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More info from Egbert. It appears this might be miscommunication. I suggest we stop petitioning for a little while to see what happens next.

Looks like some of the replies on the mailing list are also worried about the response Trident may get from Slashdot....

Nothing wrong with warez sites. Not that I ever download warez, since I prefer to use FreeBSD, X Windows & Gnome for anything that resembles a workstation. Unless, its for someone who doesn't know anything about using *nix, so I'll usually install a version of windoze. But still, when it comes to mp3s, there is some music I'd like to have, though doesn't deserve my money. On the other hand, music I like and listen to regulary deserves my money, so when I have the money, I make sure the artists get some money by buying the CDs. Even still, most of that money goes to the producers, but at least the artists get some.

Maybe its time for people who like mp3s to start to convince bands for running an Internet feature, where you can download music freely, but if you like it -- send a donation. Then again, most people would rather save their money so it wouldn't exactly work.

Display PDF is a successor to the Display PostScript system in NeXT/OpenSTEP. There is a Display PostScript extension for X Windows; you can read more about Display PostScript and the X Windows Display PostScript extension here.

Alpha blending (eg transparency) between windows is being addressed with the X Render extension. While neither Evas nor E17 currently make use of the Render extension, and Raster hasn't said much about it on the E-develop mailing list, he has made few posts to the XFree86 Render mailing list indicating preliminary work on a Render backend for Evas.

In my configuration, mouse3 (right button) is bound to the enter key just right of the spacebar. My mouse2 (middle button) is bound to F11.

Would be nice to have buttons 1, 2, 3 emulated by (command-)click, option-click, control-click (...thus allowing combinations) -- a bit as happens in OS X if you use XonX / XDarwin.

Has anyone managed that in Linux?

Its a bug in ATI Rage cards. You may wish to try XFree86 4.1 and see if the problem is fixed.

Does anyone know if it's possible to get a Voodoo2 running Glide or OpenGL apps accelerated under XFree 4?

I'd love to check it out, but I need my Quake3 and Unreal Tournament to work. Looking at the release notes, there's a fb-like Glide driver for running X on these devices, but no mention of 3D acceleration.

I'm already kinda missing the 3D accel under XFree on my work box (Rage Pro) since going from XFree 3.3.6 + UtahGLX to 4.0.3, but I couldn't cope with that at home. It seems the DRI people aren't going to support 3 year old cards such as these any time ever, which is sad.

You could use more or less the same process, only with monochrome elements instead of R, G and B -- and have a display with three times the horizontal resolution of a color display.

Microsoft Cleartype uses subpixel text rendering to take advantage of the fact that each LCD pixel is actually three. Apple used a similar technique for text rendering on TV monitors. And you can enable subpixel text in recent XFree86.

Virtually every license I've ever read has stated "Subject to change without notice".

Including the GNU General Public License, but not including the BSD license, the X license, or the zlib license.

What bothers me most about the Open Directory license is that the requirement to keep checking back home makes the license to use a specific version of the data non-perpetual and makes the license not a free documentation license.

My Troll Rant:

I prefer my X system of Ms's anyday. Designers might want to check out http://www.xfree86.org. Linux is here to stay, and so is *BSD, its NOT going away, and never will, because its been here 30 years since AT&T. I don't own ANYTHING made for that so called "Windows" OS. I don't pay for binarys when I can go download the source for free. I love security and LOVE to have control over what MY servers do. I don't like company's limitations of security through closing up some prog binary. Its too insecure. I prefer to use source to secure my systems. Not let some company decide that I have to download a so called "Service Pack" because THEY screwed up.

I have been a Unix admin and programmer for over 17 years, and run my buisiness successfully off of NON-Commercial Platforms.

XFree86 is produced by the XFree86 Project, a separate organization with different goals. The XFree86 people do release both source code and binary releases.

(This is not to say X.org & XFree86 don't work closely together - the XFree86 Project is an honorary member of X.org, which means they get all the voting rights, without having to pay the membership fees charged to the other members.)

Hey, if you're running Slackware, it's your job to download XFree86 4.0.2 and the 4.0.3 "upgrade" from ftp.xfree86.org and install it yourself in place of the XFree86 3.3.6 included with Slackware 7.1.

I'm doing some Slackware 7.1 installs on non-personal systems right now, and it's like a 10 minute job at most. If that sort of thing is above your head, perhaps you should be trying an rpm-based distribution instead of Slackware, just to make things a little easier for you! No sense in beating your head against a wall and there's no shame in being not quite ready for Slackware yet.

Better yet, just give it a try. Download all of the files in the XFree86 4.0.2 distribution for i386 Linux Glibc 2.1 and read and follow the "Install" file, which will tell you how to proceed to install XFree86 4.0.2. Then, re-visit the XFree86 repository and grab the update to 4.0.3 and install it in similar fashion.

It's there. Along with X 4.x which is incompatable with all but the most expensive newest cards.

That's funny, it works fine with my old Matrox Millennium and the Chips & Technology 65550 in my old Libretto...

It's there. Along with X 4.x which is incompatable with all but the most expensive newest cards.

That's funny, it works fine with my old Matrox Millennium and the Chips & Technology 65550 in my old Libretto...

Solaris 8 has very minimal support for graphics cards. You'll almost certianly want to replace Xsun with XFree86. Do a search on Google for "solaris xfree86" and you'll find several useful HOWTO-type documents.

What kills me about the UID number was that I /waited/ on it, since I didn't think registering was a good idea when Taco implemented it. I guess 3 digits is enough of a status symbol anyway ;)

Best of luck with your upgrade. I hope it doesn't fail horribly!

The biggest problem with people mistaking Slashdot for Freshmeat is that there is rarely enough information given for a good software announcement. That said:

XFree86 is a freely redistributable implementation of the X Window System that runs on UNIX(R) and UNIX-like operating systems.

Author:

The XFree86 Project <XFree86 at XFree86 dot org>

Homepage:

http://www.xfree86.org/

Tar/GZ:

ftp://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/XFree86/4.0.3/

Changelog:

http://www.xfree86.org/4.0.3/RELNOTES.html

Trove categories:

Old Appindex :: X11 :: System

Summary of updates in 4.0.3.

Some temporary file-related security vulnerabilities are fixed.
Screen corruption problems and palette saving problems with some Neomagic chips are fixed.
'XFree86 -configure' problems are fixed in some drivers (including sis and i810).
A problem with some plain S3 ViRGE cards is fixed.
Some Xaw incompatibilities with Xaw6 are fixed.
Some XKB files are updated.
Some trident driver updates, including fixing acceleration for the Cyber9388.
A palette saving problem in the vgahw module is fixed.
Support for the wsmouse protocol is added for OpenBSD/i386.
A load problem with the sis driver module, and some depth 24 problems are fixed.
Support for the "PD" variant of the ATI Rage 128 is added.
Support for GNU Hurd is updated.
Some TrueType font problems are fixed.
The mga driver doesn't attempt to drive the G450 if the "mga_hal" module isn't available.
A problem with bold font simulation in xterm is fixed.
The (DPS) stub files created by pswrap are now compatible with the Adobe version.
Some glint driver problems are fixed.
Support for building on OpenBSD-current, and multi-thread support for OpenBSD are provided.
A problem with the ThinkingMousePS/2 protocol is fixed in the mouse driver.
Support for the Render extension with Xinerama is added.
A DGA-related server crash is fixed.
Some Chips & Technologies driver bugs are fixed.
Some tseng driver bugs are fixed.
Some Alpha platform updates are included.
Support for the GeForce3 is added to the nv driver.
Misc build-related issues are fixed.
Various documentation updates, including a reworked XFree86(1) manual page.

The biggest problem with people mistaking Slashdot for Freshmeat is that there is rarely enough information given for a good software announcement. That said:

XFree86 is a freely redistributable implementation of the X Window System that runs on UNIX(R) and UNIX-like operating systems.

Author:

The XFree86 Project <XFree86 at XFree86 dot org>

Homepage:

http://www.xfree86.org/

Tar/GZ:

ftp://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/XFree86/4.0.3/

Changelog:

http://www.xfree86.org/4.0.3/RELNOTES.html

Trove categories:

Old Appindex :: X11 :: System

Summary of updates in 4.0.3.

Some temporary file-related security vulnerabilities are fixed.
Screen corruption problems and palette saving problems with some Neomagic chips are fixed.
'XFree86 -configure' problems are fixed in some drivers (including sis and i810).
A problem with some plain S3 ViRGE cards is fixed.
Some Xaw incompatibilities with Xaw6 are fixed.
Some XKB files are updated.
Some trident driver updates, including fixing acceleration for the Cyber9388.
A palette saving problem in the vgahw module is fixed.
Support for the wsmouse protocol is added for OpenBSD/i386.
A load problem with the sis driver module, and some depth 24 problems are fixed.
Support for the "PD" variant of the ATI Rage 128 is added.
Support for GNU Hurd is updated.
Some TrueType font problems are fixed.
The mga driver doesn't attempt to drive the G450 if the "mga_hal" module isn't available.
A problem with bold font simulation in xterm is fixed.
The (DPS) stub files created by pswrap are now compatible with the Adobe version.
Some glint driver problems are fixed.
Support for building on OpenBSD-current, and multi-thread support for OpenBSD are provided.
A problem with the ThinkingMousePS/2 protocol is fixed in the mouse driver.
Support for the Render extension with Xinerama is added.
A DGA-related server crash is fixed.
Some Chips & Technologies driver bugs are fixed.
Some tseng driver bugs are fixed.
Some Alpha platform updates are included.
Support for the GeForce3 is added to the nv driver.
Misc build-related issues are fixed.
Various documentation updates, including a reworked XFree86(1) manual page.

The biggest problem with people mistaking Slashdot for Freshmeat is that there is rarely enough information given for a good software announcement. That said:

XFree86 is a freely redistributable implementation of the X Window System that runs on UNIX(R) and UNIX-like operating systems.

Author:

The XFree86 Project <XFree86 at XFree86 dot org>

Homepage:

http://www.xfree86.org/

Tar/GZ:

ftp://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/XFree86/4.0.3/

Changelog:

http://www.xfree86.org/4.0.3/RELNOTES.html

Trove categories:

Old Appindex :: X11 :: System

Summary of updates in 4.0.3.

Some temporary file-related security vulnerabilities are fixed.
Screen corruption problems and palette saving problems with some Neomagic chips are fixed.
'XFree86 -configure' problems are fixed in some drivers (including sis and i810).
A problem with some plain S3 ViRGE cards is fixed.
Some Xaw incompatibilities with Xaw6 are fixed.
Some XKB files are updated.
Some trident driver updates, including fixing acceleration for the Cyber9388.
A palette saving problem in the vgahw module is fixed.
Support for the wsmouse protocol is added for OpenBSD/i386.
A load problem with the sis driver module, and some depth 24 problems are fixed.
Support for the "PD" variant of the ATI Rage 128 is added.
Support for GNU Hurd is updated.
Some TrueType font problems are fixed.
The mga driver doesn't attempt to drive the G450 if the "mga_hal" module isn't available.
A problem with bold font simulation in xterm is fixed.
The (DPS) stub files created by pswrap are now compatible with the Adobe version.
Some glint driver problems are fixed.
Support for building on OpenBSD-current, and multi-thread support for OpenBSD are provided.
A problem with the ThinkingMousePS/2 protocol is fixed in the mouse driver.
Support for the Render extension with Xinerama is added.
A DGA-related server crash is fixed.
Some Chips & Technologies driver bugs are fixed.
Some tseng driver bugs are fixed.
Some Alpha platform updates are included.
Support for the GeForce3 is added to the nv driver.
Misc build-related issues are fixed.
Various documentation updates, including a reworked XFree86(1) manual page.

But there are no modules/dri files in this update...

check the file list here

no radeon_dri.o

my file list was the Xdrivers.tgz subsection of that list...

posts on linuxgames confirm it... HeUnique is smoking crack

they haven't merged the DRI CVS with the main X distribution

Can someone shed more light on the status of the G450 and XFree86 support?

Can someone shed more light on the status of the G450 and XFree86 support?

Well, does matter that Debian had Qt Xft AA two weeks ago? For your information, I have had Qt Xft since 3 months ago. But I'm not going to go about bragging that my distro got it before all the others. I'm not a Debian user. I use Linux, but I don't even use a distro. All I had to to was to get qt-copy from KDE CVS (i.e. cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.kde.org:/home/kde co qt-copy) and replace my current Qt with that. qt-copy will always have the latest Qt with fresh bugfixes and such, and was previously the only source for Xft AA in the latest Qt as th only other Xft source was the original 2.2.2 patch released by Keith Packard.

--

Examples of the freetype library in action in Xft can be found on Keith Packard's website here: http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/render/

Examples of subpixel sampling (a.k.a. `clear-type' in MS-speak) can be found here: http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/render/clear.html

Please don't propagate MS FUD.

Thanks,
Daniel

Examples of the freetype library in action in Xft can be found on Keith Packard's website here: http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/render/

Examples of subpixel sampling (a.k.a. `clear-type' in MS-speak) can be found here: http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/render/clear.html

Please don't propagate MS FUD.

Thanks,
Daniel

XRender will be supported in the upcoming 0.9-7 release. Full hardware support for XRender should make it in 0.9-8. When that happens the NVidia cards will probably be the fastest and most feature rich you can get for Linux. Given, this will be for x86 only for now, but as an AMD x86 user I can't complain.

This info comes from a reliable source. And since NVidia has hired this X guru, I can only conclude that they're very serious about Linux/XFree support (Think SGI).

Posted from an AA'd konqueror browser (driver "nv" for now :)

-adnans

ie.
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "ExpertMouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "ThinkingMousePS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/psm0"
Option "Buttons" "4"
EndSection

More details at XFree86

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

11.2. GLX
The GLX 1.3 API is exported but none of the new 1.3 functions are operational.
The new glXGetProcAddressARB function is fully supported.
GLXPixmap rendering is only supported for indirect rendering contexts. This is a common OpenGL limitation. Attempting to use a direct rendering context with a GLXPixmap will result in an X protocol error.
p> From the XFree86 Documentation The DRI is to circumvent the X protocol for higher performance and glx does the same up to an certain degree.
It would need changes to the X well defined X-protocol to implement this. And I'm not that firm with this, but I think the X-protocol opcode has only 8bit. A 3D implementation definitely will need more operations.

One thing to notice is that both images posted here use subpixel rendering, which is only useful on LCD displays. Subpixel rendering uses the knowledge that each pixel is made up of a discrete set of red, green, and blue rectangles, that are next to each other. The glyph rendering code can then use this knowledge to make text appear smoother, since it can turn on, say, the red channel of an adjacent pixel, knowing that it's it's physically next to the blue channel of the previous pixel. Keith Packard has more info on his pages at his web page, including a few sample screenshots with subpixel rendering turned off and on.

However, this only helps on LCDs. It is not possible on CRTs to have as fine of control over individual color channels. As such, these screenshots might look suboptimal or blurry on non-LCD displays. Note that some may recognize that this is very similar to what Microsoft calls ClearType (R, tm, whatever). Indeed it is -- however, that name is owned by MS. Jacob suggested SchweetFont as a possible alternative name. :-)

What I am missing in GTK is font antialiasing. I have toyed around with this in KDE2 and it looks so much better! In fact, it made me switch over to KDE2 completely. See Keith Packard's page for a HOWTO on how to install it and sample screen shots. This is a must have.

I am really looking forward to stuff using the X Render extension (anyone have any examples of anyone using it? Docs on how to use them? I so want real transparent terminals...)...

The RENDER extension is definitely being used, by Qt. KDE's CVS version of Qt now includes patches to make it do font rendering. The great thing is that this is all at a very low level, so it's completely transparent to the application programmer. All of my KDE applications have well-kerned, well-hinted, fully anti-aliased proportional fonts. The same is possible with gtk+; in fact I'd heard that someone had it working at one point.

As far as docs, I don't believe there is much right now. There is an incomplete Xft manual page for the library dealing with the font stuff (basically renders fonts in truetype and feeds them to X using the render extension). There is also probably likely to be something at the render mailing list.

Real transparent terminals...as I understand it, that requires a seperate extension. Render creates the option of alpha blending, but it takes something else to do it on the window level, rather than on top of an opaque window.

And I noticed one sort of odd thing: it hasn't crashed yet on me. When I started trying Mozilla the thing blew up all the time; now I feel completely comfortable with the idea of Mozilla as my primary browser, particularly with the integrated (and free!) crypto.

The only edge Konqueror has over Mozilla now, in my opinion, is being based on QT - which is the only toolkit so far that's been patched to use the excellent Xft library for antialiased fonts under XFree86 4.0.2 and later. I can't wait for Mozilla to pick up support for this thing.

I thought that a copy of the OS is included with every game, tailored to the game (like it should be). This allows MS and developers to do whatever they want with the underlying OS - you said it yourself in this very comment. So why I can't plug a newest Super-Force-Feedback Joystick which uses standard USB? If I have access to the OS and all the hardware it's my problem, not MS's!

I, personally, am looking forward to the XBox.

Same here. It would be a great pleasure to legally take money back from Microsoft :-) Of course, I won't be buying any games - X itself is the game in town :-)

Distros update their versions for lots of different reasons, often because a number of new user programs are available, a new XFree86 version is available that is needed for new video cards, or sometimes for purely marketing reasons, as when Slackware jumped from 4.0 to 7.0 in order to reach marketing parity with Red Hat - Slackware generally used a conservative numbering scheme, but Red Hat advanced the numbers rapidly, even though all the distros are based on the same stuff, but lots of people gave the Slackware folks the message they didn't want software they perceived as out of date.

So no, it's fine to use the 2.4.0 kernel with Mandrake 7.1. The version of the kernel bears no explicit relation to the version of the distribution.

By the way, if you wonder where most of the rest of the programs on your distro come from, you have the fine folks at The Free Software Foundation to thank. Richard Stallman takes pains to point out the system is more properly called "GNU/Linux", because what Linus developed was a kernel that the already-existing GNU programs could run on.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

Why is everyone so convinced that Linux has to be prettied up, promoted, and made palatable to the masses?

Because the masses have money. Companies like money. Companies that see the prospect of money in Linux on the desktop are more likely to publish Linux ports of their video games, write Linux drivers for their hardware, and offer Linux-compatible ISP services and online media.

I like Linux game, Linux drivers, and Linux compatibility. Any more questions?

There are many more reasons why even the most hardcore, non-gaming, free-software-only Linux user still benefits by "Linux for the masses", though. You may complain that Red Hat is aiming for a Linux distribution a 3 year old can use... but they're not taking away our Perl interpreters and ssh daemons to do it, and eventually that 3 year old may grow up and spend a little time playing around with the compiler himself.

The other thing that's "vital for desktop acceptance" is an office suite of the caliber of MS Office 2000, which isn't going to happen unless they decide to port it.

Of course it isn't. Free software developers could never produce any sort of useful desktop software on their own, certainly not any office programs. That stuff is just too complicated for a bunch of hackers. Why, where would they even start?

Well I have found that a the earlier Geforce 2 work a treat (I am running a Diamond Viper V770) and have yet to expirience an X crash. One thing that I would warn you about however is that XFree 3.3.6 does have a better/wider support for graphics cards but on the flipside 4.0.1 (latest release of XFree86) does give better performance

Could I suggest that you look here for a list of graphics card XFree86 supports (to varying degrees). Personally if you want relability rather than performace I would say an ATI Mach 64 based card would be good. If you want speed though a geoforce 2 should see you right....

Forgot to mention that we were using the latest binary X from Xfree86

XFree86 4.0.2, released this week, does support the #9 card: http://www.xfree86.org/4.0.2/Status23.html#23 - even in dual-head combinations!

(SCNR - But *please* don't call XFree86 4.* "X4". X4 is something different.)

Look at the new features! If this were MS code, it would be worth at least a century or two jump in the version number! The cool ones are:

Bug fixes: Yea, those.

Render Extension: The render extensions and additional stuff added to x11perf, xft, and xlib to support it.
Compositing code for Render is complete, but a lot of stuff (polygons, image scaling, seperate alpha, see the summery) are still unimplemented.

Updates to nv for GeForce2: Hah! BeOS had GeForce2 support before X!

xf86cfg: A new, graphical configuration utility.

And much much more!

Here is the link.

It says that Render uses XAA for acceleration, and acceleration on the MGA chip is already implemented. 2Qs

1) If it uses XAA, why does it only accelerate on MGA?

2) Does this mean that it becomes a Render vs 3D choice for NVIDIA users? As far as I can see, the NVIDIA drivers don't support the Render extensions. Or am I just confused.

In contrast, it is not a "contribution" to buy a copy of Civ:CTP, however nice the folks at Loki are.

The thing that is most irritating about the whole "commercial games" thing is that there are so many middlecritters in between you and the producer of the game. If you pay $40 for a game, it is unlikely that Loki sees much more than $10, which makes this a pretty inefficient way of getting funding to them.

I've bought games (well, one game) from them, so it would be pretty hypocritical to argue that it's dramatically evil to spend your money that way.

It's just a bit silly to regard this as a "contribution" when it's largely likely to be a contribution to the bottom line of the retailer rather than the producers...

Opera5 + Ads versus Mozilla + Modern Mozillium theme? No contest! Can't wait for the XRender conversion of Mozilla/Gtk+, sweet! Go Keithp!!!

-adnans

Anti-aliasing for black-and-white texts can work but it's worth noting that anti-aliasing of colored text is intrinsically flawed because anti-aliasing of colored texts on colored backgrounds creates linear combinations of two different hues which are perceptually different from the original hues, creating a false dark border next to the text.

To see what I mean, using xmag or xzoom look at the border area between the red text and green background color image of the anti-aliased xterm (4th column, 8th row) on Keith Packard's X rendering page.

> There is only so much anti-aliasing will do to correct bad fonts.
Have you seen http://xfree86.org/~keithp/render/compare.html ? Thats a preety good demo of why its a good idea to get it into X, even if it has dropped hte boldness :-0

http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/render/translucent. png

Also have a look at this.

Keith Packard's new rendering extensions will hopefully be ready soon. His alpha blending screenshots look much cooler anyways (not to mention the sub-pixel ClearType and font anti-aliasing screenshots.)

Obviously it depends on your personal preferences, but you could try:

the FSF: donate here
KDE: contacts here

other projects as you use them; e.g., netbsd, openbsd, Apache, XFree86.

Or just donate computers to Africa or somewhere.

"it took the average user three seconds longer to find program X with GNOME than with KDE."

I guess you already found program X when you're using Gnome or KDE...

Your a troll. I'm biting.

*
Alpha blending is being worked on by Keith Packard of SuSE inc. and the brilliant XFree86 team, and should be implemented in a future version of XFree86

* True type fonts have been around for over 2 years and are standard on all major distros. XFree 3 uses an external font server like xfstt, XFree 4 handles them natively.

* etc? True, X lacks color correction. But XFree 4s modular interface allows for a companys to sell closed source X modules AFAIK, so an Apple ColorSync module should be possible. Why not do something constructive and mail them about it?