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XFree86 3.9.18 Today, v4.0 in March
John Fulmer writes, "The fourth and final beta of XFree86 3.9.x has been released and up on their ftp site. From the announcement:
'This snapshot version is 3.9.18. We are planning to release 4.0 in early March 2000.'
You can download (source only) from here.
"
Absolutely -- If you've ever compared a Panatone book with what's in Photoshop (for example), there's an enormous range of colors, usually darker ones, that can be discernable when printed, but can not be represented properly with a computer monitor.
Monitors only display a subset of the colors that can be discerned by the human eye, increasing the resolution beyond 24 bits doesn't change this fact.
Are you sure that your cards have 32MB of video RAM? It sounds like they're using (slow) main memory through the AGP bus, a solution that's pretty common on real low end PCs.
Either that or your cards are some odd-ball defective "OEM" model.
Calling a troll a troll? As if you needed to bother...
yes, the mac os can resize on the fly.
and change bit depth. and have different bit depth on the different video cards. it's not the most flexible GUI, but the video support's quite good.
I'm waiting for them to speed it up and require less resources, it is currently a bit of a dog...
RH 7?!!! WOW!!! They sure made it to release 7 pretty fast! They're sure good. I suggest renaming RH 7.0 To RedHat 3000. This way they have NT beat for the next thousand years, and they'll probably make a more million in stock shamming.
> That's not entirely true. X does use it's own loader, contributed by Metroworks (I think)
Contributed by Metro Link, the X server people.
this was such a help. i was pulling my fuckin hair out over this.
But that the alpha values doesnt exist on the screen doesnt mean that they dont have to be stored in the memory (they have to be _somewhere_ :)
> are there gonna be any improvements other than additional hardware support?
There is support for multiple screen displays (like a Mac), and the fastest 3D performance possible.
HAPPY TROLL DAY!
sm00ch
Oh, you mean open like THIS ?
Jeez.
Or how about running more than 2 or 3 large applications at once with only 64 meg of RAM under MacOS? Memory protection under MacOS 2000 = Microsoft Windows 3.0
It seems like I read somewhere that x maps the video memory on you video card to itself (or something like that, im not much of a programmer) and as a result its memory usage as reported in programs like top appears bloated. Since I have a 16mb tnt card that adds an extra 16mb onto the memory usage of x even tho it doesnt take away from my system RAM.
Correct me if I'm wrong on this.
Will version 4 allow a accelerated non-fullscreen OpenGL possible? I have a TNT2 and a Voodoo 3 3k and have yet to find a way to have an OpenGL application run in windowed mode and still be hardware accelerated. Is this a problem with Mesa or XFree?
"I'm not sure I like this trend in pushing out new software as soon as it hits a new major ersion number. " ;)
/dev/null ~
/me rolls his eyes
you're kidding right? That's the nature of the beast of OpenSource (TM). Release early and often, get eyes pouring over it, get them bug reports coming in, and improve it! That' how OpenSource moves fast, by moving fast. Standing still is a proven method of going nowhere. Of course no one twists your arm to upgrade, and you always have the alternative of running software from them other guys. You know, the ones that release stuff after everyone forgets what hell their last release was like.
"My concern is that if RedHat puts too many "new" versions into their 7.0 release, people new to Linux may get the impression that the software isn't quite as stable as we claim it is."
People running Redhat deserve whatever impressions they get. Rh 5.0 impressed me enough to never try RH ever again! I'm sticking with Slackware myself. Everything works fine here for me. I like Debian too but it's package manager grates on me.
Redhat != Linux! Gnoobiez be damned. heh ln -sf
P.S. nice bug in the posting delay boyz I haven't tried to post in hours! Cowboy really now.
The thing is, can this version run Q3A in accel. mode on the All-In-Wonder 128?
Wait are you saying he doesn't do this? I hate to tell you but it isn't too unusual for newspapers,TV stations,radio stations etc to reflect the views of thier owners. If you think the average reporter/editor can write whatever they want think again.
Betcha boy, I have heard that Matrox drivers have faster gfx support in 4.0 than under Windoz.... but I'm not 100% sure
jiggy jiggy jiggy smalls is da illest
helo thx every1 4 u suport abut jon katz bing a hitler!!!!!!!!!!! u r all cool ppl {{{{{{{{{{{{{{ hugs }}}}}}}}}}} plz kep good wrk up thx. i c u l8r!
You're implying you would deny him the right to print what he wants? Go reread the First Amendment. It sounds as if you and I both would loathe Murdoch all the more for doing what you describe, but the difference is that I recognize his right to run his business as he sees fit. Ditto for Slashdot.
Somewhat offtopic, and I apologize for this. I use RH6.1 On a sparc station 5 (what a bitch that was to install - only managed to install it over the network, for some reason...). Posted this to several X newsgroups, but got no answers - perhaps someone here is more knowledgable? I wan't to try Xfree 3.9.18 but as there are no binaries for sparc (or any platform yet) will have to compile it from source (not a light undertaking.. .a 75Mhz sparc is NOT fast). Will the source compile straight off on my SPARC, and will the XSun servers be built by default? Thanks!
I think that when people say "The human eye can't see more that 24 bit", they are making the claim within the context of computer monitors. Sure, with Television and movie screens it is a problem because they are both capable of much more contrast between black and white than computer monitors. The point is, as maximum brightness of a certain display increases, the number or discernable steps of color increases. Within the context of your average computer monitor it is questionable to assert that the human eye can really see the all of the colors.
Does anyone know what the outcome of this story was. Does Xfree86 4.0 use the freetype lib?
Well, isdn is NOT. At least on my box.
Will XFree86 v4.0 fully support the G400 DH?
Wait! We gotta make it glibc 3.0 and gnome 2.0 I want a pure OH release. puttin' on my oh face, oh oh oh
Not me I have an All-in-Wonder 128 AGP. Which is basically a rage 128 with a built in TV tuner, DVD decoder etc. Anyway so far only Mandrake has got the card to work and only at 800x600 and I think it was 16bit color. Any Suggestions on what to do to get it working?
There is still no DRI for NVIDIA in 3.9.18, and if XFree86 4.0 is slated for early March, I'm starting to think that NVIDIA isn't going to follow though on what they have said. From what nvidia has been doing, it looks like if they do include support, it will be binary only, which would likely leave freebsd users out in the cold for quite some time.
Now I have to go through all that downloading & burning, all over again. Do you guys know how much it costs to get a CD-ROM, these days? Yeeesh! Next time, can you at least wait until I've compiled and used the sources, before you update them? :)
(PS: To the humour-impaired, the above is not a critisism, flame or troll. Any attempt to mutilate this post into such beasts will result in my 22nd level Mage turning you into a frog. So there. :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Please allow me to kick-off the "why the hell did
they run this story" thread.
What is wrong with you Linux people? Since when is "decent" ever good enough when it comes to speed?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
will i be able to play gl quake 1 in a window with my matrox g200 under xfree 4.0 ?
what the fuck??? TODAY IS TROLLDAY! GET FUCKING TROLLING.
> So to make use of DRI in XF86Free 4.0, what do you do when you have FreeBSD or Linux 2.2? or
:)
> OS/2? Or any of the other OSes on which XFree runs?
You can port the DRI driver in Linux 2.4.
It's even under the X11 license, not the GPL, which should make all you zealots out there happy
Overlays are cool. The point is that you create a memory-surface in vid-mem and fill it with whatever you want to view and then register it with the card giving the card info on position and scaling for the overlay. Then when the card is going through the primary surface drawing all the stuff thats in there normally it replaces the parts of the primary surface that has a corresponding overlay with the overlay graphics. The point of this is that if you are watching a movie or playing a game that updates its display often it can use an overlay to draw on and can therefore get around accessing the primary surface at all (and therefore all windows that would normally be drawn over stays untouched under the overlay), you can also use it to paint stuff on top of the rest of the GUI (since its done in hardware at the time of display-update you are guaranteed that the overlay is on top of everything).. Under windows its commonly used for screenbuddies and such stuff that has transperancies too.. Excuse my bad english
yes. i was running it with two different cards with two different monitors of two different sizes running two different resolutions during the .16 release. had to stop when someone needed the second monitor, but it was beautiful.
I was wondering the same thing, and did a bunch of research last weekend. It looks to me like the G400 is the obvious choice. It has open source drivers and its performance is good. But now should I get the single headed or dual headed model? :-)
Can anyone think of a good reason to go with something else or a reason not to go with it?
Okay so I have a Voodoo 2, and every time I start Quake 1, 2, or 3, or UT, something breaks and I have to reboot because I can't see anything even if I try switching consoles. If I try this snapshot will it use my Voodoo 2 in a different way so it might work?
I can't remember where, if someone does please post, but aren't there libraries that render anti-aliased fonts at a decent speed?
If so, are they fast enough and robust enough to be used as a standard? Or can they be incorporated into GTK+ and Qt?
I would REALLY like to know also. I dug through the mga driver source and have found nothing relating to g400 dual head support. This is the #1 feature myself, and most of my friends with g400s want.
please explain in what ways. Utah-GLX already has its own direct rendering code.
Actually, those extra 8 bits are for alpha (transparency)... but they are rarely used. So it's not like they're JUST there for padding the pixel data out, but that ends up being their general purpose anyway.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
s/^([^#]*)#.*$/$1/; # Comments? What for? instead, simply use: s/#.*$//;
--
Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right.
****Gfx Scrollbar Special case hit!!*****
Not to sound whiny, but that's incorrect.
A "quantum leap" is movement from one location to another without moving through the intervening space. Period. There's nothing in the definition of a quantum leap that puts any constraints on the distance, although it is true that most quantum leaps occur over a very tiny distance indeed.
If XFree86 4.0 includes many new features that weren't in the previous version, so we get them all at once rather than getting them one at a time, then the metaphor of a quantum leap is accurate and appropriate. Since I hope there is in fact more than one new feature in this upcoming version, I do indeed hope it's a quantum leap forward...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
3.9.18 is damn speed AND it works with netscape!
Rarely used? I know many people using this feature... including myself, most importantly :). I have twin 21"ers and a G400 max just begging XFree to support it... until then I'm stuck, painfully using AccelX which sux (imho) and I had to shell out the $ for... *sigh*
But XFree 4.0 is looking very sweet. These guys are awsome.
I hope I'd notice the difference between 600MHz and 5-8MHz :-)
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Well, at least now I have some place to put my TNT2 (having replaced it with a Voodoo3 in my home machine -- oh, if only nVidia hadn't made us wait for XFree 4.0!)
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Yeah. In one specific area.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
One problem was immediately apparent. When large chunks of the screen need to be moved around, like when a window is dragged or its contents scrolled, the display lags. It isn't just that movement is choppy, it actually lags. You pick up the window, drag, release, and watch the window move along the path you traced over the next second or two. Scrolling is the same, and that really kills you. Imagine having to wait for your machine to recover after scrolling.
This happens in Win98 and NT. In XFree86, there's an even bigger problem: severe font corruption when acceleration is turned on. This leads me to believe the acceleration function for moving/copying regions is broken on these cards and has been disabled in the windows drivers to prevent the same font corruption symptoms from showing up.
I can't be certain this isn't related to some of the other hardware in these machines, but I can't be certain these cards aren't simply broken either, so I recommend you check for these problems before buying a Rage128.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
The simplest implementation is to add 1 extra bit to every pixel. If the bit is on, the pixel draws red (or whatever the overlay color is). If the bit is off, the normal color is drawn.
The advantage is that the normal color is not destroyed by turning on the bit, so the bit can be turned off to reveal the original image. If the original image is expensive to calculate the user interface is sped up a lot. This is similar to using XOR but looks much better.
Modern overlay hardware has 4 or 8 or even 24 bits so that many colors (2^n-1) can be drawn in the overlay.
However the advantages of overlays have become less and less over time, due to many reasons: Drawing is getting much faster so the delay of redrawing the background is ok. Double buffering can make the drawing not blink, which may make it less objectionable than the speed loss due to not using the overlay (double-buffered overlays are very rare). Overlapping windows means a program needs to be able to recreate the background image from scratch, eliminating one of the programming advantages of overlays on ancient systems. Modern users are less tolerant of the rubber-banding or outline GUI style that a limited-color overlay forces. And the limited colors usually means totally seperate drawing code must be used to preview in the overlay, resulting in more bugs and programming effort. And you usually have to make your program work anyway if no overlay hardware is available, for portability.
I have pretty much restricted use of the overlays to rubber-band boxes because of this.
Problem:
It seems that everyone is talking about 3D support, while I consider that Xv support in the 4.0 might be as revolutionary as the hw 3D drivers. While DVD is making headlines, not even the MPEG1/VCD is supported properly; and the reason is the lack of basic-level support for hardware assisted motion video viewing.
Questions:
As I understand, the 4.0 offers X video (Xv) extension support, which basically provides API for the hardware video scaling (with interpolation), overlaying and colorspace conversions. Does the Xv API also allow the support of iDCT and motion compensation hardware found in the newest video cards (which could be used to dramatically reduce DVDs CPU requirements) ? And what Xv:s relation to video input / output devices (both integrated and external) ? Is the Xv extension support currently implemented in any hardware drivers (I think G400 has some support, but whats the state of it ?) ? Is there any video-playing software/video libraries available, which support the Xv in the 4.0 ?
Vaadin - the best open source framework for building web applications in Java - no plug
I think all of the former X servers from XFree86 were kind of trash. Having one server with many
- --------
loadable drivers is something they should have
done from the beginning.
So, it is a step in the right direction.
I will try it.
BUT:
* It still consumes enormous amounts or RAM,
between 28-48 MB on my machine.
*I would call it slow when compared to other
windowing systems like win32, or the system that
BeOS has.
* It still doesn't have real transparency, don't
come with things like Eterm, because that is not
real transparency.
* It does not have anti-aliased fonts.
* It is not multithreaded, and that would, IF
implemented right, make a difference in overal
responsiveness and speed. Even on single-processor
machines. (Look at BeOS)
* It does it's own input device handling, what
should have been done by the linux kernel. Now
virtual consoles, X, SVGA etc. all have to do
their own handling. This is absurd, it should be
done by the kernel, maybe in combination with a
userspace console daemon that passes events to
programs like the X server, but not by the
X server itself. OK, this is more a problem of
linux in general, and they have to work with the
current system.
The same goes for video-drivers, mode-setting and
the like. That should be done by the kernel too.
Not accelaration and drawing, only the memory
handling. Any user can just write values to the
videocard memory and 3D pipelines that crash most
systems. This should be protected by the kernel,
and it isn't.
I regret to say that currently the standard RedHat
combination: XFree86 with enlightenment, gnome and
netscape crashes more often than windows 95 does.
Let alone 98.
Ok, so you linux itself doesn't crash, but the
graphical system does, and people still loose all
their work.
* XFree86 is almost completely incommunicado if
you try to reach them for help, or for bugreports.
They only ever send me their standard "we got your
message" email.
I tries several times to get on their mailinglist,
so I could follow their progress, but they just
will not even answer my application.
They are too damn closed.
The only way I see that Linux is going to get a
better graphical system, is when they open up,
or if their tree is forked off by another group.
What I would like:
I would like to see a GGI based system, with an
X server running on top, that implements all the
missing features from XFree86.
It would require a lot of people porting drivers
from XFree86 to KGI, and a group porting XFree86
4.0 to libGGI, fixing bugs in it, cut out all the
accumulated slack, implement alpha channels (that
is not in the X specifications), add antialiasing,
make it multithreading. Decrease the memory foot-
print. And last but not least, be very open to the
community.
X on GGI is the only way I see that shows real
promise for multimedia on Linux.
-----------------------------------------------
UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
-------------------------------------------------
UNIX isn't dead, it just sme
> Okay. So you feel that X is unstable.
- --------
Yes.
>I'm willing to bet that in reality, it is what
you have done to X. >Linux/X/gnome/enlightenment hasn't crashed on me
once. Ever. Since I installed it this August. Not Once.
In real live I am a sysadmin at a physics
department for Linux/Solaris. I think I know what
I talk about. You speak only for yourself,
and how well things work on only your box. I have a
network full of RedHat 6.0 + updates, almost all users using
Enlightenment + Gnome + Netscape 4.61.
Almost all crashes I have seen are caused either
by X (50%) or Netscape crashing taking Gnome or Enlightenment down, thereby
closing the X-session.
The Windows machines around here do not crash.
People do not play games around here. Linux
crashes quite often, using only things like
netscape, ghostview, what people use doing
physics. I wish it were otherwise too, but it is
not.
> And putting video routines into the kernel will
improve this stability?
Into the kernel go: only mode-setting,
memory-management and an interface to the hardware pipelines for rendering.
Of course NOT the X server routines doing the
drawing and the like.
Having the bare resource handling in the kernel
has the enormous advantage of not having to have
duplicate driver effort for X,
SVGAlib, SVGATextMode, etc.
These would simply be loadable modules.
Userspace libraries like libGGI use ioctls to set a mode.
Not to do acceleration and drawing. You don't need
to, and that would be kernel-bloat yes.
You can use memory mapping to interface the kernel
provides. The problem is, that most cards are
made in such a way that save registers
, those that can be written to without crashing
your videocard, thereby needing to reset your machine,
cannot cleanly be separated from unsave registers.
In that case you need a kernel space mechanism that
makes sure only sane data goes into the accelaration pipelines.
You can still bring X in such a state so
that you can do nothing to switch to a console
and bring back your machine to
live. Ok, if you have a network,
but most people do not have that.
