Slashdot Mirror
X-Server with Alpha Transparency
An anonymous reader pointed us to a Java X Server that has hacked together
alpha channel transparency. Its not XF86, but its nifty. It demos (worthless but pretty) transparent windows, bizarre but pretty transparent widgets, but also the extremely wonderful and essential anti-aliased fonts that X11 continues to lack.
You might try the XFree86 Font Deuglification Mini HOWTO for some help with the Netscape fonts. Although not perfect, it made quite a difference for me.
IMO , that kind of "feature" is useless to get some work done. It should be implemanted on the application level - ie only a few apps need ta have alpha channel things like the Gimp or some games. The only people really interested are Hardware vendors, one more occasion to upgrade the CPU and/or the Graphic card .....
Actually, many GUI applications could potentially make use of this. Think anti-aliased text, or PNG's that actually work correctly in web-browsers. You say that applications that need it should be the ones to implement it. Well what about other features of the windowing system, like line drawing? By having this in the windowing system, there's one piece of code to debug, optimize, and make hardware specific versions of. If each application has to support alpha-transparency on its own, then we'll never get to make use of hardware-based alpha-composition. Do you really want to see the day when GIMP runs better on Win32 than on Linux?
And your performance claims make no sense. Just adding alpha transparency to the windowing system doesn't mean every widget would have to use it. Widgets that don't need it wouldn't use it, or would have it as an option. There wouldn't be any significant performance degradation for widgets that don't use it. Widgets that do need it can make use of it, and less developers will need to reinvent the wheel by writing their own alpha-composition code.
Right now the only way to achieve something like this in X is through a hack. The Java X Server is merely a hack. Yes, things like EFM, Eterm, and the like are able to do stunning effects such as this, but in the end, it is actually faked. Until someone writes a protocol for X to allow this, we aren't going to see it. And writing an extension for alpha rendering is MUCH easier said then done.
Yes, there are a few projects going on to do this, and there have been a few projects going on for _years_ now to add this to X. Don't get your hopes up, because you aren't going to see true translucency/alpha rendering on X anytime soon.
--
Joshua Deere (dphase@locnet.net)
UNIX Systems Administrator, LOCNET Internet Services
jd
WeirdX is the one with the transparency hack. WiredX does NOT have this.
---
END OF LINE
every flippin topic that goes through slashdot there is some retard that has to say something about beowulf clusters
And every one of those has to have a reply complaining about the fact that every article has someone talking about Beowulf clusters. Damn, it's like we have a Beowulf cluseter of you people complaining about Beowulf clusters in some kind of recursive Beowulf cluster nightmare.
My other
I've been using MI/X at work, a free X server. While it was OK to use, it's rather simple in nature, and I had to play around with font configuration a lot to get it to display complex apps with any degree of readability. It also lacked cut and paste from Windows to X, really annoying.
I just tried WeirdX, and it's pretty good! The performance is OK, at least for a few windows (I'm running the recently released JDK 1.3). It supports cut & paste between X and Windows (or the mac I believe if you run it on a mac).
It also seems to be pretty configurable as well, here are some of the more useful properties you can edit (in config/props if you don't specify them on the command line):
# for specifying the size of the screen
weirdx.display.width: numeral
weirdx.display.height: numeral
# Use this for seperate Windows type windows
weirdx.windowmode: InBrowser | MultiWindow
# check out the default - that's why some graphics look funky!
weirdx.display.visual: TrueColor16 | PseudoColor8 | StaticGray8
default: PseudoColor8
# Set to yes for a a real three button mouse, otherwise you have to chord.
weirdx.display.threebutton: yes | no
default: no
# Use this to activate the alpha hack, note that happily it's off by default so you can use it for real work.
weirdx.display.background.alpha: numeral in decimal
default: 255
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley