Slashdot Mirror
XFree86 4.0.1 Released
Alphix writes: "The first update to XFree86 4.0 has been released, a ton of bug fixes etc and a merge of new DRI code along with SPARC fixes should be enough to warrant an upgrade =). patches are here, source is here. Sourceforge and other mirrors should have it soon."
Cheers Terence!
It must be said, while I and most other slashdotters probably disagree with nvidias decision to close source their drivers, your levels of support and quick response to problems are second to none compared with any hardware company i have ever encountered before.
Well done!
What didn't work was that plug-n-play monitor detection was after it loaded tdfx-driver. It went through modelines(virtual-there were none in the config-file) deleting the ones "out-of-spec" when specifications weren't yet known(resulting in horrible refresh-rates and resolutions).. Other thing that annoyed me was that gpm's repeater didn't work properly(there was a patch for gpm to fix this).. Or maybe xfree should just add a 3 button microsoft mouse to their driver(only supports 2 button microsoft mouses..) so i could get a rid of gpm..
However, Branden in May did announce that he would be releasing the binary packages for XFree86 4.0.1 during this month. If you're a Debian user who's hoping for the Debian packages for XFree86 4.x, then I'd advise you to read the plans Branden has for XFree86 4.0 packaging.
-- "I can't tell the future, I just work there." -- The Doctor
Wow. I'm always impressed with the speed that alot of these open source projects develop. I just installed X 4.0 on my laptop about a month ago, and I thought it would take forever for them to start improving on it (see 3.3.6 -> 4.x transition). What a pleasant surprise. I have had no problems with the NeoMagic drivers for 4.x, other than a small issue where it will not turn off my LCD in DPMS mode anymore. 4.x seems to run faster, use less memory, and I really think thoses GL extensions will have a bright future for all us game players. Keep up the good work guys.
Success is as dangerous as failure, hope as hollow as fear.
I've used both DirectX and OpenGL. In fact, I program OpenGL mainly. I find Direct3D has direct hardware access in most implementations. You simply cannot get a pointer to graphics memory from OpenGL. First, because OpenGL has no symantics for interaction with another graphics API (like D3D does for DirectDraw). Second, because there is nothing in the API that allows you to do that, the API just wasn't designed that way. You simply cannot use a rendered surface for a texture without rendering to a windowing system bitmap. OpenGL has no conception of a rendering target, it simply considers the primary buffer. As such, rendering to anything other than the screen takes jiggering by the glue logic (GLX or wgl.) These are weaknesses in OpenGL itself. It is possible that an implementation could expose direct access and the concept of a rendering target through something in wgl or GLX, but in that case it would not really be OpenGL anymore now would it? It would be almost-OpenGL. Anything written using these extensions would have to be rewritten to use another implementation.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Question: Why was this marked off topic ?? This is 80% on topic.
Seriously, when 2.4 of the Linux kernel is released, I wanna see it on slashdot. When XFree86 4.0 was release, I wanna see it.
When 2.4.1 of the Kernel or 4.0.1 of XFree is released, I wanna see it on Freshmeat not slashdot.
until ( succeed ) try { again(); }
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Use the HTML blockquote tag, please
-- no
You can use the 3D hardware accell drivers for XFree3.3.x from http://people.freebsd.org/~3d/ (rather outdated pages though :-(. Works well for my TNT2. Now for XFree4, are those NVidia Linux Binaries usable in FreeBSD's Linux compatibility mode ? Anyone tried this ?
Or, more to the point, is there a bouncepoint for Xinerama that is worth reading? The xfree86 site doesn't have much.
HELP! :-)
Have you read my Bio ?
I think you should be doing the reading here.
You could start with this, this, and this.
thank you,
++tlt
Someone moderate this up, will you?
BTW, Daryll, thanks for all your work on GLIDE/Mesa - I've been using them for a long time, and Im glad for the opportunity to thank you.
I actually rather like the current status quo. Loki's selectively porting the good games, and I don't have to worry about the 90% of the games that are total crap.
As for OpenGL, it's easy to program in, reasonably fast, and extremely portable across platforms. Loki's working on the 3D sound API. In the future portability will be the key, as PC games are getting to be a niche market compared to the game consoles. Why limit your release platform to WinXX PC's when you could cover Apple and the ever-growing linux population (And the FreeBSD and Be niches) Anything to squeeze a few more dollars out of the production run.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'll fess up to it. It's my fault. I screwed up.
Remember, moderators, check those links before you moderate. I'm a perfect example of why you should. I actually clicked, but moderated before the page loaded in my enthusiasm.
*sigh* Why, oh WHY can't their be an option to revoke moderation, whether or not you get the post back. At least let us use another point to moderate the post in the OPPOSITE direction.
You can all hurt me now.
J. T. MacLeod
No, 4.0.1 is not yet in ports. There aren't even offical tarballs yet, remember? You can always track http://freshports.org/ to see when it arrives.
-bugg
Perhaps we could have a new "software" section akin to the BSD section for discussing mildly momentous updates like this.
;)
/. crew isn't perfect, but I still like it better than some of the alternatives. Maybe take it easy on some of the really minor versions (or toss them in with the quickies).
But what would we call this section? Maybe something as simple as "X"?
In all fairness, I do actually agree with you to a point. On the one side, minor software releases aren't really "news", even for major packages like X or the kernel. What is interesting, however, is the resulting discussion. I've learned more about X and other software from the resulting discussions here than I have from reading the announcements or installing them. While Freshmeat does have the ability to post comments, discussion there seems to be pretty much nonexistant.
As far as a separate "Software Updates" Slashdot section goes, I think this'd be more trouble than it's worth. The biggest problem I see is trying to avoid duplication of Freshmeat. If every program that's announced were posted, I think we'd effectively kill freshmeat and that section would become so watered down that discussion there would cease to exist outside of "First Post" messages. On the other hand, selectively placing annoucements in such a section wouldn't really be fair either; where do you draw the line between what's included and what isn't? The kernel? X? Apache? Gnome? Mozilla? Larger misc apps?
What's being done now by the
It's only software!
I've been happily running XF4 on my Banshee for a while now, I'm hoping that the dual monitor support with Rendition chipsets (I've got a diamond stealth s220) will work now.. Fingers crossed, starting ftp....
So does the 4.0.1 release fix this? I was a little disgruntled when I got xf4.0 and could not find any way to get it to work... Which I thought was my fault but I guess not.
I wonder if the xfree86 .tgz in slackware 7.1 includes this hack for voodoo3's or not.. It certainly would be convenient to just get the xf86 and 3dfx specific tgz's from ftp.slackware.com, but considering how infamous slackware is for upgrading, maybe that isn't such a good idea.
I need to reinstall XFree86 at sometime anyway, as a disk crash due to a power outage caused fsck to remove some files.
If I read CVS correctly, this has added support for at least some chips (such as the Rage Mobility 128).
IE is anything but simple. Up until Mozilla, it had the best HTML renderer out there. As for BeOS, Opera is out and has most of those features. I was talking about Opera 4.0, since that's what I've used, and 4.0 just recently came out of beta. True, Opera now has a lot of support (including CSS2 and XML.) As for Net+, I wholheartedly agree with you. Net+ is VERY feature poor. But does that suddenly taint my judgement about other OSs? I've used Netscape. It is ugly, it is bloated, it crashes. In fact, even the windows version crashes more often than IE does. So where's the problem. And me being a BeOS user has nothing to do with this. In fact (gasp) I think I use NT almost as much as I use BeOS. And I've been using Linux back since Slackware 3.x. I've used these OSs a lot, and I've gotten information on the usability of each one. Just because I like BeOS does not mean that I think everything in it is good. It has a dearth of applications (though to be fair, it does what I need), it doesn't have some cool things like COM, and it doesn't have DirectX :)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Matrox G200 is a fairly unique situation where Linux is faster. But if you look at the big picture (highest performance graphics cards, a wide array of apps), OpenGL on Linux is in a very poor state. I'm not saying that this can't be fixed (and it probably will be) I'm just saying, that it is not to the point where Linux users can claim to be even near the same level as Windows.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
What a great debate this is. It's clear that you can't marshal any arguments to counter my position (because, really, there aren't any - you want support for a closed-source product, you have to pay for it) but are bitter about the delays. Doing business with people like that sucks, doesn't it? Hope you learned your lesson. Closed source isn't evil, but you have to know what you're getting into. And in a Free Software development effort, closed source modules always lag behind in both quality and currency. Live with it, or pick a different vendor.
Linux already has the pimpled faced mainstream suburban teenagers. When was the last time you were at a LUG?
-bugg
Just installed 4.0.1 from source on my machine with a Voodoo 3 that had been having issues, and it started up fine for me. I don't know if I was having the same problems you were, but I would definitly give it a shot.
Sorry, I use Debian and that's what I got from RedHat's web site. Must have been looking in the wrong place!
Whee! I was debating to try to upgrade or not, and now I think I'll make the leap.
-bugg
Well, I'm on Woody, so I wouldn't even know what version the "official" Debian release is on. Debian releases are unusually strict in their stability requirements, and there have been quite a few blunders in the 2.2 series of code as far as stability. Then again, I don't know anyone who is using the official stable Debian release. I have the distinct impression that a larger than normal percentage of Debian users are extreamly comfortable with Linux and generally are using the unstable or at least frozen versions...
Well, I did say "From the diff" and all the lines had a "+" sign at the beginning. FYI this indicates that these are lines added to an existing file in the diff, which contains modifications to a heck of a lot of files. You know it wasn't a point and click thing to find this in the diff file, but I was interested in what was changed myself so I thought I'd share with the community. It's amazing what you can learn on a good day reading Slashdot posts!
I believe his point would be to have a "microupdates" sections for stuff like this. So if you didn't want to know when X4.0.1 and similar things are released you tick it off in your preferences as "Hide These From Me Please" sections.
That way it would still be possible to get the biggies. (Which would be under "X".)
Well, I would say it's going extremly well, installing the drivers should be a snap with the new 0.93 release since they included a script that does all the work. Performance is great, in both 2d and 3d. the only thing you have to do is make sure you remove mesa from your system, or at least the libGL.so* files
When you get into "What is/isn't newsworthy" discussions you almost always begin to decide what you alone want to see and since this specific website tailors not only to developers or end users, or admins. There shouldn't be one set of ideas portrayed. I think the slashdot team has to more than adequate on choosing their content to this point. And I don't think they would be as successful as they are, were their judgement on what to put on their page less sound. More to the point, historically they have never printed any minute release information for less than important applications. And I don't recall any "tiny release" of XFree86 ever making it into the news. What release of XFree86 can be called "tiny" anyway?
>that i'm not too happy with the state of XFree86
>4.0. Primarily because there's a lot of support
>that was left out.
The alternative being not releasing it so that people who DO have supported chipsets can use it?
>Particularly on most 3dfx chipsets. Sure, it says
>all 3dfx chips are supported, but that's
>laughable.
The DRI drivers are being done by 3DFX, so they're the ones that you have an issue with, not the XFree86 team.
It is also worth noting that the drivers are specifically mentioned in the FAQ to be beta quality at this time.
>Perhaps 4.0 was build up quite a bit more than
>it should have been - but it comes down to the
>fact that this wasn't really a next-gen release.
Ummm, a new codebase (X11R6.4), more protocol extensions (can we say Xinerama?), a re-enginnered direct rendering interface, integration of a font server and OpenGL software renderer, a binary loader that can load drivers on any operating system under the same architechture...
This smells of major next generation release to me.
>For some people it was worth while to upgrade,
>while for others it was not.
And for almost all people it *will* be worthwhile to upgrade, once the driver base is brought up to snuff and the distributions start packaging it.
>I would have been much happier to see the folks
>at XFree86 wait a little longer to release a much
>better product.
What objections do you have to the current implementation, aside from whining that it the driver for your video card isn't finished?
Unfortunately its difficult for an unreleased product to gain a wide base of drivers, a signifigant amount of polish, and full bug testing.
>Something that everyone could upgrade to. I
>know at least 3dfx and some ATI chips got
>screwed.
Ummm, screwed? You can continue using 3.3.6 as you did before. The only people who need be affected are those that BENEFIT from the release.
And again, I must reiterate - waiting for all drivers to mature before release buys nothing. The only effect is to keep it out of the hands of the people who CAN upgrade and CAN benefit immediately.
Ditto! wake me up when 3DFX and NVidia gety serious about support.
Dude, are you an MS bimbo? Win95 has no DOS code?!? Run 'format a: /s' and tell me that boot disk doesn't contain DOS.
That's about the first time I heard anyone not from MS (hmmm... wait a minute) say that Win95 has no DOS code.
This, of course, is pretty off-topic, but it was funny.
longer necessary. There were certainly changes, but the DR lawsuit established, to my satisfaction at least, that the announcement of the "disappearance" of DOS in Windows 95 was more for marketing than technical reasons. Microsoft's arguments at the time had as much technical credibility as their infamous video demos in a more recent trial.
>>>>
That's FUD. Win95 contains no DOS code aside from the compatibility module. It contains a great deal of Win 3.x code, but as I said its up top. Think of it this way. The core foundation was totally overhauled. It got rid of DOS, supported Win32 protected mode, etc. Once they had this skelatal foundation, they stuffed a lot of Win 3.1 back on there to support graphics, printing, UI, etc. That's why Win95 has a lot of 16 bit code, even though the architecture is totally new.
XF86 is essentially a vastly better X. There is no need in such an architecture of antiquated chips (a lot of S3 stuff was left out). There is also no reason to weigh down the developers making all these old drivers when the could be doing something important (working on DRI!) As for 3DFx, those drivers are developed by 3DFx themselves, and it is widely acknowledged that they spent way to much effort on their 3.3.x drivers and let their 4.0 effort slide. (As such, performance on Voodoo boards is much better under 3.3.x)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Summary of the above:
...
...
... not by a long shot. At least that's IMHO. Do I use them? Yes.
DirectX rul3z now, regardless of how shitty it used to be. [List-o-technical-reasons why DirectX/3D is better.]
OpenGL sux0res. Lotsa proprietary extensions and shit.
End summary.
What our good friend forgot to mention is that
a) Hungarian notation is, well, hellishly hard to understand, and that with this lovely notation, you don't need them funny characters above the numeric keys, or the languages Perl, INTERCAL, Brain**ck, or Malbolge to create write-only code.
b) DirectX/3D is under MS influence (control, as it were), and that MS doesn't have much of a rep for releasing documentation that accurately reflects the underlying API. Not to mention that NT (at least previously) had a problem of keeping updated in terms of DirectX, whereas it ran OpenGL just fine.
c) Or that while The Gamers(tm) run mostly Windows machines, that The Gamers(tm) make up a tiny fraction of the software market, especially in terms of revenue. Of the remaining population, not everyone runs Windows 9X/NT/2000/Whatever, and writing in OpenGL means that your apps can be ported to whatever platform has OGL support.
I don't see all the hoopla about DirectX. Maybe it's just me, but I've always valued things like ANSI C, ANSI C++, and Java, because of their portability. Sure, some languages may be better, or more elegant for certain things, but writing in languages that are standardized and portable gives you great flexibility, and allows 'laziness'.
Is the C family of languages the best for programming? Um
Same goes for OpenGL. Is it necessarily the best in terms of features? Well, maybe not. Do I use it? Yes. Why? See the above reasons. 'nuff said.
The patches are up only at this point.
Mandrake 7.1 is 2.2.15. and unless i'm mistaken, the kernel status of the latest 'official' debian release hasn't even made it to 2.2 yet (2.0.37?).
> Unfortunately, the Xfree 4.0.1 version does not
:)
> work with our drivers. We hope to have out a
> new release for that version out shortly.
They're working so hard on the new version that they have no time for grammar!
