has oversight for the Linux kernel. As a public service announcement for you, most of what people call "Linux" is actually the Linux kernel plus the GNU Free Unix base and a windowing layer. There is no maintaner because the because the various licences that cover these code bases (including the gpl v2) are permissive. You are allowed to use the code as long as you list in your own documentation where the code came from and who it is copyrighted to. Usually, there are conditions in a particular license where derivative code must be released under the same license. Some licences such as the gpl require you to publish your source code while others such as the bsd license doesn't require this and also allows commercial use without any payment.

why do all these posts turn into Windows vs Linux arguments, usually sprouted by people who know not much, or nothing at all, about linux.

They don't do so nearly as often as you think, actually. They turn into arguments made by people who you assume know nothing about Linux. But that says more about your assumptions than about the other people.

How many of your apps have shipped as part of a major Linux distro for the better part of a decade?

The model reviewed by the article is just one of several types of Linux laptops sold by R Cubed Technologies, ranging in price from $999 to $1,454. I really think you're getting a better buying one of these Linux laptops than buying a Dell laptop where you have to pay the Micro$oft tax or one of those exhorbitantly expensive Apple laptops.

The R Cubed Linux laptops have Intel integrated graphics cards for which Intel has released 2D and 3D-accelerated open source graphics drivers that are capable of transparent windows and drop shadows with EXA as well as rotating cubes and wobbly windows with XGL and Compiz! Way to go Intel!

domain squatter

What you say? http://www.x.org/ must surely have the same domain as http://x.org/ , since the domain is "x.org", the bit on the left is configuration internal to that domain.

Anyway, www.slashdot.org redirects to slashdot.org instantly for me.

domain squatter

What you say? http://www.x.org/ must surely have the same domain as http://x.org/ , since the domain is "x.org", the bit on the left is configuration internal to that domain.

Anyway, www.slashdot.org redirects to slashdot.org instantly for me.

I'm not sure how the state of video drivers affects VMWare sessions. 3D graphics under VM sessions are all software-rendered anyway, so 3D should be very close on either platform, and the 2D graphics drivers for all but the VERY latest cards are nice and accelerated under X.

http://ftp.x.org/pub/X11R6.8.0/doc/radeon.4.html

I use a RADEON 9200 here at home because I use 3D in Linux and I don't want to use the binary-only driver, but at work I have an X600, which has perfectly good 2D, but only software 3D. I don't know about you, but I have no business doing anything 3D at work, so it's of no consequence that I don't have DRI there.

I'll repeat this: If you don't do 3D -outside- your VMWare sessions, you need not worry about 3D driver support. The 2D part of the driver still works swimmingly using the generic driver from xorg. If you're doing 3D -inside- VMWare sessions, you're being foolish because it's going to be rendered in software no matter what kind of video card you have.

Also, just to finish my technical pissing contest:

Video RAM has nothing to do with moving video on your PC. Having more or less VRAM will not affect how movies play. If I hear one more AV person say how they need a computer with 'lots of video memory' so they can play movies smoothly, I'll strangle them. Any card made since 1999 has PLENTY of VRAM for anything 2D, including motion video. Video RAM will not speed up Photoshop; it will not speed up Final Cut or Premiere; all of that stuff takes place on a frame buffer that fits quite nicely into even the most conservative VRAM. I will retract this statement when Apple enables Quartz 2D Extreme by default, which makes all of your 2D windows, widgets, text, and composition using GPU-accelerated OpenGL textures stored in VRAM (Quartz Extreme holds the windows in RAM and composites them in VRAM, IIRC).

X11R7.0 is the first release of the complete modularized and autotooled source code base for the X Window System. X11R6.9, its companion release, contains identical features, and uses the exact same source code as X11R7.0, but with the traditional imake build system.

Most X drivers do not synchronize their drawing to the vertical retrace signal from the monitor. (To be fair, very few windowing systems do this consistently, even MacOS X.) This leads to a tearing appearance on some drawing operations, which looks slow. If the vertical retrace signal could be exposed through the SYNC extension, applications could defer their rendering slightly and reduce or eliminate tearing. This requires extending each driver to support this, as well as adding a little support code to the server itself.
The un-Composited model of X operation requires many round trip operations to redraw areas when they are exposed (window move, etc.). It is important that X be able to make Composited operation fast in the future.

