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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.
"
Does MacOS let you use those screens as one logical screen? Multiple screens with multiple sizes and color depths are supported (in various ways), they're just not as convenient as Xinerama.
Why not just dump X and get a decent imaging model as the new standard?
NextStep, OSX, etc. all used the Postscript model, and they get a good part of the flexibility on the display side from this.
Why not just get Ghostscript up and running, and bolt the display stuff onto that??
John
John_Chalisque
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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
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Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
This isn't just any old release, this is the last XFree before 4.0, one of the most eagerly awaited releases in recent times. Even if the article had said nothing but "XFree86 is now expected in early March", that would have been news for nerds, stuff that matters.
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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.
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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
I would suspect so. RH 6.2 is available in beta, so I doubt they'll put XFree86 4.0 into 6.2 My uneducated guess is that the 7.0 release will contain kernel 2.4 and XFree86 4.0.
-dwd-
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.
You are right. I am a bonehead. I got so excited my fingers kept flying but my brain disengaged.
What I meant to say was "a supernovicular explosion of features".
Thank you for not thinking.
Freshmeat has comments. About two comments per program to be more precise. What a lively discussion.
That's probably because, officially, there isn't 3.3.6 for slink. Some have been made but they aren't part of the official slink distribution, so your mileage may vary. XFree86 3.3.6 in potato, on the other hand, is just fine from my experience.
Freshmeat is for downloading the shit, /. is for bitching about it, flaming, trolling, zealotry, my-os-is-better, "i submitted this last week", and "Linux!" 'No! BSD!'
What about 3DLabs! Does the X world think 3D revolves around 3dfx and voodoo?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
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?
"Quantum" means that the step is indivisible, not that it's large or small.
Stairs have quantum steps of about 8". My old analog radio receiver had a continuous tuning circuit, but my digital radio receiver has quantum steps of 200 kHz (iirc).
The dictionary definition of "quantum leap" makes sense in that it describes a discontinuous change. By their nature, discontinuous changes are abrupt and can't be broken down into smaller steps. The "dramatic advance" follows from the fact that most human-scale continuous changes are actually the result of many small discrete changes, so they're drawing a distinction by specifying this change is large.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
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.
ftp://ftp.xfree86.org/pu b/XFree86/snapshots/3.9.17/binaries/
.tgz packages. tar -zxf 'em from root. If you have a copy of Slackware pkgtool floating around you can use that. Otherwise, there are a number of small utils that will convert them to .rpm for you.
has binaries for
FreeBSD-2.2.x and 3.x
NetBSD-1.3
Linux on Alpha/Intel, glibc only.
Solaris
They're
If there isn't one for you (eg, you still have a libc system) download the source. It's a usually a simple make World && make install && make install.man. Be warned, on a K6-2 500 the process took a few hours. Oh yeah.. The funny looking INSTALL.TXT file is actually nroff formatted. 'nroff INSTALL.TXT | less' works.
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I've been using 3.9.17 for a while, and its at least as stable as 3.3.2 was (for me ;.). Except for the occasional queer behavior from Xinerama, which 99% of end-users aren't going to touch anyway, I'd give it a thumbs up to make it into the RH 6.2 distro.
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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
Also, why not use unstable? It can be a bit annoying sometimes (when something breaks, and fscks with dpkg), but you get access to up to the second software, the latest packages and dpkg enhancements, and a chance to help out Debian (by reporting any bugs you find in unstable). I've used it for quite a while now, without any major problems.
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.
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The I810 needs some kernel patches to work properly.6 ">ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat-6.2bet a/i386/</a>) - we're now supporting the i810 chipset.
<p>You might want to try getting the kernel and XFree86 packages from the current Red Hat Linux 6.2 beta (<a href="ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat-6.2beta/i38
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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
you can't [currently] have different bit/color depths yet. but I think that's an 'overlay' function that is coming...
otoh, can macOS allow different window managers? different look/feel themes? macOS was the most strict UI I've ever seen. just like the original Ford car - any color you want - as long as its black.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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
Would anyone be willing to explain what these great new features are, and what they will do for us?
DRI - Direct Rendering Infrastructure
Basically, the DRI allows a 3D application (game, most likely) to talk directly to the video card. Currently, GLX is a network protocol, and so all 3D requests go over the network (this is a simplification).
Multi-Head/Xinerama
The ability to use 2 video cards at the same time. Classic multi-head means 2 X sessions at the same time. Xinerama is an extension to allow you to have 1 session that splits across 2 screens. Very cool.
Unified Device Drivers
In previous versions of XFree, you'd have to write a driver for each video card and then port it to each platform. So, Matrox (for instance) didn't makr XFree drivers. They'd have to make it for Linux and port it to FreeBSD and Solaris x86 and OS/2. Porting requires significant effort. Now, they write 1 driver and it works on all x86 machines.
Better Mouse Support
These new fangled mice have all sorts of buttons on them. Mine has 3 buttons and 2 scroll wheels (each scroll wheel is seen as 2 buttons...one pressed when you scroll up and one on down). XFree 3.3.x only supported 5 buttons (and thus my second scroll wheel doesn't work). XFree 4.0 supports unlimited numbers.
General Re-write
The XFree guys have been at it a long time now. So, they're taking this opportunity to rewrite some portions of their code. It's supposed to be faster and use less memory.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
Uhm, no. A "quantum leap" is a big advance. From Meriam-Webster Online:
It does derive from quantum mechanics. I think it comes from the idea that energy levels are quantized, so that to move from one to another you have to have some minimum energy jump. So the step forward your talking about is not a minuscule step, but a a more revolutionary step forward.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
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?
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Yes, there are usually binary-only RPMs available for the major supported platforms (Solaris, *BSD-x86, Linux-x86/alpha, etc) within a week or so.. I'd be terribly surprised if it took much longer than that
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No. Have a look at the current beta - some packages will change (some have changed already), but there won't be any major changes such as moving to XFree86 4.0, Kernel 2.4, glibc 2.2, KDE 2.0, GNOME 1.2 or whatever else is ahead.
XFree86 will definitely bring a lot of good things, but also some breakage because of library and header changes. Anyone shipping 4.0 as soon as it's released (without fixing up some applications or waiting for them to be fixed) is setting himself up for some trouble.
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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.
Note: I'm speaking as an individual who has read quite a bit on 3D support under linux and who has used the following 3d chips under linux (not as a developer): Savage4, ATI Rage 128, TNT2, 3dfx.
Currently, the best supported 3D cards under linux are 3dfx and Matrox. 3dfx is probably better supported at the moment. By mid-year Precision Insight plans on having DRI drivers for 3dfx (already available from cvs), Matrox (G200/G400), ATI (Rage 128), and Intel (I810). nVidia should be releasing drivers in the next few months for their line of 3D cards, although the impression I've gotten is that they won't be using DRI (apparently they or SGI didn't feel that DRI was the most appropriate means of doing accelerated 3d for nVidia's cards).
Utah-GLX already supports hardware acceleration for ATI Rage Pro, Matrox, nVidia, S3 Virge, and probably something else that I'm forgetting. However, Utah-GLX doesn't use the Direct Rendering Infrastructure.
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 ;-)
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
My prediction: Redhat 6.2 with Xfree86 3.3.6, all the current stuff. Then in late summer/ early fall , Redhat 7.0 with Xfree86 4.x, and a 2.4 kernel (I thought the DRI in Xfree86 4.0 needed some special kenel modules anyway). Also should have the upcoming version of Gnome that probably won't make it into 6.2, also expect to see a Redhat branded Mozilla in there. In my opion it is going to rock.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
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.