Note: flaming nvidia won't get the drivers fixed quicker. This is just a note so that other people don't waste time trying to get the nvidia drivers to work.
I could never get my GeForce 2 to work under XFree 3.3.x. It could never ever display anything after and then would hose display of even simple text aftewards. Luckily I could still issue a reboot locally or remotely.
On the other hand, I went to XFree 4.0 and snagged the NVIDIA drivers and it worked on the first try. Can't ask for any more than that from the software. ^_^
I used the nVidia drivers briefly -- every time I came back to my computer, if one of the GL screensavers had triggered, I was without fail back at the gdm login screen, because X had crashed. I envy you your painless experience.
Also, you might try compiling from source and installing into an alternate prefix rather than doing a binary install of XF4 over your Debian system -- if you keep doing that, you'll find you've fubared your system enough that Debian upgrades will stop working...
--
Ian Peters
Ipswich, UK where I was an assistant Vet Tech.
Where is the typo here? You know, I shouldn't really respond to trolls of your level of immaturity, but discrediting me for no reason is something that I just can't ignore. Learn to read, or - if this accusation was intentional - grow up."A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
My box only shows 108% allocated to X with the nvidia drivers loaded. The memory isn't all being consumed from your available ram. There is a difference between allocated and committed pages of memory, in that X allocates enough pages to access all of the AGP range.
Allocated memory is basically the reserving of specific memory addresses (real or virtual). Committing is the process of getting memory pages for use that map to the allocated addresses.
I think that X with the (nvidia drivers) allocates the AGP range twice, once for the video card and again to have room for textures in main memory, but waits for the committal.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Same here with my Rage 128. Had to tweak the module load sequence in XF86Config to get it just right. But I don't remember any black screens since Suse came out with their driver.
Did I leave anyone out?
Yes.
Slackware (2.2.16)
Mandrake(Hacked Redhat) (2.2.??)
LRP (2.2.16)
Yggdrasil (err..)
------------
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
try the nvidia mini-howto
the thing that helped me with the crashes was the little reference to Option "NvAgp" "1" at the bottom there, i set that to 0 and good-bye, crashes..
just my $0.02
------ Poo-tee-weet?
Can you write down the problems that you are having, the equipment that you are using and the versions of the software you are running and send it to the developers?
This is called a bug report.
If you can do this just one time a year, then you have done a great thing and have helped out open source a great deal.
-- Never make a general statement.
for my Voodoo 3.
Soon I can remove Windows!
internet mail:anita548:aol.com ICQ#:74734566
Ha, ha :) Ok, almost got me again. Sorry lad, this form of "humour" isn't very interesting. Still, I did fall for it the first time, so I commend you for your effective trolling, even though I don't approve of trolling.
"A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
that i'm not too happy with the state of XFree86 4.0. Primarily because there's a lot of support that was left out. Particularly on most 3dfx chipsets. Sure, it says all 3dfx chips are supported, but that's laughable.
Perhaps 4.0 was build up quite a bit more than it should have been - but it comes down to the fact that this wasn't really a next-gen release. It was more of a 'other-gen' release. For some people it was worth while to upgrade, while for others it was not. I would have been much happier to see the folks at XFree86 wait a little longer to release a much better product. Something that everyone could upgrade to. I know at least 3dfx and some ATI chips got screwed.
(Next comes my - why does 3dfx support for linux suck so bad? post)
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I downloaded from ftp://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/XFree86/4.0.1/source/
early this afternoon (EDT) and then noticed that a new file was created (doctools) after I'd started the download.
See http://campbellcentral.org/rick/xfree86.log.html for details.
use Mozilla. If you think it's slow, switch to a faster skin.
Will I retire or break 10K?
All I want to know is how in the least bit this is going to affect my tetrinet game. ::
-Swift
-Swift
How the hell was this flamebait?
OK mods...
FLAMEBAIT: "Linux sucks"
NOT-FLAMEBAIT: "Perhaps it would improve the site if..."
Slashdot is at the mercy of the damn moderators
Fear the government that fears your guns. Fear the government that fears your computers. Remove them from my email.
Okay, so I can screw up my Linux box again by installing the Voodoo3 server which doesn't work. I'm back on on the XF_SVGA server, thank god. Anybody know if the sh*t works nows?
kick some CAD
(now palm-ready)
For gods sake man, get it right, people were hunters and gatherers before they had the technology to grow plants and domesticate animals. Once this technology was available they could then settle and start enjoying a slightly easier life picking fruits from trees and reduce their need on the "trends" of hunting. And as for:
Where have you been? Heard of id? OpenGL is far from obsolete, but if you really want someone to port Direct3D to Linux I suggest you get on the phone with your buddy Bill.
I hate ignorance, but even I fall prey to it sometimes.
Ashley Clark
A) You have to use XF86Config no matter what. The visual-mode configurators don't work very well yet.
B) X is too stupid to figure out mouse protocol and screen refresh rates for itself. You absolutely should not have to specify refresh rate ranges. Sure you could use the stock SVGA that can do X at X hertz, but then you're not optimally using you're monitor.
C) With multiple RPMS, you can just open up the RPM and click install. You have to go through each on and install them in the correct order. I suppose you could highlight them all and select install, but I don't know how Kpackage would respond to that.
D) I recently did an upgrade equivilant to upgrading XFree. I installed service pack 6a on Windows NT. It updated the GDI, it added DirectX support, updated the kernel and server, and it installed Internet Explorer. This is equivilant to recompiling the kernel, upgrading X, and updating the window manager. I downloaded the 30 meg file, clicked the exe, it chugged, and it rebooted without any questions asked (aside from the "do you wish to reboot" dialouge.) The system came up fine later, I did not have to reconfigure anything.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Ah! iexplore.exe is simple! Simple com app placeholder! Not IE. IE itself is a web of COM objects which handle HTML display, JScript (r) and VBScript (r), image rendering, user interface widgets, ActiveeXploit, etc. ... This is what I thought you were basing your "Bloated NS! Bloated Mozilla!" views on -- because iexplore.exe is a few hundred K, whereas Mozilla/Netscape main binaries are many meg. IE just hides those in \windows\system as the various COM objects that IE uses to function (go ahead and compare the space used by a clean install of Win95 vs. Win95 + IE .. or Win98Lite and Win98 'normal'). Considering the amount of CPU time and RAM they use, I'd consider the DHTML widget components (and others) that IE uses to be worse than Mozilla's components (and far worse than the equivalent Gnome and KDE widgets which do the same thing).
:) .. I just remember DART and DIVE from OS/2 days).
The reason I said you judgement seemed tainted is because you gave a very "BeOS" slant to everything. It'd be nice if you gave more of an indication of having used other OSes (thus giving us a better view of where your opinions come from).
While I haven't used SDL, I hear it's quite good.. it is also portable across Linux, BeOS, and Windows. Given some proper code, it could be a nice performer on all OSes. SDL would make a nice portability wrapper on top of the various OS APIs, such as DRI and OpenGL on Linux, DirectX for Win32, and whatever BeOS uses (I have no idea
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Binaries and complete source tar balls comming later.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
You also won't get the non-pimple faced 3D animators onto your platform. As a person who does both graphics and plays games, you wouldn't believe how much stuff there is in UNIX that offends me. As for capturing the desktop market, Linux will only do that when they scrap it and start over. At this point, Linux is simply a bundle of libraries a kernel, and some bloated graphics interfaces. That's what UNIX is supposed to be! (And that's why it is so powerful for those you know how to work it.) However, in the desktop market, none of that matters. Nobody wants to deal with installing all the libraries and keeping stuff up to date and all that. Take, for example, this latest XFree86 upgrade. Under windows, it would have been distributed as an EXE. You double click on it, it chugs, you hit OK when it asks you to reboot, and voila, you're running a new version. (Under BeOS, you hit the button, and then while you're still surfing the web tracker reboots with the newer version and you get a message box telling you that you've been upgraded.) Under Linux Mandrake, one has to download an obscene number of RPMS (like 4 or 5) the go into the command line, type in RPM -Uvh X*.rpm, then run xf86config to configure it. With upgrades like that it is going to take a lot more than a new version of X to let Linux capture the desktop market.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Anyway, 4.0.1 looks like an improvement of sorts, maybe by 4.1 it will be safe to use. Looks like debian guys will be packaging it soon, this is always a good rough indicator for me, a lazy person's safety metric, if you will...
Anyway, thanks for one of the most clueful followups that I've had in a while.
http://www.mp3.com/tib - lamer than a lungfish
And should be applied from the xc directory with the -p1 -E options to patch.
:)
Not the -p0 -E options as specified in the patch files.
Doesn't everyone keep the 400+ MBtyes of X source around to rebuild X when a new patch comes out ?
You're 3DFx support sucks because 3DFx spent too much time writing XF86 3.3.x drivers at the cost of the 4.0 drivers.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I saved my config file, did the X4.0.1 upgrade, thru in my config files (and xinitrc, btw) and the dual monitors worked.
Now if I could only get that old IBM G61 monitor to do 1024x768 like it says it will....
Thanks!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
+ for most games that make use of it.
Thank you! Now Quake 3 will finally be as good as it was under XFree86 3.x. I think half of the troublesome posts on news.lokigames.com were due to XFree86's broken in-mouse support.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
a) Hungarian notation is, well, hellishly hard to understand, and that with this lovely notation, you don't need them funny characters above the numeric keys, or the languages Perl, INTERCAL, Brain**ck, or Malbolge to create write-only code.
;)
... not by a long shot. At least that's IMHO. Do I use them? Yes.
>>>
You only have to learn it once. People program Win32 everyday, and frankly, not that many people consider Hungarian notationa "deal breaker."
b) DirectX/3D is under MS influence (control, as it were), and that MS doesn't have much of a rep for releasing documentation that accurately reflects the underlying API. Not to mention that NT (at least previously) had a problem of keeping updated in terms of DirectX, whereas it ran OpenGL just fine.
>>>>>>>
Yes, DX is under MS control. That's why it can progress so quickly. The ARB is both a strength and a weakness. It is a strength because it insures that one company cannot use OpenGL to its advantage (like MS does with DirectX.) However, the consensus method slows down the introduction of new features. That's why I think the open source development model would be so cool for something like this. One core group is in control so the API stays focused and moves quickly, but they are required to commit changes, so the API stays Open. As for NT, it really wasn't a political issue. DirectX access hardware directly, while the NT HAL is designed to prevent just that thing. As a result, concessions (ahem) had to be made in Win2K.
c) Or that while The Gamers(tm) run mostly Windows machines, that The Gamers(tm) make up a tiny fraction of the software market, especially in terms of revenue. Of the remaining population, not everyone runs Windows 9X/NT/2000/Whatever, and writing in OpenGL means that your apps can be ported to whatever platform has OGL support.
>>>>>>
Think of it this way. Gamers are just like normal consumers. Consumers use DirectX everyday. Office uses it, MSIE uses it, RealPlayer and QuickTime use it. These consumers (including business people) make up 95% of the market revenue-wise. Plus most run windows. From a business point of view, leaving out the Linux, BeOS, and Mac users means almost nothing! That said, I'm not urging people to use DirectX. (I want ports to BeOS) I'm simply saying that it is a superior API to OpenGL.
I don't see all the hoopla about DirectX. Maybe it's just me, but I've always valued things like ANSI C, ANSI C++, and Java, because of their portability. Sure, some languages may be better, or more elegant for certain things, but writing in languages that are standardized and portable gives you great flexibility, and allows 'laziness'.
>>>>>>>>>>
The hoopla is that its fast, flexible, and usefull. An API is not like a language. Where the speed, flexibility characteristics of a language are pretty set in stone, and API can change and evolve. If I was a business person, it makes much more sense for me to take advantage of something like DirectX, and leave 1% of users out in the cold, than to not use it, and get that 1%. Then, I'm not urging people to use DirectX. I'm extolling its virtues as a better API
Is the C family of languages the best for programming? Um
Same goes for OpenGL. Is it necessarily the best in terms of features? Well, maybe not. Do I use it? Yes. Why? See the above reasons. 'nuff said.
Smee
>>>>>>>>
You can use it, that's great. In fact I use it! I like it better because I can run it on BeOS. But I hate every minute of using it, thinking that if I would just use Windows, I would have access to a much better API.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I would just like to say you rule!!
I would give my left for for a job like yours.
-Andy
Without being able to play the latest Quake mod at 120 fps, or the latest Sports game the same way, we won't get the pimple faced mainstream suburban teenager to want to go to Linux.
So? Why is that so important? I like the Unix descendants because they give me power over my use of the computer. Though that's a personal preference, I do think it's one of their greatest strengths. Games will always be played, and they're hardly the sine qua non of the computing experience. Nor should they be; they're another flavour of entertainment; they're not the kind of activity computers can be best at.
UI's are coming along, but I fail to see why (presumably male) teenagers should be the target.
--
this is not my beautiful wife. TH
The learning curve to get into contributing to very complex apps such as XFree is incredibly steep, IMNERHO.
--
Cross platform is not even an issue,because even under OpenGL, Windows still kicks the ass of Linux, BSD, and BeOS (until this fall that is!)
Having just gotten OpenGL to work with 4.0.1 with my Matrox G200, I have to disagree, for Quake 3 at least. It runs considerably smoother than under Windows, with the drivers from Matrox. The mouse control is a little odd but the 3D is definitely faster.
Cryptic Allusion - New Mac and Dreamcast Games!
>>My X server generally uses around 96M according
>>to top. But that is just fine with me as I have
>>3 times that left to work with in addition.
This is (from what I've heard) because X adds the total amount of video RAM on your graphics card to the amount of memory that 'top' says the X process uses.
Well I would say it is more like the upgrade from Windows NT 3.51->4.0 (where the graphics drivers moved into the kernel) or Windows NT->Windows 2000.
>>>>
No you wouldn't. It is much more like a service pack, because it is an upgrade of the core architecture. WinNT to Win2K is something akin to retooling X to use DirectX! NT 3.51 -4.0 might work, though.
Microsoft hasn't upgraded DirectX on Windows NT with any service packs. Is it because it would take too many changes, or because it's a marketing lever to get you to buy Windows 2000? How long will it be before DirectX 8.0 (or 9) is available on a Windows based on an NT kernel? Windows NT 4.0 is still DirectX 3.0
>>>>>>>>>>
You still have no clue about Windows architecture, do you? MS hasn't upgraded DirectX on Windows NT, becuase the NT Hardware Abstraction Layer is at odds with DirectX. The HAL was designed to prevent just the kinds of things DirectX is for. As such, it would require a total retooling of the HAL. Now Windows 2000 did this (it has the NT kernel) and I'm sure it was partially market driven, but I do think it was a good upgrade because it not only took a lot of work to retool the HAL, but they added COM+, ActiveDirectory, and rewrote the TCP/IP stack.
The architecture of XFree86 changed significantly with 4.0, and if you can't see the difference it's because, for the most part, it was done quite well and hidden behind unchanged API's. This is a Good Thing.
>>>>>>>>>>>
That's great. The architecture of DirectX was almost rewritten from 1.0 -> 5.0. I still don't consider an upgrade of a component like this akin to upgrading from NT4 to Win2K or from 95 to Win2K.
NT 3.51-> 4.0 was mainly a GUI shell upgrade, moving the video drivers into the kernel, and a few other tweaks (Direct 3D, DNS). Many people claimed NT 4.0 should really have been called 3.70 or something similar.
>>>>>>
Many did, as people are wont to. However, NT not only moved stuff into to kernel, retooled the GUI, but it also added stuff like fibers, DirectX, and improved networking and administration. Those kinds of changes take place between kernel revisions. If Slack justified a version upgrade between 4.0 and 7.0 (not taking into account the 3 digit leap) I think 4.0 was warranted.