Input handling should be outside the X
server, the X server should only
receive events. A similacrum of raw
keypresses if it wants to, but things like
ctrl-alt-f1 should be caught by the kernel first,
and all things like virtual consoles,
X-servers, SVGAlib, etc. should receive events
from either the kernel or a mediator daemon.
>Are you on the GGI or Be development team or something?
No, but I follow them closely, and am sympathetic
to their ideas. The linux community generally has the
wrong impression of what they try to achieve.
I think Xfree 4.0 will suck less, a lot
less maybe, but I'll have to see.
Up until now for instance, it was very hard to get
snapshots compiled, netscape would not
display anything but empty grey screens, and
the X team never answers request to get on
their mailinglist, or to bugreports.
They are just incommunicado. The GGI people are very nice,
and do answer questions. They have achieved a lot, considering
their numbers.
Ah well, who am I trying to convince anyway.
-----------------------------------------------
UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
-------------------------------------------------
UNIX isn't dead, it just sme
As far as FreeBSD goes, the new module loader will allow you to run the same of XF86 4 module on any OS, as long as it uses the same processor. So x86 Linux modules will run on FreeBSD without a recompile. Pretty cool huh!
Is this an advantage of the ELF format or is X doing something sneaky to make this work?
Anyone have any luck with Xfree86 and the Intel i810 video? I just got a new machine and X bombs on it... James F. Bickford Sys Dev Assistant Electronic Interface Support
pronoblem
Has anyone else had problems running Netscape with the snapshots? They have been pretty stable for me except when I run Netscape or Mozilla. Netscape won't follow links, doesn't render pages at all (but downloads all the data) and Mozilla -- well, it's still buggy (M13) but at least it follows links..
A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
I think this needs to be implemented somewhere though. Making X antialias is difficult because this would require modifying the way X works ( and would cause possible compatibility problems ).
BTW, antialiasing is only half of the problem. The other problem is the fact that outline files and font metrics are unavailable through the X APIs. This is essential for WYSIWYG printing, because at present, all one can do is grab bitmaps from the X server, but to print, you need the outline files associated to the fonts ( unless you're content to print at screen resolutions ), or you need to know the printer name of the font and have an entry for your font in the ghostscript Fontmap.
Also, different pieces of wetware (What, you suppose me to know what they are called? In a foreign language? Come on! :) are used for detecting intensity and colors. The intensity-detecting ones are much more sensitive, thus making everything seem gray when it's dark (the reflected light is below the threshold of the hue/saturation wetware). So it's really not a question of 24 bits RGB or not, but more like 24 bits HSV, with the Value part hogging most of the bits...
Tomorrow, I will look at this analogy and cry. But tonight, it all makes sense...koffee, come hither...
This leaves one concern unanswered:
:-)
What about the needed kernel support? For DRI, kernel support is added to the Linux 2.4 kernel.
So to make use of DRI in XF86Free 4.0, what do you do when you have FreeBSD or Linux 2.2? or OS/2? Or any of the other OSes on which XFree runs?
The module loader might be completely OS-independant, and the modules might be written for complete OS-independance, but there _are_ OS dependancies somewhere or they wouldn't be extending the Linux kernel for DRI.
So what do you do on the other OSes?
I'd like to know too
That sounds like the same sort of thing that NT's instability is often blamed on - direct access to video hardware that runs really fast when it works. A network-transparent windowing system made a lot more sense when X was first created. At that time it was more likely that the applications wouldn't run on the machine that you were sitting at, but on some central server. Higher-powered client machines have made this less important. I had heard at one point that XFree 4 would include more efficient ways to handle local X connections to decrease the amount of overhead necessary.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
http://OpenUT.sourceforge.net
http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=975
They have updated drivers, including new opengl drivers, which might work better. I don't have UT, so i don't know how it works.
Also, last time I checked, XFree86 4 does not support old glide games. Maybe it will later though.
I know I will be moderated down for this, but . . . Vincent
Seems like most people missed this little bit tucked in the release notes:
A DPS extension for XFree86 is currently under development. The DPS client library is now part of the XFree86 source tree; the extension code itself, however, cannot be integrated for licensing reasons and is distributed separately. For more information, please consult the DPS site at SourceForge.
Unfortunately the licensing is a bit messy - they are based off the most recent Aladdin GhostScript. But it's still cool to see it's in the works.
are there gonna be any improvements other than additional hardware support? more speed, full screen game play or something?
Your uneducated guess is a good one.
RH 7.0 will almost definitely be the Kernel 2.4/XF86 4.0 release (possibly KDE 2 and/or GNOME 1.2 as well).
So, if Rupert Murdoch decided to run stories exalting, say, Pat Buchanan as the ideal Presidential candidate and run mud-slinging stories on all the others, you'd have no problem with that because "Rupe wanted to and it's his multi-media conglomerate"?
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Linux MAPI Server!
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I'm not saying it should be illegal for Murdoch to broadcast what he wants. Like you, "...I recognize his right to run his business as he sees fit". Also like you, presumably, I know that the media wields a great deal of power and there is responsibility that goes with this power. When that responsibility is abused, I complain. Would you deny me the right to make complaints when I want?
In other words, take your own advice: when you see someone has written another comment you don't want to read, instead of repeating the tired, ass-kissing adage "Let Rob do what he wants", just think to yourself "Let Poster X do what he wants--which is apparently complaining to Rob."
There, look what you've done--you've made me violate my own advice.
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I am interested in upgrading my video card and have had a hard time bringing all the fragmented information about what cards will have fairly complete Linux support. Does anyone have a handle on this?
What cards will/do have hardware 3D acceleration and support similar to what they do have under windows? What are people using that they are happy with? Or please point me in the direction of some good information that can help me make an informed choice.
-Thanx
The way I understand it, overlaying means inserting your video or whatever directly onto the video signal going to your monitor. They use colorkeys to determine which region gets overlayed.
Am I close, or completely off the wall here?
By the way, the Utah-GLX project can be found here: http://utah-glx.sourceforge.net.