Dude, I didn't RTFA, but you really need to upgrade to X11. I haven't used X10 since the 80s.

Actually the Linux kernel does these things pretty well. And modern distros that use udev, hal and dbus can detect hardware configurations on-the-fly. I was half-shocked when I plugged in my digital camera and it was detected and mounted automagically. The problem is X has it's own hardware subsystems for the sake of portability (BSD kernel does not Linux-like subsystems) and are not as good. It would be great if X just would let the Linux kernel do its thing. There is some work being done along these lines and hopefully will improve the situation.

Xorg isn't licenced under GPL, it's mostly BSD / MIT (apart from things like fonts). Since Xgl is part of Xorg it too is under an MIT style licence. Being GPL would make things like binary drivers legally very dubious.

"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.

> Sure, a lot of the stuff I mentioned ia hardware improvements. But what you're missing is that it's Microsoft driving the hardware improvements in many cases, and providing the OS software to make them run. That's more than even Apple does, and Apple owns its hardware.

Well, Apple has driven a lot of hardware improvements, but I won't get into that. I really doubt Microsoft is the only one who can come up with the not-so-bright idea of "Let's build a PDA into a laptop!" It's just that they're the only ones who think that's actually a good idea.

> A secondary LCD screen that offers limited, PDA-like functionality while the main OS is in Suspend. How would you do that with XP? Or Linux? It's not anything you can write in user mode.

It depends on how they're actually doing it. If (as I suspect) they're basically just being retarded and BUILDING A PDA INTO A LAPTOP, with a separate processor and everything, it shouldn't be too hard to just put Linux on there - after all, one of Linux's main strengths is its broad platform support. If this device is sharing information with the main processor, that complicates things a little, but given a known protocol for sharing data it should be pretty simple to write a Linux kernel module for doing this. Finally, it might even be possible to just leave the Windows CE crap thing they put on the "embedded PDA" in place and have Linux act like Windows toward it.

> Touch screens are hardware improvements. But Vista will bring software from Microsoft that makes it easier to use your finger to do things that would normally need a mouse. So you take your big old fat finger and stab the screen with it. A little circle appears, kind of like a radar screen, and it figures out which icon you meant to press. Current touchscreens can't do that. Rocket-science innovation? Maybe not, but Vista will have it and previous versions of Windows Tablet PC won't.

That sort of primitive intelligence sounds like something that can and should be done in the touchscreen firmware. It shouldn't have anything to do with the OS.

> The Power modes thing, I'm still not totally sold on how it works. But I'm interested in seeing it.

I could write a bash shell script to do something like that on my laptop. I haven't and won't because I like running my computer without a swap file, because I don't like bash shell scripting (I would write it in C++ instead :), and because I don't like the idea. When I say off, I want my computer to F*ING TURN OFF!

> The LCD projector thing -- that's not OS? How would you do that with your current-generation video driver?

How would you do it with a current-generation LCD projector? Also, if what you mean is "how would I forward a window to another device with current technology", I'd suggest you check out this website: http://www.x.org/

True, if by "around the corner" you mean "last month".

a mere 1600 DPI but that should be plenty for most

I'd be wary of buying such a mouse for use on a Linux/BSD system. I realize, though, that most gamers use Windows. It would seem that under many circumstances, there is no way to set the speed of a mouse in xorg/xfree86. Sure, you can set the acceleration, but if you happen to have, say, a shiny new Logitech Cordless MouseMan Optical (800dpi), the thing is so fast that you have to set the acceleration to be

Why is losing mouse acceleration a big deal? It means that you cannot move across the screen with a quick movement while maintaining the ability to make small movements easily. It turns out that in operating system like Mac OS X, they actually "decelerate" for very slow movements - it takes a greater distance to move one pixel. I had never noticed these things before.

This issue is already on the TODO list and in their bugzilla system submitted by someone else. The goal is eventually to have a much smarter system for mouse speed and acceleration, to suit all tastes. I hope it gets some attention (perhaps as an add-on to the new X11R7), as right now I went back to an older mouse that works with acceleration (but isn't optical).

My mouse is simply incredibly fast (and I can't imagine another reason than the doubled dpi from most mice) - plugging it into my Mac Mini showed it was much faster than a wired Logitech optical mouse, and the discrete settings Mac OS X offered for mouse speed proved either too slow or too fast. I think the bundled Logitech software allows for finer control of mouse movement, though.