As for the difference between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, they were substantial. But the groundwork for Windows 95 was definitely visible in Windows for Workgroups 3.11 with its support for 32-bit hard disk I/O, win32s API, and so on.
>>>
Win32S is just that, a subset (and rather limited I might add) of the Win32 API. The ground work was there, but the actual foundation was totally overhauled. Most of the code remaining from Win 3.x was not in the core architecture, but in components in user-space (which has a slightly different definition in Win9x architecture) like the GDI, user services etc.
A good part of the "major differences" between W4WG 3.11 and Windows 95 were so that Microsoft could convince users that those pesky alternative DOS's like DR-DOS and PC-DOS were no longer necessary. There were certainly changes, but the DR lawsuit established, to my satisfaction at least, that the announcement of the "disappearance" of DOS in Windows 95 was more for marketing than technical reasons. Microsoft's arguments at the time had as much technical credibility as their infamous video demos in a more recent trial.
>>>>
That's FUD. Win95 contains no DOS code aside from the compatibility module. It contains a great deal of Win 3.x code, but as I said its up top. Think of it this way. The core foundation was totally overhauled. It got rid of DOS, supported Win32 protected mode, etc. Once they had this skelatal foundation, they stuffed a lot of Win 3.1 back on there to support graphics, printing, UI, etc. That's why Win95 has a lot of 16 bit code, even though the architecture is totally new.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Open source does have a marketplace - just because people can get the source doesn't mean people won't pay for it. You and your happy little windows 15 minutes is almost up....14....13...12...
...
15, 14, 13, 12, 11,
*BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH*
Looks like he'll have to start over again with that 15 minutes.
=================================
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
I would moderate you up as informative if I could figure out what the hell you just said.
I believe you are confusing X with XFree86. Give me a fucking break.. PeeCees aren't everything. X runs awesome on SGI with awesome fully accelerated hardware. Try out X on an UltraSparc box or an Indy/Indigo2 (they are damn cheap nowadays).
(Even Mozilla isn't looking good.)
;-)
Bzzzzt. Wrong. Have you used any recent builds? Mozilla's rendering speed is spectacularly good now. It's rendering everything I throw at it, even broken Frontpage stuff. (I've heard there *are* pages out there that don't render properly but I haven't personally run across one yet.) O'Rei lly waxes poetic about Mozilla's extensibility. (the idea of extending Mozilla's wsiwyg xml/html editor is particularly intriguing.) Mozilla skins are hot. Mozilla still does crash - though not as much - and there are still a few features missing. But to say Mozilla isn't looking good... just shows you missed the cluetrain. Try not to be late for the next one please.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
It doesn't seem like it's a big secret that XFree86 4.0 was bleeding-edge. I knew it from reading the release notes. Why complain about the rawness of the release when the XFree guys stated quite plainly that it was tender code?
The problem in an earlier pre release was thet the card (agp 3000) simply wasnt initialized (as the second card in a dual head setup) in the 4.0 release the driver crashed, I think it was a "worked" right after compile, but I could repeatedly crash it by dragging windows from one head to the other. Wether this was an ATI, tdfx, xinerama or other issue I dont know, but I went back to the memory leak filled (Lets see windows perform this good with an app using 150% of its ram!) 4.0 as opposed to the crashing 4.0.1
XFree hasn't released any release notes about this. Any clue as to what the DRI code merge is about? And what stuff was patched. As for 4.01, I wouldn't hope for much in terms of performance or stability. Usually, .01 releases are bug fixes (aside fromt his mysterious DRI code merge) and if you're 4.0 already runs fast and stable (a relative term for X) than I don't see the value in upgrading.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Why do I say this? Well, my main beef (and it is something I can live with, as from what I understand, it is extremely difficult to do) is that the drivers do not support 3d accel. when in Dual Head mode. To have to pop out, reset the config file and pop back in, those are a few steps more then my lazy behind will do. This is something that works in the W2K platform out of box, so dual booting is in my future for a little while longer.
Bryan R.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
any idea when Debian will be released? Will it be this year/century? I'm tired of waiting for it already.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
If only it were that simple. Due to the very nature of OpenGL (open standard etc) it is moving much slower than hardware is. DirectX on the other hand gets an almost complete rewrite every year and only has to support one platform. For this reason GL won't be able to quickly take advantage of new card features (vertex/pixel shaders etc). Games publishers require DirectX support -- OpenGL is an optional extra that is mostly put in the schedule because the programmers would like to do an OpenGL version.
However, the DirectX people do seem to be interested in getting the best graphics API possible. When the time comes that it is necessary to support other OSs in order to make DirectX the best then it will probably happen. Look forward to huge licensing fees though. Unfortunately, Linux is not an OS that you're average gamer will have installed so publishers aren't pushing for Linux support. If that ever happens then developers will either move to a cross-platform API or start writing multiple versions of their renderers for different platforms. Which do you think is more likely?
Anyone have any idea what the memory footprint of this is? 3.3.6 is eating up 15M and up on my 64mb box. Is this (close to) the minimum an X server can use or is there room for improvement in XFree?
If nvidia wanted their drivers to work they would release the source just like everyone else, and they'd track development. Since they don't give a shiot about being a part of the community, the community feels no obligation to help them. If you buy their crap, you get what you deserve - frustration and delays. Seems fair enough to me...
Package management is for wimps!
Just download the source like everyone else... its not compilcated:
make World...wait a bit..and a bit more.....
su
make install
You're done.
It would be great if this problem was solved because you could easily switch in and out of different apps including 3D / OpenGL apps.
I didn't realize it was not a separate file. I take back my complaint, unless the info is available in a separate textfile somewhere else.
And what's with all the "instructions to moderators" type posts - is this some sort of pseudo-meta-moderation?
Well, if you see something wrong, don't you try to change it? This post apparently being the exception, I see a lot of people just go to a page on the linked site, copy all the info on it, and paste it into a post hoping to get a few karma points. As a result, I have to scroll back through 3 pages of the +5,Informative post I just read a minute ago.
--
read the subject, ignore the above message's link or be subjected to nausea far deeper than you could ever think possible.
and a +1 informative score to boot.. bad moderators! bad bad bad!!
-'fester
This is due to top reporting virtual memory usage, not just physical memory usage. This causes things like mmapped registers and framebuffers to be considered "used memory".
Our nvidia drivers mmap both framebuffers and registers (maybe a little excessively, but it won't hurt anything). This isn't "real RAM" being used, but only virtual memory.
In short, it's unnerving, but harmless.
Terence Ripperda,
NVIDIA
As a proud owner of a 3dfx card (yeah I know there are better cards, but my Athlon 700 kinda compensates for it now) I really hate the situation with 3dfx on Linux.
Remember dev3dfx? I haven't used some other cards for Linux 3D yet - can anyone tell me if they need a device driver like this?
Mesa - can 3dfx support in Mesa ever be stand-alone? I have no interest in installing Glide. But Mesa requires it to support my card. It shouldn't need to. I guess the NVidia driver is considerably cleaner thanks to the absense of Glide.
Why don't we do it the other way round - just develop a good Mesa driver for every card, and implement Glide using Mesa? There are 2 advantages:
1. You don't need to install Glide if you don't need it - OpenGL apps are newer, usually more important to you, and exist in a larger quantity nowadays than Glide apps.
2. People not having 3dfx cards can also use the Glide library if they want to.
May I suggest the sane alternative of disabling the GL screensavers in your .xscreensaver, xlock or whatever, The drivers are reasonably solid and good, but running GL screensavers is asking for trouble.
I'd found that If I left My machine a long time with GL screensavers, it would have COMPLETELY locked, so disable them.
skiy. www.Smokedot.org Drug Info, Rights, Laws, and Discussion
You may so that's no problem if you have a serial console around, but not everyone has such. Hence some bug reports don't contain all of the information they need :P No information from the debugger such as backtraces, etc.
-bugg
I say port Direct3D to Linux!
And how, pray tell, is porting Direct3D to Linux not "playing catch-up with Windows"?
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Well, problem is that the nVidia XFree 4 driver has 2 components: (a) a binary driver module that XFree itself uses (not a problem, since XF4 provides binary compatibility across OSes on the same hardware), and (b) it has a kernel module for Linux that does "helper" work for direct-to-hardware GL stuff. The kernel module would have to be ported (it's available as source, but I don't know what the license is on it)... but also, the GL libraries might be a problem (they're not the standard GL libs that XFree builds). Can FBSD binaries dynamically link to Linux .so's?
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Freshmeat has been getting worse and worse in recent months. For every useful tidbit there's 100 entries like this:
So I for one welcome Slashdot announcing the "important" ones.
bp
Can anyone suggest a graphics board which will give me 3D acceleration on my FreeBSD box. As I understand NVidia have some drivers for Linux but they are binary only so perhaps Matrox or 3dfx or ATI would have source code for their drivers. Sorry if these are stupid questions. I want to get a new graphics card and want to have my 3d accelerated and don't want to purchase the wrong board again.
great, a script that does all the work... kinda what I wanted them to do! Thanks for the info richie
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) -GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
Hi. I was the one who marked this offtopic. Call it bad moderation if you want, but I'm so sick of what I call "meta-bitching" that I had to do something. People get so wrapped up in this imaginary slashdot "community" that they feel they are owed something from it.
It's just a website. You don't like what's posted, go to the next article. Maybe change your preferences to block certain topics. Maybe GO READ ANOTHER WEB PAGE ENTIRELY. Just don't hurt the signal to noise ratio by posting crap like "I don't want to see this here." No one really cares what you want out of slashdot. I personally could give a hoot if Jon Katz ever got posted ever again, but I don't waste anyone's time complaining about it, I just don't read his articles. What's worse is that these whiny posts always get modded up. So I marked it back down. Maybe "redundant" would have been a better choice, but in the end the result is the same. You're not contributing to the discussion, and you're wasting the time of the people who are interested in the article (I've personally been waiting for 4.01, its actually a pretty significant release to a lot of us), so you're offtopic. So sorry if I affected your prescious karma.
Oh, and before you all rush to the reply button, I know I'm being a hypocrite by whining about this myself. Don't even bother.
-kms1
Nyet.. sorry. bang wrong.
The increased memory comes from the fact that X mmap's the card buffer and registers. (Typical windows are 32-64 Mb)
So, typically, top doesn't consider whether the memory is your RAM, or the 64 MBytes that your card is mapped.. it is just counting what the kernel has mapped.
So top is only counting mmaped pages used by the process and doing a simple (numPages * pagesize).
So, your X server consumes about 4Mb, plus the 64Mb AGP window = 68Mb.
There are other factors in the card's memory model and X server that may also increase the size quite a bit (running textured gtk/e type apps will use a bit of SHM and also caches pixmaps)
Enjoy,
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
All hardware supported in 3.3.6 is also supported in 4.0.1.
All hardware supported in 3.3.6 is also supported in 4.0.1.
The AP6422 is supported in 3.3.6 but not fully in 4.0.1. The AT25 is supported in 4.0.1 but not in 3.3.6.
No ARK Logic chips are supported in 4.0.1.
All chips supported in 3.3.6 are supported in 4.0.1 except for Mach8 and some old Mach32 chips. The support in 4.0.1 is, however, unaccelerated for all chips except the Mach64, Rage and Rage 128 variants.
No Avance Logic chips are supported in 4.0.1.
All chips supported in 3.3.6 are also supported in 4.0.1.
The following chips are supported in 3.3.6 but not in 4.0.1: 6410, 6412, 6420, 6440, 5420, 5422, 5424, 5426, 5428, 5429, 6205, 6215, 6225, 6235, 7541, 7542, 7543, 7548, 7555 and 7556.
No Compaq AVGA support in 4.0.1. DEC TGA support is equivalent in both versions.
No Cyrix chips are well-supported in 4.0.1.
No Epson chips are supported in 4.0.1.
No Genoa chips are supported in 4.0.1.
The standard VGA core is supported in both versions, but there is no support for the 8514/A or XGA-2 in 4.0.1.
No IIT chips are supported in 4.0.1.
The i740 and i810 are supported in both versions, but the i810 is only supported on Linux/x86 platforms at present.
All chips supported in 3.3.6 are also supported in 4.0.1.
No MX (???) chips are supported in 4.0.1.
No NCR chips are supported in 4.0.1.
All chips supported in 3.3.6 are also supported in 4.0.1.
All chipsets supported in 3.3.6 except the NV1 are also supported in 4.0.1.
No Number Nine chips are supported in 4.0.1.
No Oak chips are supported in 4.0.1.
No Paradise/Western Digital chips are supported in 4.0.1.
No RealTek chips are supported in 4.0.1.
All chips supported in 3.3.6 are also supported in 4.0.1.
Only the ViRGE and Trio3D chipsets are supported in 4.0.1. All of the other chipsets are only supported in 3.3.6.
Support for the 86C201, 86C202, 86C215, 86C225, 5597 and 5598 is currently only available in 3.3.6.
No SMI chips are supported in 4.0.1, but the fbdev driver is reported to work on Linux.
The following (older) chipsets that are supported in 3.3.6 are not supported in 4.0.1: TVGA8200LX, TVGA8800CS, TVGA8900B, TVGA8900C, TVGA8900CL, TVGA9000, TVGA9000i, TVGA9100B, TVGA9200CXr, TGUI9400CXi, TGUI9420, TGUI9430DGi.
All cards supported by 3.3.6 are also supported by 4.0.1 except for the old ET3000.
No Video 7 chips are supported in 4.0.1.
No Weitek chips are supported in 4.0.1.
IMHO "solid and good" doesn't equal "disable OpenGL to make it work". One reason I use Linux instead of windows is that I can run broken program (read my own program with memory allocation error or something) without taking system down - instead I get a nice core dump for debugging if I want so. Now you are suggesting that because XFree 4.X is buggy I should limit my choice of programs to start because my userland programs can take my system down with the assistance of XFree 4.X. Uhh, no thanks.
I'm aware that XFree 3.X.X isn't that flawless either but I don't have to pray each time I use glx extension... (I have g400).
_________________________
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
Yeah, I understand. But people were asking early on about what the differences were, because the official page was not up yet. This guy answered that burning question...
:-)
I dunno. I figure the mod- and meta-mod- system works pretty well. When I moderate, I mark "Hey Moderator" posts as off-topic. Which they are, IMHO.
---
I couldn't get the newest nvidia drivers to work with xfree 4.0.1. I thought maybe my configuration was wrong, but when I reinstalled xfree 4.0 it worked fine. I would have thought that the xfree people would check to see if they were breaking someone else's drivers!
.93 drivers to work with xfree 4.0.1?
Has anyone gotten the
I hate people who bitch about a problem and do nothing about solving it.
Either be part of the solution or part of the problem?
Fight Spammers!
Yes, I too dislike rpms... that's why I don't use an rpm-based system. Debian is great. Upgrading will not involve downloading an obscene amount of packages, but rather "apt-get upgrade". The packages will be tested for quality before they're even put on the apt mirrors, and you will barely notice the upgrade, until you discover the faster performance. This is why debian is so much better than all of those OTHER distributions :-P
--
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
One part of Debian that most people seem to miss is the non-free tree. It has non-free apps in it. So if that's what you want, there it is.
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END OF LINE
Actually, we don't announce submissions that don't have any code available yet. Which appindex are you talking about?
Fighting the War on the War on Drugs.
http://smokedot.org/
I've been running XFree4 for several months. On Debian. Hasn't crashed yet. Either there is no problem, or nVidia's drivers are just that much better than all the other ones. :)
The only real problem I've noticed is that copy/paste ops sometimes lock the system for a second or two, and sometimes KDevelop gets screwy (menus get slow and text gets messed up). The first problem is only a minor annoyance, and the second can be fixed by restarting the program. I don't have 4.0.1 yet, so maybe these problems are fixed. Anyone know?
For Debian users who want X4 NOW: Just use the binary installer provided by the XFree86 people. It is a completely painless process. It just asks a few questions ("do you want XYZ fonts?", etc.) and does its thing, and everything works. (at least, it worked for me)
Be careful, though. Recently, potato had an update for X3. dpkg though the thing was still on my computer, so it automagically downgraded me, which completely destroyed my whole setup. I had to re-run the X4 installer from a VC, but then everything worked again.
------
The existing drivers should work fine. The ABIs are (AFAIK) NOT changing at all.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
DirectX is great, once you learn the programming technique. (Not that hard really, once you get used to it.) And it is, in the words of Andre LaMothe, essentially a miracle. As for not being on Linux, neither are 90% of the good games. Does that mean you shouldn't play them? As for your comparison to OpenGL, there is none. Maybe you think DirectX==Direct3D? Cross platform is not even an issue, because even under OpenGL, Windows still kicks the ass of Linux, BSD, and BeOS (until this fall that is!) Plus, DirectX (even D3D) is much better. Let me iterate:
1) DirectX has an integrated programming interface. Once you learn it and can get past the hungarian notation, you'll find it is pretty easy to use. Not only that, but in the time it takes you to learn all the native media APIs on Linux, and also learn OpenGL, you could have learned DirectX a lot sooner, because there is only one mindset to learn.
2) It is a higher quality API. DirectDraw gives you direct access to graphics hardware. It is really, really fast, and gives you a lot of control over what you're doing. (Want to quadruple buffer, no problem!) DirectInput is hard to use, but hideously flexible. (Just like... UNIX!) It supports any kind of device on the market, even ones that haven't been invented yet, due to the generalized API. DirectMusic has MIDI composition unmatched by any other mainstream (hardware accelerated of course) API. DirectSound is a lot better than OSS or even ALSA in terms of compatibility and speed. The only mediocre API is DirectSound3D, but with extensions like EAX, even that is pretty good. (Especially considering that the other option is the propriotory A3D.) And now, Direct3D. It used to be a slow, hard to program, feature barren POS API. Now, it is a fast, hard to program, feature filled API. First, it has much closer access to hardware than OpenGL does, via DirectDraw, and as such, can do some really nifty things. It can render into secondary surfaces ACCELERATED. OpenGL can do that too, but only in software mode. The core API supports a LOT more features than the OpenGL core API plus standard extensions. Only when you add in propriotary extensions does OpenGL become feature competitive. Seriously, extensions suck. They aren't standardized in the beginning, so you end up with the ATI version of an extension, the NVIDIA version, and the S3 version. Also, the ARB slows progress of stanard extensions. I was looking at the meeting notes of the recent OpenGL conferance, and right now they are deciding on a standardized extension for texture compression! D3D has had that for a long time, and now has an array of new features that OpenGL can't touch such as vertex blending and per pixel lighting. Sure nVidia promised to expose all of them as propriatory extensions, but will developers use them until a standard comes out? These days, D3D is just as fast as OpenGL on the same hardware, and can do tricks that GL just can't do. Sure it is limited to one platform, but that's the price you pay for DirectX.
In short, DirectX is a great API for anybody developing for media applications. Sure it is MS only, but you have to give it credit for being great. You don't even have to use it (I don't use D3D because I like programming on BeOS) but you have to acknowledge its power. If I were SGI, I would light a fire under the asses of the ARB, write an OpenGL version 2.0 that could compete with D3D in terms of features (rendering to auxilliary buffers, etc) and then heavily fund the Kronos project to take on the rest of DirectX. That is the only hope *NIX has of getting a hold on the desktop market.
PS> Yes you need IE. Why would you use netscape? It is a bloated, buggy piece of shit. (Even Mozilla isn't looking good.) Sure you can use Opera, but can you live without CSS and DHTML?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Funny. That's why DirectX versions are free? (And only take one reboot?) If you're going to argue, at least have a point.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I've found the nVidia drivers to be very good. I'm no X guru by any stretch but I found installing XFree4 with nVidias drivers relatively simple (and about time too, I bought Quake 3 ages ago but couldn't face all the mesa stuff).
Does anybody elses X server show as taking up > 200% of memory in top? Mine does and I'm wondering why...(it doesn't seem to do any harm though I do see the odd complaint about a lack of shared memory).
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
If it had not been released it would have taken longer. Having seen the attitude of users, I can almost guarantee it. Frankly, I'd been waiting for the development process to be opened up on this this thing. It's been cooped up too long.
What's up with this "If I can't use it or fix it nobody but the Man should get it" attitude?
I'll even go as far as saying that they probably released it to piss people off enough that they would get involved in fixing things. People automatically go into wait mode if you say y.9.x but they growl and finally get involved if you say y+1.0.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Description: This is an MP3 player. I know there are hundreds of others available here on Freshmeat, but this one is mine!!! I'm so 1337. Besides, I don't know enough to be able to contribute to any of the existing open source projects.
Or, my personal favorite:
Description: Initial Announcement - No code is available yet. Even though there are hundreds of similar programs already available, I'm looking for people that are smarter than me to write this one.
No thanks. I don't smoke anymore.
Although I do appreaciate announcements of LARGE updates to POPULAR software packages (E: Linux 2.4.0, FreeBSD 4.0, XFree86 4.0.0), I feel that posting a story everytime a tiny release of some popular package is lame. Perhaps we could have a new "software" section akin to the BSD section for discussing mildly momentous updates like this.
I assume that you are not referring to professional animators when you make that statement. I'm certainly not a professional animator, but I've read plenty of
articles about software shops pushing them towards Windows boxes and the backlash that occured as a result. It's my understanding that professional
animators and CAD/CAM engineers overwhelmingly prefer Unix platforms to Windows.
>>>>>>>>>
I was talking from an architecture point of view. Sure animators prefer UNIX, but that because it fits much better in a network environment and is much more stable under high load. Also, UNIX machines usually have pretty hefty hardware. From the architecture side, however, media on both UNIX and Windows is somewhat of an ugly hack. (Especially X.)
Nobody wants to deal with installing all the libraries and keeping stuff up to date and all that. Take, for example, this latest XFree86 upgrade.
Under windows, it would have been distributed as an EXE. You double click on it, it chugs, you hit OK when it asks you to reboot, and voila,
you're running a new version.
Nope, with Windows this is more like an upgrade from Windows95 to Windows2000 Professional. No, the upgrade to XFree does not change as many underlying
OS level pieces as a 95 => 2000 upgrade would, but it does change the basic architecture of the windowing system and would not be a simple "click the EXE
file" upgrade. This is not equivalent to upgrading a display driver in Windows! Now, Windows "beats" Linux as far as that is topic is concerned, but that's not
what XFree86 4.0 is compared to 3.x.
>>>>>>>
I was talking XFree86 4.0 --> 4.01. 3.x-> 4.0 is MUCH more trumatic. It's also not similar to the upgrade between Win95 -> Win2k (considering that they're different OSs entirely.) The upgrade between 3.x and 4.0 would be like installing service pack 6 on NT. This pack (when installed on a clean 4.0 pack 1 machine) upgraded the GDI (akin to X) Internet Explorer (which functions as the window manager) and introduced stuff like fibers (a lighter kind of thread, akin to upgrading Pthreads.) It also introduced bug fixes to the kernel. All it was was a 30 meg download and a clicking on an EXE. To get the same effect under Linux you'd have to upgrade X from 3.x to 4.0, recompile the kernel, and upgrade the C libraries (new threading support.)
An even more accurate comparison would be upgrading Windows 3.11 to Windows95. The underlying OS architecture was, and still is, basically the same, but
the graphics architecture changes so drastically that it was often easier to reinstall the whole box than attempt an upgrade. At least with Linux the windowing
system is not tied so tightly to the core OS that screwing an upgrade of the windowing system up basically screws your box up beyond repair (or fubar for those
that prefer that term).