That sounds good in theory, but I think that having half of the graphics subsystem in kernel space and half outside is too much overhead. With that we now need to constantly switch from user to kernel code and back.
At leasts that's my opinion (I could be wrong).
32bpp = [xx rr gg bb]
xx stands for nothing
rr for one red byte
gg for one green byte
bb for one blue byte
24bpp = [rr gg bb]
=> same number of color, 32bpp just is aligned on dword addresses.
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
I'm not sure I like this trend in pushing out new software as soon as it hits a new major version number. I'm sure XFree86 4.0 will be fairly stable, as will the new 2.4 kernel, but real rock-solid stability only seems to come a few minor versions in. Just looking at kernels, we went from 2.2.0 to 2.2.12 to the latest version fairly quickly before things reached the level of quality they are at now. I'm sure XFree86 4.0 will go through the same process as it goes from 4.0.0 to 4.0.x.
My concern is that if RedHat puts too many "new" versions into their 7.0 release, people new to Linux may get the impression that the software isn't quite as stable as we claim it is. This could happen even if they see no issues with the actual software, but just see version numbers fly by at three or four per week. I know there are other distros out there, and I'm sure some won't jump onto the new kernel and X until things settle down, but RH *is* the distribution used by most newbies, and the media sometimes seems to think that RH and Linux are the same thing (but that's a whole new thread altogether!).
It's only software!
#include
I've got a g400max dualhead. setup with two 19inch SGI monitors ready for this, is it gonna happen?....
Answered my own question :)
M atrox Go Direct
take a look here:
http://www.matroxusers.com/News/Janweek02.html#
`Now, in January 2000, Matrox has contracted Precision Insight to develop the Matrox Millennium G400 XFree86 4.0 DRI driver . Although largely optimized for the Matrox G400, this driver will support 2D and 3D features common to both the Matrox G200 and G400 chips. In addition, it will also offer multi-monitor capability to Matrox G400 DualHead users.'
Am I the only one who thinks it's odd that they are announcing this as the final pre-release? I would think that if it is not yet prepared for general use, that it shouldn't be stated that this will be the last release that won't be ready. I would think the determination on whether it would be last or not should occur after the effects are seen among the general development users. If some huge ugly bugs pop up that require pretty decent sized-changes, I would want those changes to be throughly tested before a 4.0 release.
Then again, XFree 4.0 will be VERY welcome whenever it's ready.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Does MacOS let you use those screens as one logical screen?
Yes. Since the "Color Quickdraw" days ('86 or '87), the QuickDraw imaging system has supported an arbitrary number of graphics devices, which are united in the form of a single desktop. Note that this region need not be rectangular. (Application developers who need to know the geometry of the desktop region can use the GetGrayRgn toolbox call, but this need is infrequent in practice.)
Apple has encouraged developers to write their applications with the expectation that there may be any number of graphics devices, each of which may have different size, color, and depth characteristics. (See DeviceLoop for the recommended way to provide multi-device support in your MacOS applications.) Because MacOS applications have been "multi-device savvy" since day one, the multi-monitor support in MacOS is particuarly useful and impressive.
In this respect, MacOS makes a good model for emulation.
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
The human eye cannot see more than 24 bit. Even if it could a monitor cannot display more than how much... A 1024x768 monitor can only display 786,432 pixels/colors. That is a far cry from 2^24 (16,777,216 possible colors). If you go to 1600x1200 you get 1,920,000 pixels still only 1/8 of a 24 bit color palette.
I've wrote the routines for image processing/manipulation. The human eye can only distinguish 64 shades of grey at one time. When it comes to color the human eye can only see arround 64K colors. That is why they use false color in scientific areas. You can see more definition with the color.
The extra bits in a 36 bit color depth is for image processing/manipulation. When doing histogram stretches and other process this is where the extra bits of resolution comes out and makes a dramatic inprovement in image quality.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
The term "quantum leap" does not apply. The development of XFree86 has been steadly advancing covering all ground between point a and point b. It's like a super nova. All of a sudden bam it is there super bright. You see instantanious results but don't forget that it took light hundreds/thousnds/millions of years to get from point a to point b.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
I'm not a XFree86 developer, but I do subscribe to the XFree86 list, and download the latest sources when they are available. The 3.9.18 mainly contains a bunch of bug fixes, a few updates to documentation and some building fix ups.
Don't expect any new features that are not already there in 3.9, the team is working very hard to get 4.0 out the door and is concentrating on fixing any final bugs. I have been playing with it a little and it is almost (if not actually) ready. I don't seem to have any problems with it. I'm happy because of the built in Mesa and DRI support that lets you use the video acceleration in a window instead of full screen. So if your app crashes, you don't have to reboot to get your video back.
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
Where?!? I've been searching long hours (well, not quite) for an RPM of the last snapshot, to no avail. If you can tell me where to find these, I'd be much obliged =). -Sam Black
wrong. In hardware those 8 bits aren't used for anything. In software those 8 bits are used for alpha blending. It wouldn't make much sense otherwise. You can't have a transparent pixel on your monitor. RGBA is purely a software thing.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
(Note: I can't just remoderate again, once a comment is moderated by someone, the same person can't moderate it again.)
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Okay. So you feel that X is unstable. I'm willing to bet that in reality, it is what you have done to X. I installed RH6.1 (it is hardly a standard redhat box by now), and I run gnome/enlightenment.
I am in the middle of an expected 2 week uptime period before I boot back to windows.
That will be two weeks of C development using Kdevelop (which is still a bit buggy). I segfault so often I wrote my own handler. Not to say I suck at coding, but I am writing a inter-thread, buffered messaging system from scratch. There are pointers all over the place.
Linux/X/gnome/enlightenment hasn't crashed on me once. Ever. Since I installed it this August. Not Once.
Sorry. Windows can barely handle running Halflife and SC3k and The Sims (Windows is only usable for games for me), much less any C development.
And putting video routines into the kernel will improve this stability? Just because you add something to the kernel does not make it suddenly stable. I believe that one of the reasons why the Linux kernel is so stable is because it has not done such silliness. Keep it lean. The kernel shouldn't care whether a monitor is even attached.
Are you on the GGI or Be development team or something? Your rant sounded like a generic "Product A sucks. Try the new, improved Product B!" rant.
All the good stuff is stable in RH6.2beta right now, please keep it that way !!
RFC1925
So, I'm glad those wasted 8 bits are finally getting some good use.
Gustavo J.A.M. Carneiro
How can I get a copy of the Red Hat beta? I went to the RH web site but it didn't seem to be there.
Marjo Wycam, Master of the Programming Arts
Okay, here is my requisite bitch session about the problems in X. First. Is it just me, or is it really stupid to put a transparent networking protocol at the heart of the system. Something like that should really be at a higher level. I like the SunView approach. The windowing system would directly use ioctl()s to access the graphics card. Who's up for a port of THAT to Linux? Second. What has been done to lighten up X. When I hear statements like, "Netscape uses up even more memory than X!" its not to reassuring, considering that most non-unix windowing systems are fairly lightweight. Believe it or not, Quartz is based on the concept of a "lightweight window process" and if you've ever used BeOS, you know how lightweight it is. Its integrated into the app server (I think) and its memory usage barly registers. And GNOME doesn't help much either. Do any of the people on the dev list have any indication of X4's memory usage in comparison to X3.3.x? May they pull a Be and actually DECREASE memory usage in a major feature release?
Third. How good is DRI? Is it up to par with the cool SGI push X out of the way tricks? Is Linux OpenGL support finally going to whoop NT's? I hope so.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
"Even on a monitor this can be noticeable"
If you made a black to white gradient on a 24-bit (or 32-bit since the result is the same) display...
it is just possible for some people to see the contrast between say, Gray 117 and Gray 118.
They wouldn't be able to uniquely IDENTIFY those two colors (you can only distinguish a few dozen greys), but they can see the contrast.
Question though: Would you pay for say, 50% more RAM in your video card so that a few people couldn't strain their eyes looking for constrasting greys in long black to white gradients?
It's not noticeable in any normal use, and you REALLY have to stare pretty hard to see it. X supports 48-bit color information, but nobody at all uses it.
The Film industry needs 36 bits because they LOSE bits during image editing processes, that has nothing what-so-ever to do with the display depth. Your DVDs will look just fine in 24-bit RGB
Actually, it doesn't appear that nVidia will be releasing drivers which use the DRI. There was a post on Slashdot in the recent past (during the discussion of Va Linux/SGI/nVidia working together) from an SGI developer saying that the DRI doesn't make much since for nVidia given their hardware design. Despite a # of (very polite) requests, though, I can't get any more info from nVidia on the matter.
Adam
I admire the Utah-glx developers greatly for what they've done... However, bear in mind that what PI has developed (the direct rendering infrastructure) goes well beyond what can be done with utah-glx.
Adam
Thanks for that info
Adam K
I'm sorry, but you must have gotten the bad crack from your dealer this morning. Enlightenment, FVWM, Blackbox, etc are Window Managers. They run on top of an X Server, namely XFree86. The X Server is what actually deals with the hardware. All a window manager does is draw pretty little borders around your windows and allow you to move and resize them. Additionally, neither is in itself a GUI.
/usr/doc/howto.
For more information, try 'man XFree86' and 'man fvwm', as well as reading the XFree86 howto usually located in
Yes, that was a gleeful RTFM, but not a cruel one I hope
.sig: Now legally binding!
Is Redhat waiting on this so they can include the "four point oh" in the features list on the box?
-Oy Vey
Thanks go out to the XFree86 team, and I'm eagerly waiting 4.0!
--------
Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
Does anyone ever create source RPM's from these pre-releases? If so, I'd be willing to try it. Otherwise i don't think so :)
- Mike Roberto
-- roberto@apk.net
--- AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
The joke held true, once again. Debian potato frozen and not too far from stable and NOW they tell us XFree 4.0 - the most anticipated release since 2.2-kernel - is nearly out.
Well, I can only hope Vincent will once again see through the trouble and provide the more recent XFrees than those in stable release.
There is no such thing as good luck. There is only misfortune and its occasional absence.
I have been waiting for this since I started using Linux, about 6 months now!
There are a few major things in Linux that need to be worked on, but this has been the most critical. THANK YOU XFREE86!!!
This space intentionally left blank.
Not to sound whiny, but a "quantum leap" is a pun based on the quantum mechanics time travel stuff from the show _Quantum Leap_. A "quantum leap" forward is, literally, a miniscule advance. Somehow, I'd like to think X 4.0 will be a significantly great advance from X 3.xx. :)
-Legion
How does it run Unreal Tournament? I've just recently got the UT demo running on 3.3.6/Voodoo3 with downloads from 3dfx for the Glide and non-root-runnable modules. I found the performance to be playable, but basically unacceptable. Certainly a far cry from the Windows performance (with the possible exception that it won't blue screen my OS, as the Windows version will). Does 3.9x improve on this? The release notes certainly have a lot to say about improvements to 3dfx, DRI, Glide, etc., but how about some real-world experiences...?
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
And here I see it again:
<B>I'm typing this in extrans mode (isn't that the default mode</B> and it <i>doesn't show up</i> as it's supposed to.
<a href="http://slashdot.org/">Especially links</a>
<grub> Reading
nt
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Yes.
Daltorak
In actuallity, Netscape only breaks on the new libXt.so, so you'd only need to copy that one file.
I'm waiting for XFree4, because until the support and performance picture becomes clear, it's awfully easy to make a serious purchasing mistake. As I see it, there are several dimensions to this problem.
SlotA -- Slot1/Socket370 -- SuperSocket7
FastCPU -- MediumCPU -- SlowCPU
PureGames -- MostlyGames -- MostlySerious -- PureSerious
For my part, I'm SuperSocket7, MediumCPU, MostlyGames. In that current environment, I believe that puts me in line for one of the ATI Rage128-based cards. (It would seem that non-game use suffers on 3dfx, correct me i I'm wrong.) It would be nice to see this matrix fully fleshed out.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I've been hearing for months how XF4.0 is gonna revolutionize linux, and make so much more stuff possible, programming easier, everything better.
