Slashdot Mirror
XFree86 4.0 vs. XFree86 3.3.x
Patrick Mullen writes "I've recently compiled a comparison of XFree86 4.0 vs. 3.3.x. The review includes benchmarks, an overview on 4.0, the bugs still in 4.0 and a few other tidbits. "
Its a bit sparse but its a good overview piece. It looks as if its definitely not for everyone quite yet.
Should I upgrade now?
X Free Four-point-oh looks good
But will my box crash?
IIRC, mesa is the OGL library behind GLX, and is part of the Xfree distribution now. I think the author may be confused. Am I mis-remembering here?
What I like most about XF4 is it's speed on my laptop. My laptop only has 16 megs of memory, and it rips now. -LW
... is Quake 3!
With the 3.3...... release I couldn't run Q3A
with my TNT2 but now it works just fine.
Thank you NVIDIA.
(Well I really want opensource drivers but theese drivers really are good)
It's called new wave but it's just the same.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
The specs on the GeForce look nice, but I find the 3dfx benchmarks quite questionable. I installed X4.0 by wiping /usr/X11R6 clean and using a standard RPM install, followed by an RPM install of the Glide 3.x drivers. Quake 3 worked out of the box, and my framerates have been approximately 20% higher. I'm curious as to exactly how he configured his card and whether he was in fact using the correct drivers. This seems a bit odd. I've only heard good things about the improvements using the Voodoo3 cards from a number of people.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
You can also find information comparing driver support between XF86 3.3.x and XF86 4.0 here at the XFree86 website. You'll find that many popular graphics chipsets have yet to be ported to XF86 4.0.
Has anyone else been having trouble getting to Nvidia's site? I'm getting errors about the hostname not being valid. It's been like this since at least yesterday.
matt
It's also very slow. You see on my main desktop ( A humble P200 with 64 megs and a 4 meg S3-Virge ) it takes several minutes to load X. Most of that wait time you have a blank screen.
Sure, X4 doesn't support many chips the X3 supports. However there is no need for it to support them as both versions of X are compatible and Mandrake has already demonstrated how to ship and install both.
With a little refinement they will be able switch X version depending on Video hardware. And of course OSS means that every Linux and *BSD vendor can copy what they do at will.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I'm pretty darn excited about XFree86's support for this. Should make configuration a lot simpler. I've never been able to get the color depth under X that I could get from Windows.
rusty
"The further I get from the things that I care about, the less I care about how much further away I get." -Robert Smith
Um... XF4's architecture is vastly different from before... that's why you bump major version numbers.
Wrong... The license changed (with release 3.0) from GPL to something compatible to X's license.
Adam
"With the present state, 3dfx is actually behind on DRI drivers, which is rather surprising."
They are behind for a couple reasons:
a) Precision Insight (PI) was more concerned with taking advantage of all the cards features than they were with optimizations. This should hopefully be changing in the near future.
b) 3dfx seems to be just as concerned with supporting the Voodoo4/5 when they're released as they are with supporting the Voodoo3, and PI has been working in that direction.
"The only explanation I can come up with is because XF86-4.0 is less proven than 3.3.x 3dfx's drivers proved to be very fast even without direct hardware access, and without true OpenGL-which may be the reason why the new implementation is so weak. Which brings me to my next point..."
In fact, the 3dfx has always used direct rendering for 3d acceleration under X, but now they are using Precision Insight's Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI), a different form of direct rendering.
"nVidia pushed the drivers out the door almost immediately..."
That is just wrong... It took an extremely long time for nVidia to release their drivers after they said they'd be releasing high performance 3D driver for 4.0.
we're trying to keep the scene free of idiots like yourself
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
X is basically a hardware interface, and those other things you mentioned are window managers(technically, GNOME and Enlightenment are user interface suites, which both include a window manager. GNOME uses Enlightenment, KDE uses KWM.)
You can run x without them (try it sometime, just type X on the console. alt, ctrl, backspace will get you out)
As to which window manager is better, it depends what you like. I like the GNOME interface a lot, but it takes up a lot of resources, so I usually use GNUstep.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
I too have compiled XF4 at home, but I have a problem with it...and it's a rather strange problem..
I can start the X server and do most things alright in it ( some pixels here and there don't quite work right, specially in XMMS but hey, it's okay, XFree4 is still beta right? )
But if I switch to a VT and then back, the X desktop is totally messed up, we're talking virtually unrecognizable, the colours are all wrong.
It sounds like ( to me ) that whatever buffer it writes the screen to when switching isn't quite saving all the information, or is writing back to the screen wrong.
Yes I have looked at the code, unfortunatly I'm not a Master C Programmer ( yet ) so it doesn't all make sense to me.
My advice, if you have a Rage 128, ( or at least an AGP Xpert 2000 with 32 megs of ram ), you're probably better of with XFree86 3.3.6.
Then again it could just be my motherboard but somehow I doubt it.
Any ideas?
> In their mind, you're just another person who
> can't keep up with technology. So is the FSF
> just trying to one-up MS in their own game by
> releasing XFree86 4.0? Seems like it to me.
Definitely not. If you take a closer look at the new Xfree 4.0 version, you'll find that it is indeed greatly different from 3.x; different enough to warrant the jump in version numbers.
The underlying architecture was completely remodeled, the insane replication of code and effort for the seperate monolithic x-servers has been replaced by a modular design that will even allow cross-OS reuse of driver modules, the font handling has changed and so on..
you have moved your mouse, please reboot to make this change take effect
Maybe its entirely true, and maybe version hype causes it all, but...
It is still open, and it is still free (like beer)!
I can take a little hype under these conditions.
Actually, it's the other drivers that are behind
And Mesa happens to be at the heart of the OpenGL implementation in XF4...
whose OpenGL 1.2 implementation is not complete/100% conformant
Which has very little to do with XF4, which is what is suppossed to being reviewed. Nvidia released a new server and a matching OpenGL implementation (without programmer's documentation or at least a dammed header, mind you). An own OpenGL implementation (or SGI's) is supposed to be behind it...
And you are comparing apples and oranges here... it doesn't say which Voodoo driver is being used, and I'd suppose it's compared against the nVidia recently released drivers. The point is nVidia says their drivers are beta, while the Voodoo ones are still in development.
I'm kinda surprised taco posted this, next thing he'll post is my (rather long) email that says "XFree86 sucks" or "XFree86 rulez"... :-(
Can anyone tell me if X is better than GNOME or KDE or Enlightenment or any of the others?
Actually, you're already using X. You just don't know it. Linux/Unix GUIs are divided into two parts--a server and a client. XFree86 is the X-Windows server. GNOME and KDE are actually the clients on your system. Most of the Linux distribuitions use XFree86, but there are other X servers.
This is further complicated by the fact that both GNOME and KDE also require a "window manager". GNOME 1.2 uses Sawfish as a window manager. Most previous versions of GNOME use Enlightenment. KDE uses it's own K Window Manager.
If I've got anything wrong, I hope that someone else will correct it. I'm just trying to offer help from one newbie to another.
rusty
"The further I get from the things that I care about, the less I care about how much further away I get." -Robert Smith
Gnome doesn't use Enlightenment anymore, but rather Sawfish which is supposed to fit in better with how E does things... There's an interesting article What's New in Gnome 1.2 on LinuxPower
Unless the original post is a troll itself, that is.
The original post seems too polite to be true, but I actually answered a question very close to this on a newbies forum, so my estimates are : 55% Troll 45% True.
Ciao
----
FB
I'll play devil's advocate on this one. ;)
Linux is growing faster because it has so much room to grow. The real competitors to Linux are already well established in their markets, so growing... for them... isn't as easy as it is for Linux. The market is also expanding rapidly, which gives Linux a more equal footing for expansion. That can distort those numbers.
With that said, I still don't agree that Linux is failing and is never going to pick up. There is no evidence of that, and far too much evidence to the contrary.
I would not cite Linux's growth in the marketplace as compared to its competitors though, as I personally don't think that is an accurate measure of its success. Instead, I'd mention where Linux is taking market share away from its competitors. There is a distinct difference between the two in a market that is expanding as rapidly as this one.
LouZiffer
LouZiffer
If I run X using startx, then switch to another VC using ctrl-alt F2, then log on as root and start an X session to use some graphical tools, then quit the root session, if I do Alt-F7 to get to the original session, I get a crash every time. I suppose a positive result of this is that I use sudo much more frequently, but I don't even recall some of the names of some of the KDE tools to run them from the command line. It's a bit inconvenient. Apart from that, things work fine. Q3Arena works well, though I don't see any improvement when I activate r_smp 1 to get SMP support. In fact, I get about .4 fps lower than with r_smp set to 0. I'm still too new at this to really troubleshoot that properly, though.
Mandrake 7.1 beta, PII333 SMP x2, 256MB RAM
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
Well, are we talking about NT or W9x? NT did not have multiple monitors supported until service pack 4 for 4.0, and became standard in 2000. W9x got this in W98, and it didn't work too well when I tried to use my extra video card and 15" montor. You could have a text based second monitor for many years on Linux and Windows or so that is what I thought. If I am wrong then someone please correct me. Either way the features that you speak of were not supported by Windows for many years.
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
Nice troll! I'll bite. Lessee, where do I start.
Why don't you do a little research occasionally?
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Did you try GNOME with XFree4.0 ? On my box with RadHat's GNOME it had a problem repaining the background on the root window.
In my Crystal Space engine which can also run in software rendering mode I noticed a big improvement in performance (from 25 FPS to 31 FPS) when going from XFree 3.3 to XFree 4.0. This has nothing to do with hardware rendering. I'm talking about software here. Other people reported this too.
I wonder what happened there?
Greetings,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
My name is "Rob Malda."
I am a dot, dot.
I'm using it as we speak, no problems. I've had October Gnome and now Gnome 1.2, and they both work fine. Maybe your vid drivers?
If you're still using E you might try going with sawfish. E on my machine (P2-500, 128M) dragggs. Sawfish is heaven-sent though.
I've been running XFree86 4.0 for almost a month now.
I compiled it myself, installed it on Debian 2.1, with my NVIDIA TNT2 AGP and the NVIDIA drivers.
I've only had one or two lockups in the meantime. I'll likely upgrade to 4.0.1 soon.
My instructions for what I did to compile and install it are at http://www.antimeta.com/tmp/
--
Marc A. Lepage (aka SEGV)
--
Marc A. Lepage
Software Developer
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
The FSF would never do such a thing.
:) Except for flex and ncurses.
I like to play devil's advocate.
I just hope that ncurses keeps the BSD-style license after the five year agreement to keep that license is up. If it stays with the current license, I can see it becoming standard on more OS's (of course I thought it would at least a couple of years ago).
this comparaison is possibly intereting for gamer and others 3D user.
but, what about performance of XF40 VS XF3.x on a P120 with 16MO RAM ???
which one is the more ligth with AS1.0 ?
in slackware 3.0 we belive.
bye bye !
This statement in the article raised the hair on the back of my head. They state, "Since the new drivers use direct hardware access, no need to be root to play games anymore. This is sure handy because it integrates more functions into a standard user, making the unprivileged user much more practical. Combine this with a distribution like Mandrake, and you may never need to logout again to play Quake 3."
/dev/3dfx) has owner and group set to root, yes you must be root. Simple fix is to change the device driver to something like games (which the 3dfx docs tell you to do BTW) and you don't need to be root to play Q3A.
Not sure where they get their info from, but I can play Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament without beeing root. I even installed them without being root.
What they are actually implying is if the device driver (in my case
I think they should have done much more research for their article before making clear mistakes like this. Now, XFree86 4.0 makes some things nicer but their statement is completely in left field.
-- DuckWing
Your X server is what controls your video card and mouse. That's all it does; X does not have menus, windows, or any of that stuff, because of the way it was designed. It's also a network protocol, which enables you to run remote applications and have them display on your local terminal. My ISP got pissed at me when I tried this from their BSDI box...
The windows and such are controlled by your window manager. Window managers are what give you your basic menus, your titlebars, window borders, etc. Enlightenment is a window manager, as are fvwm, twm, olvwm, afterstep, windowmaker, and dozens of others.
GNOME, KDE, CDE, and UDE are desktop environments (although I've not used UDE). They're basicly application suites. GNOME programs, for example, use the GNOME libraries, and are all similar as far as interface goes. They try to be consistant. KDE and CDE come with their own window managers (KWM for KDE and mwm for CDE), but GNOME does not; that's why you'll often see it paired with enlightenment or sawfish (or many others). I don't know about UDE, I've not tried it.
All these work together to give you your GUI experience. You can use a different X server, for example, and not have to change any settings for your window manager or desktop environment.
The best way to learn this is to try different window managers and see what they have to offer.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
You're confusing two things. X windows is a lower layer that supports whatever window manager (KDE, Enlightenment, etc.) people care to write to use it. They depend on X already being there.
Java code for GUI applications is too slow for some stuff. Java's not a compiled language (normally, anyway) so it's not as fast as what a program written in C/C++ would be. Depending on the application, this can be a big drawback.
Plus, you have to install a java runtime environment and set it up in order to run java stuff. Last time I downloaded blackdown's JDK it was 10 megs (and their server was really slow). JDK's are normally not included in linux distributions for some reason (prolly lisencing, but I don't know for sure).
GTK+ is a native C toolkit, so GUI programs in C are often written using it. It's the basis for GNOME. KDE uses QT for its toolkit, since it's written in C++.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
I have little doubt that XF4.0 is going to make games somewhat snappier, but I'd like to see how much.
i find it irrratating that the only bugs he mentions about xfree 4.0 are related to playing games. because the article isn't directed towards gamers. at the end he made a comment that "i doubt you're a serious cutting edge linux user if you're not using 4.0". god forbid there be cutting edge users that dont use their linux boxen for games. what about the bugs that i care about? like that fact that when i ctrl-alt-f1 to another virtual terminal and then ctrl-alt-f7 back to x, the screen is all black until i can trick the monitor into switching modes? (activating xscreensaver seems to do the trick). or the fact that i can't use an image with black in it as my desktop wallpaper, because it not ever redraw that area of the desktop? there are plenty of bugs other than the ones he mentioned. and despite the recent kick for games on linux, there are still plenty of us who dont use linux for games.
that being said, i use xfree 4.0 and am fairly happy with it. it is fairly stable. i have never had it crash on me, and all of the bugs that i have found are pretty much just minor annoyances. (although it would be nice to be able to use transparent Eterms again....
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
GLX
...
This is SGI's OpenGL extension. Several companies have been working hard at this, mainly Precision Insight. Companies that obviously benefit from this have been supporting them, like ATI, 3dfx, Matrox, and SGI. These sound like good players to me. My only question is why nVidia did not support the project. It's unfortunate nVidia would not support the project
The author seems to be mixing PI's DRI work for XF4.0 (which includes GLX implementation) and SGI's GLX (OpenGL on X). NVidia's drivers implement GLX as well (not surprisingly because their OpenGL implementation is partly made by SGI.)
-- v --
I've got X4 running on SuSE 6.4 on two machines, both at home and in my office. Here's what I did. After installing 6.4, I used Yast and went to the SuSE ftp site under install. The rpms are there under SuSE/X/XFree86/XFree86-4.0-SuSE/suse64. Yast recognized that these are newer packages than 3.3.6 and let me upgrade X. I selected everything except glide, xextra and xxprt. I also installed SaX2 but at first it would not work. I ran xf86config and generated the XF86Config file, and it worked fine. Later I found that Sax2 requires perl-tk and perl-gtk packages to work, and then I used it to setup a new configuration. Right now I am at 1280x1024, 32 bit, with a virtual screen size of 1600x1200, and running Gnome 1.2. It is fast and looks great!
For the last few years, I've used metrolink's multi-headed server. For $40 it was a steal (at least compared to XiGraphics $350 server and the multi-headed stuff on our RS/6000's.) It was easy to set up, install and reletively stable. It didn't work perfectly though, it left the mouse pointer behind on one of the screens and got "weird" on some scrollbar functions.
/etc/X11/gdm-conf and _poof_ I could drag stuff from screen to screen to screen.
I compiled and installed XFree86 on my RH-6.1 system and, using xf86config, got my first head going in a few short minutes.
I then read _gasp_ the manual page for XF86config which told me everything I need to do to set up the multi-headed stuff.
The documentation (if you bother to read it) is well written and very usable.
Once I got the multi-headed stuff going add +xinerama to
I now have a three headed beast with one AGP Matrox G200 and two Matrox Millenium II PCI cards.
Performance is completely acceptable and it is really cool that I can define different monitor types per head.
My G200 is driving a 21" while the two Millenium II's are running old Viewsonic 7's.
The Xinerama feature is SOOOOO handy. I can drag unimportant stuff to the outboard monitors and use the big central for the important stuff.
XFree86 4.0's performance and flexibility is FAR superior to ANY other multi-headed X-server I have used.
If you can't read a man page and don't need Xinerama (oh yeah and have lots of monitors laying around) Metrolink is a good way to go.
Still, reading a man page is not too much to pay.
Oh yeah, the RPM's for RedHat are available via rawhide.
Gee I hope I didn't sound too stupid.
Has anybody else noticed visual artifacts with the nVidia drivers (.90?) I'm running XF86 4.0 on RHL 6.1, and when I run an X program, while the performance rocks, there's subtle visual artifacts all over the black areas of the screen. Card is a TNT2.
---------------------------------
---------------------------------
Visit
I've been running XF4 for some time now. I have a Geforce, and I've used both NVIDIA's and XF's own driver. The XF driver performance was much better than in XF3.3.6, but NVIDIA's driver is even faster than that. Also, NVIDIA's opengl support is quite solid (provided it's closed source and all, but at least it works.) So yes I'm satisfied.
The only thing that does not work (tried nvidia and xf drivers) is dpms. I used to be able to do 'xset dpms force off' to shut down my monitor, but with XF4, this no longer does anything. Anybody know if it's supposed to be supported?
-- v --
The one time I tried to install XF4.0, Windowmaker stopped working (been so long I can't remember exactly why). Has anyone gotten them to work together?
- Have a picture
Thank you for correcting me on these. I looked at both of these, and it appears that GNU distributes Flex, but that the FSF has not been assigned the copyright. It's actually distributed under the BSD license. More importantly, the lexers it generates carry NO restrictions from Flex itself. :-) It appears that ncurses is actually under an MIT style license.
So, I stand corrected! Thanks! It looks like I slacked a little on my research. Oops.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
It's that GUI that M$ keeps denying.
Even with my limitted knowledge, his article/write up seemed off color and slightly unfactual. (re: MESA not being in X4's implimentation of GL). It surprises me that the slashdot people don't read the articles themselves before posting them to slashdot, in order to check and see how factual they are. Or maybe they do, and just overlooked it. And then again, maybe they leave the crap-testing to moderators and posters. :)
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Your X server is what controls your video card and mouse. That's all it does; X does not have menus, windows, or any of that stuff, because of the way it was designed.
And this is why it's shocking that X is as bulky as it is. It does very little, yet sure requires obscene overhead in order to accomplish it. Isn't this one of the shortcomings of Windows?
What I would like to know is: which video card is best supported for direct rendering under Xfree86 4.0 ? I know nVidia's driver's are closed source, but I guess that's excusable if the work fully. Last I heard the ATI drivers were still in development. I haven't heard anything about how well the Matrox drivers work. And the 3dfx drivers don't fully support Mesa/ OpenGL, right?
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
I use it, but under certain circumstances when you try to close it down it completely locks up the machine and I have to hit reset.
:-(
I don't know of this is X's fault or the dodgy 0.9 beta nVidia drivers I've installed for my TNT2 Ultra card.
Should have bought 3dfx or matrox
:-(
Quake 3 crashes when you try to play it
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
Firstly I found 4.0 far easier to compile and set up than 3.3.x.
....
.... not in my PATH, not in 4.0 source-tree... no links to it... how on earth am
;)
As for desktop-use, works just fine, except I've got at weird problem with Gnome/sawfish. Gnome hangs for about 10 sec when it tries to start sawfish.
Where the problem lies is at DRI *and* documentation. I'm at total loss. What I can gather of documentation are incomplete and vague.
Like yesterday, I tried once again to see if I could make DRI/glx work. At one time I come across a reference to glxinfo, which will tell you alot about your setup
..glxinfo?
I gonna run this?
Another place in the DRI documentations it tells you to install the correct kernel-module for you videocard... fine.... but are there any kernelmodules other than 3dfx for the 2.2.x? If so, where?
And while we're at kernelmodules. The agpart patch... everytime I need this I keep forgetting where I found it.... and everytime it's a hassle to setup....
Glx-setup. Under 3.3.x glu/glx had a *huge* configfile... in 4.0 all you'll need to do is to load the glx-module. Then where do I put stuff to configure my AGP-port?
... and in the end, I haven't gotten DRI to work... not even sure if glx/mesa/opengl works...
... and a couple of other small problems (like, the dk-maps are stille wrong/incomplete).
Possible I'm doing something wrong... but it would be nice to be able *read* about it somewhere and correct my mistakes...
Anyway, I wouldn't change back to 3.3.x.. 4.0 is just to easy to configure...
Bjarne
Wow, I should start asking my tech support questions on this site. I get an insult, at least 3 reasonable answers and a joke. In all seriousness though, make this an exception and for tech support questions head over to www.linuxcare.com ro something.
# cd /usr/ports/x11/Xfree86-4
# make install
===> XFree86-4.0 is forbidden: Root hole in X server, XFree86 developers seem to be ignoring us.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I can't say more good things about XFree86 4. Why? Primarily, because I can run programs that utilize GL along with my Riva TNT2-based card. Although the driver isn't open-source (write a nice letter to nvidia, please), it works well enough that I don't have to reboot to windows to play Quake. This, in my opinion, is one of the best things that could have happened to X.
Anyway, just my $0.02
-- K
XFree86 4.0 is what I needed to get my two ancient Matrox Millenium I work. The third-party solutions AcceleratedX and MetrowerksX crashed while initializing the cards. XFree86 4.0 does the job... also with Xinerama, which I find superb, because I have two 19" connected to the graphic cards and I like moving windows from one monitor to the other.
Cheers, Mickey. [Team Opie|OpenZaurus|OpenSIMpad|Wellenreiter]
q3a on linux is another purchase...
from lokigames if i am not mistaken...
on the other hand, if you buy unreal tournament for windows, you can download a linux version from unrealtournament.com...
the best part is that it works!...
==
It's bush league psyche-out stuff, man.
Laughable, man.
==
apostrophes...right...
...register level info for the open source community or rolls drivers (open or proprietary) themselves. Without info forthcoming from either the originator of the chip or the new owners, it's going to be a very cold day in Hell before someone comes up with support proper for the Savage2000.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Since it's an official, supported version of Quake 3: Arena, you're going to have to buy the Linux version, as if that's all you're running. Hey, it's not like it's not available and reasonably priced and packaged special (it appears that all copies of the Linux edition are in the special edition tin... (If I were petty, I'd be about rubbing a silly Software,ETC manager's nose in that fact!)).
I did it- it's not all that bad and you're rewarding Id for a job well done. When ya get to brass tacks, so should you.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I guess it might have been more helpful for me to tell you where you can find this
Actually, glxinfo isn't really being used any more... However in the Mesa distribution, there are a directory of demos. One of these demos is called glinfo, and it basically does what glxinfo did: tell you info about your gl libraries.
BTW, you'll need Mesa, since glut and GLU are not distributed with the DRI and XF4.0.
Adam
Maybe I'm just weird, but I don't play games. About as close to a "game" as I get is running xantfarm in my root window. 8-) Should I still care about 3D stuff? All I want is a nice graphics card for my UI (KDE, specifically). XFree86 4.0 does seem to have some clever stuff (getting available refresh rates directly from the monitor is Way Cool), but if I don't do 3D (games, modeling, etc), should I care about the 3DFX/MESA/OpenGL/whatever? --Eric
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
From the tinkering on it that I've done (thanks SuSE for putting it on CD) it looks pretty good. I just got a V3 for my Linux box so I may have to try to get that puppy working. Once it reaches a stable stage I think people will be all over it like lint on tape. Once Linux can play the games I want with reasonable speed I'll put it on all my boxes. And of course I want Photoshop, Gimp doesn't really stand up to PS in my opinion. Maybe the XFree people ought to get ahold of people like Adobe and such people in the graphics biz to get some colour certification on X. With good colour calibration on the free Unicies more professional apps that need said calibration will start porting. Apple got Adobe's support in a big way with their excellent colour management, maybe Linux can be next.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.