Would anyone be willing to explain what these great new features are, and what they will do for us?
I'd appreciate if you could keep it civil, but if you must insult me, please include a real answer with your response. thanks.
Wow, they're almost caught up with MacOS, which allows multiple screens with different sizes and depths.
I've seen some posts from Gtk+ hackers saying that it would be inefficient for GtK+ to do its own font rendering (I don't remember the reason offhand). It also leads to bloat if we have two implementations of everything: one in the X server and one in each toolkit.
And I'm not even sure that it's possible to do true inter-window translucency (which lots of people seem to want these days) without X server changes.
Can two different video cards be used in multi-headed mode?
How many video cards can be used in the same system?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I installed 3.9.17 a while back and everything worked just dandy.. except netscape 4.7..
It would fetch a webpage but wouldnt display it, and i could look at it via view>src but thats about it.. I guessed it was cuz it was statically linked against some xlib or something like that.. Any ideas?
I have only one video card, but I've decided to do twice as well as Zaphod Beeblebrox, and I now have four heads. Can I use the quadruple-head support?
See section 2.1 of the 3.9.17 relnotes
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
They're doing something sneaky. X uses its own module loader instead of relying on the OS. The same modules will work on all OS's for the same architecture.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
So XFree86 4 is going to be released with virtually no cards supported (for 3D) then, as we are talking about a few weeks to release. While the Utah glx project has excellent hardware support for a wide range of cards, including developing the agpgart kernel module, in less time with less funding. Why? An open development process is the obvious answer. Precision Insight provides companies with a driver development model that they understand, but they and XFree86 need to open up.
They have different goals. The XFree team is trying to put out an X server. A couple sample implementations to prove their design is correct is enough. They don't have to support many cards because the support can be written after release.
The Utah-GLX project is trying to write drivers for 3D video cards using GLX. It's not surprising that they've gotten more drivers out than XFree has.
When XFree86 4.0 is released, the Utah team can port their drivers. There's no reason to double the effort to write 3D drivers.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
Apparently my graphics card (an 8MB Matrox G200) will have overlay support when running in 32bpp (I usually run it in 1024x768x32 anyway). Which sounds very nice, but for one thing. What the hell are overlays? They sound interesting - is it for overlaying, say, video from a card or MPEG player, or for something completely different?
Overall, XFree86 4.0 looks pretty good - the older version I'm using storms along at 2D stuff and has 3D acceleration thanks to Utah GLX; 4.0 will probably be even better.
Ford Prefect
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
From the FTP site:
. 18/00README
ftp://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/XFree86/snapshots/3.9
This directory contains the XFree86 3.9.18 snapshot release.
The contents are as follows:
doc/ Documentation
doc/HTML/ Documentation in HTML format
fixes/ Fixes for serious problems found after this snapshot was released
patches/ Patches for updating the previous release to this one
source/ Source tarballs for this snapshot release
NOTE: The 3.9.18 distribution is still being put into place, so not all
of the above are there yet.
22 Feb 2000
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Some hardware does alpha blending, much like some hardware accelerates sprites.
More accurately, in the final digital-to-analog conversion hardware those 8 bits aren't used for anything (although they could be put to very good use, if the monitors were of sufficiently high quality: the human eye can detect very faint differences in intensity, more than the 256 possible levels of greyshade in a 24-bit pixel, though the human eye is not really sensitive enough to distinguish between all the possible colors of a 24-bit pixel, so the extra byte could be used to create higher intensity resolution, so you had 16-bits of intensity, 8 implicit in the RGB and 8 explicit). In the image composition acceleration hardware, the extra byte may or may not be used.
You can't have a transparent pixel on your monitor, but you can sometimes have a transparent pixel in your video memory.
That's not entirely true. X does use it's own loader, contributed by Metroworks (I think). However some modules still require certain kernel support, such as the fbdev driver. So a subset of the modules will work on any architecture, but not all of them will work everywhere.
As of now, Precision insight is working on DRI for 3dfx and ATI 128 cards, for inclusion in XF86 4.
The Utah GLX project has working under the XF85 3.3.X series writing drivers for Matrox, ATI Rage, S3 Virge, Nvidia, and i810 cards, outside the DRI framework. These will need to be converted to DRI to be included XFree86 4.
So XFree86 4 is going to be released with virtually no cards supported (for 3D) then, as we are talking about a few weeks to release. While the Utah glx project has excellent hardware support for a wide range of cards, including developing the agpgart kernel module, in less time with less funding. Why? An open development process is the obvious answer. Precision Insight provides companies with a driver development model that they understand, but they and XFree86 need to open up.
Maybe it's just me, but I've noticed that whenever I try to start up X I get a syslog'd error about MTRR and mem overlapping (32mb vs 64mb at the 0xe0000000...point, where the vid card maps its ram). I have a voodoo3/3000. Anyone else have this problem, and will something as simple as disabling MTRR in the kernel fix this?
Summary of new features in 3.9.17 compared with 3.9.16: http://www.xfree86.org/3.9.18/RELNOT ES2.html
Summary of new features in 3.9.16 compared with 3.9.15: http://www.xfree86.org/3.9.18/RELNOT ES3.html
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
In posting this comment, all my moderations for this story have been undone, so. Well, if anyone wants to moderate this up like I was going to, please do so. :)
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Just so you know: PI is also working on drivers for Intel (the i810) and Matrox (G200/G400). According to Daryll Strauss they should all be out by the end of the second quarter, even if they aren't included in XFree86 4.0.
Adam
US
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/mirrors/xfree86
Europe
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Actually the human eye can see much more than 24 bit. Consider this, 24 bit equals 8 bits per red, green and blue component. So that means you only have 256 distinct steps between pure white and pure black if you make a gradient.
Even on a monitor this can be noticeable but it is really a problem with graphics made for cinema or hi definition television. In these cases they often use 12 bit per rgb component (36 bit colour!) to avoid obvious banding effects.
So the human eye only seeing 24 bit is, like the supposed 30 frames per second thing, a myth.
In the announcement link the release notes link is broken pointing to a non existant document. So I guess I will ask this. What exactly are the real improvements? Does this affect anyone except people who are running new stuff? Better optimizations for older stuff? Less memory waste?
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Just in case this was not meant as a joke: enlightenment, blackbox and all the other existing GUIs run on top of XFree86. They're by no means replacing it.
If you'd like to replace XFree86, maybe go for framebuffer devices, svgalib or GGI.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Many thanks to the XFree team for coming one step closer to a major milestone.
The thing to look for now is 3D chip OEMs following through on their promises to make DRI drivers available.
NVidia's GLX implementation wasn't much good to me, and I wish I had kept my Voodoo2 lying around when I replaced my video card over the summer. X4 w/ DRI is the first step for me in finally going Linux full time.
The companies we all support with our hard earned bucks must support us with their commitments, and alternative OS drivers. (Sorry to refer to Linux in this respect. I sure don't view Linux as an alternative, but many people have yet to clue in. Any PHB's listening?)
Make your voices heard, and make sure that companies don't merely capitalize on promises without following through. Patience and mutual understanding are important virtues for anyone involved in a movement to promote awareness. Remember that as we all work together to make Linux better than ever, and add this piece to the puzzle.
"There is no knowledge that is not power"
It's a rarely used feature but that accursed AccelX bunch claims to have g400 dual head (dual monitor) support, and they lord it all over XFree on their website.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
This is excellent. I wonder if there is NVidia DRI, or if DRI still only works w/ Matrox/3DFx cards.
Does anyone know if DRI will work under FreeBSD as well as Linux? Or is that kind of low level hardware access kernel specific?
He who knows not, and knows he knows not is a wise man
Most of us are looking forward to antialiasing for fonts, somehow. Unfortunately, the server returns fonts as a 2-dimensional binary array (if I'm understanding things correctly). That's means pixels are either "on" or "off" (no greys).. So, it would seem that antialiasing would not be possible without a major rewrite of the API or something.
That's my question, though. Is a rewrite of the API likely? Or, do you think that a competing display technology to XFree taking hold would be more probable?
Alex Bischoff
---
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Another quick mirror is:
e 86/snapshots/3.9.18/
/ snapshots/3.9.18/
ftp://download.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/XFre
http://download.sourceforge.net/mirrors/XFree86
Well, people seem to like stuffing everything that they are missing in their windowing system into their toolkits nowadays, sans fixing the windowing system, which is not the way to go, imho.
The ggi-project on the other hand basically is a portable graphics library, not a windowing system, which wont help unless someone built a windowing system on top of it.
Thats what the berlin folks are doing, but their project seems to be very (very, veryvery) ambitious. To the point that I fear they will not be able to attract new developers because of their lack of a production (sort of) system.
GGI on the other hand seems to be out of the game kernel-wise and is (partly) still suffering from "nobody recognizes my work, I dont want to be a part of society"-attitude. All this is really a shame.
I wish the fbdev- developers would get more support (and 3D accel support in the kernel that is not made solely for X) so that people can get together and finally build a modern windowing system without having to think about graphics libs and devices first. They have to think about that enough anyway.
No, Debian stable = proven packages. It may not be sexy, but it means you aren't constantly mucking with the system while others are muttering that maybe they should go back to good old reliable MS Windows.
And if you really want to run the cutting edge, you can always run unstable.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Gee, I could swear I submitted this late yesterday when the file tree changed..
Anyway, the source can be had here, and you really should read the release notes here once they appear.
No real info is available on what exactly is new in 18: Any XFree developers here that can fill us in?
.sig: Now legally binding!
I just built this on an OpenBSD box a few hours ago. Overall it was a smooth process except for one hitch which might be a problem for those who use OpenBSD.
On OpenBSD in the file Xlocale.h you have to add:
#define X_NOT_STDC_ENV
to get it to properly compile. Hopefully this helps.
Don't hate me because I'm a troll.
when I was at sgi, we had 2 kinds of dual-screen xservers. one was the classical dualhead setup (running on an Octane). you had a :0 and a :1 screen. and only the mouse would travel between them. for each client, you had to have their 'default' set to :0 or :1 to get a window on that screen, or specifically ask for it at launch time. after it was bound to a screen, there was no easy way to move it over.
then there was the hybrid hack that the O2 systems used. it combined each head into a virtual contiguous screen (ie, there was only a :0 screen). you could bind the 2nd display either below the first one or along side of it. running xdpyinfo would show a single big screen and not two. the problem is that window managers didn't deal well with this arrangement. and you'd end up with mouse problems and dragging issues when trying to keep windows inside a screen border. I hated it - it was an aweful hack.
with xinerama, you have the best of both, sort of. you don't have a :1 but you do have a sane setup that respects the vertical screen edges, yet dragging can occur seamlessly horizontally.
and btw, if you want classical dualhead X, you can choose to startx WITHOUT xinerama mode. that is, if you really do want a :0 and a :1 screen device.
for the price of 2 used matrox cards ($50/ea at current used prices), a dualhead setup CANNOT BE BEAT. I run the same dual head setup at work and at home. its VERY addictive ;-)
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Slashdot = News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.
Freshmeat = New cool open source related software.
Not all of the new software is news, not all of the news is related to new software. But having the crossover in both places is good. Anyone who actually reads freshmeat can tell you, it's easy to let an important program get lost in the shuffle. There are now rougly 60 new items on freshmeat daily. As someone who reads both, I am glad to have the redundancy.
I'm so excited about XFree86 4.0 any new info should be written on the moon and stars. As I understand it, this will be a quantum leap forward in Gaming, Graphics and usability for Linux. Goodness knows we could use it.
Thank you for not thinking.