>>>>>
You have no clue about Window architecture, do you? Win95 is vastly different from Win3.1. It is certainly more than a change in the graphics system. (Actually, the GDI was relativly unchanged from 3.1 to 95.) I don't even feel like explaining, but read BYTE magazine around 1993. They go into the details behind the architecture changes.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Mandrake has released security update for kernel some time ago. 2.2.15 had some big holes - upgrade to 2.2.16 at once. The same is true for all other distros, for instance RedHat or SuSe
Actually, on Linux-Mandrake all you have to do is use "urpmi" for installing packages, and you do not have to think about dependencies anymore. Yes, right - rpm based system have their own versions of "apt-get" too. In case you prefere to click your way around, both "rpmdrake" and "MandrakeUpdate" are urpmi avare. I do not think that installing/upgrading can be much easier then that.
First, all the 3dfx boards that do 2D are supported under XFree 4.0. That means that the Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo2 are not, but since they don't use the X server at all they don't need any special support to run under X.
I've used my voodoo2 as a 3rd head in XFree 4.0 using the Glide driver (Glide driver for XF 4.0, that is). From what I saw, it required special support. Maybe you were implying 3D, but I thought I'd mention this.
This is necessary...life, feeds on life...
Sorry, I don't know HTML that well.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Thanks Terence, it's always good to hear from the horses mouth.
What about shared memory? Since I upgraded to XFree 4 I seem to be 'running out of it'. I get GDK warnings and enlightenment chucks in the towel with a warning re shared memory if I enable snapshots on the pagers.
If I issue the 'ipcs' command it appears I have two rather hefty 8meg segments assigned to X (though it's possible I'm reading it wrongly).
I toyed with the idea of increasing SHMMAX in the kernel source but it seems to warn against it.
Any ideas?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Most of the good programmers didn't learn their programming in school, but learned it on their own.
You learn by looking at what is there and writing your own code. You get better by doing the same.
Before I worked on device drivers, I didn't know how do it. My first device driver was for a Vista V1200 Diskpack under CPM on a 6502 (the IO code was 6502 on the apple, and the higher code was running on the Z80B card). I found it slow, so I got source code and optimized the driver.
Even if you can't program, you can provide finely detailed bug reports and run tests that could reduce where the problem in the code is located.
You could always pay someone to write the driver that you want.
Fight Spammers!
"Yes you need IE. Why would you use netscape? It is a bloated, buggy piece of shit. (Even Mozilla isn't looking good.) Sure you can use Opera, but can you live without CSS and DHTML? "
This is the funniest troll I've seen in a long time, and most loved by moderators! I'm thinking our poor friend must've used either Opera 2.11, or an extreme Alpha for BeOS which didn't support CSS.
Considering that Net+ doesn't support HTML 4.0 fully, let alone CSS *, I find it downright hillarious that this fellow would claim that somewhich which doesn't run fully yet on the BeOS doesn't have these features. Given an incomplete version of any software, you could claim anything and probably be correct!
Opera! (3.6 at least, probably other 3.x series too) supports CSS 1, ECMAscript, and Java via a plugin (ye olde surfin' joe Java plugin from Sun). Although I personally disable ECMAscript (for obvious reasons). I'd love to turn it off in NS, but it somehow breaks CSS parsing (what a tanlged web of dependancies!)
As for the comment about IE. Clearly you haven't subscribed to Bugtraq. iexplore.exe is a simple COM program which displays ye olde DHTML widget + a few other bits and bobs. The problem? MS Active*.* gets a new report on average every 2.5 days on Bugtraq. There's a thing to be said for keeping your code modular, with security partitioning between components enforced. Unfortunately, you can only say it about Unix systems -- because MS products don't enforce them (or break if you try.. ever run NT with *proper* permissions on the %systemroot% dir?)
And being a BeOS user, our friend is obviously well suited to commenting about software for other operating systems.
Thank you for making my day more entertaining!
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Xin erama-HOWTO.html
Good stuff. Check it out.
You can't get a blue screen on a black and white monitor.
Yes, should maybe be called something else, and use a 1.0 number because it is very different in a lot of respects.
The Direct Rendering for hardware 3D accelerators is NEEDED if we are going to take the desktop market for Linux. Without being able to play the latest Quake mod at 120 fps, or the latest Sports game the same way, we won't get the pimple faced mainstream suburban teenager to want to go to Linux.
It did.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
just tried several mirrors *and* xfree86.org and found the dirs to be non-existant (as listed in the article) or empty (as in ftp.xfree86.org). :(
Moderators, please forgive me for veering offtopic, but this lad needs to be enlightened.
There are several alternative browsers on the market. They're all maturing slowly and some have even got features that Exploder doesn't already, despite Micro$oft's corporate feature bloating.
Grail is a good example of open source engineering. Written completely in Python and fully opensourced, it's a must have for novice hackers who want to learn HTTP/Browser internals.Konquerer, part of the KDE Project, is another good example of an underdog browser that's starting to take hold in the market. It's support for standards which make a viable browser are almost unmatched at the moment (in the alternative browser market).
Xemacs has a Browser called W3. It supports the majority of standards that make a viable Browser, and is written in Elisp, thus compatible with the Xemacs editor.
There's another browser, (commercial, though) called Opera Web Browser.It supports a lot, but probably not as much as the above two. It also runs on the Be System.Of course, we can't forget Mozilla. It's the open-source version of Netscape 5. Probably the best browser out at the moment aside from Exploder/Win32, it runs on many platforms and is the most likely browser to take over the Exploder market share. It already enjoys a large market share in the UNIX world, just under that of Netscape 4.x. This thing supports nearly everything, including Alpha channels. Watch out for it.
Finally, there's Lynx. A text-based browser, this thing is superfast, superstable, and very very handy. I use this a lot, and it's great for most sites, if you don't mind the lack of graphics (I don't mind)."A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
I'm pretty sure this is because of the way top counts shared memory between processes (which X uses heavily.) So, if you have 3 processes all sharing the same 10 mb chunk of memory, top will report 30 mb in use. There may be some way to turn off this behavior. Perhaps an expert can comment?
Hmm.. someone is not using xvidtune :). Make sure you edit XF86Config to match your monitor specs, or yes, it will look like a sun-dried, week old beef jerky.
wow - you've made me see the light!
we all know that the Engineers at Slackware and RedHat are thinking "god damn! why am i working at this dead end job where my company just GIVES the software away"
oh wait - no they're not. they're thinking "Jesus christ - i am sooooo fucking rich!"
Open source does have a marketplace - just because people can get the source doesn't mean people won't pay for it. You and your happy little windows 15 minutes is almost up....14....13...12...
ding-dong "who could that be"
"Umm..sir...it's the justice department...does a Mr. Gates live here?"
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
No offense, but both my AIW 128 and Xpert 2000 worked beautifully right from the start with 4.0. Adam
I have always said the same about Slackware. A fast, stable distro with none of the "everything must be free" crap that Debian has and that I don't care about.
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
Despite the fact that you're an AC, I agree with you. I don't feel like my quality of life would be irreparably damaged if I never saw another Penis Bird. There are also some users I wouldn't mind blocking forever. Of course, the trolls who bitch about moderation would hate this, but fuck 'em. "Just 'cause I posted 93 trolls, that doesn't mean that I can't be cool!" Pshaw.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
Let me correct a few facts that have shown up in this thread. First, all the 3dfx boards that do 2D are supported under XFree 4.0. That means that the Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo2 are not, but since they don't use the X server at all they don't need any special support to run under X.
2D performance of the 3dfx boards is much better under 4.0 than it was under 3.3. The new architecture of 4.0 and the release of 3dfx specs allows the server to run much better.
3D performance is a more complicated matter. I suspect this is where people are complaining. The DRI is a new architecture and it has somewhat different goals than the hack I put together for doing 3D under 3.3. It is designed to run multiple applications, in a window, reliably, and securely. Those extra features do take a toll on performance. Our goal for 4.0 was always to make it work correctly before worrying about the performance. We've just gotten to that point and are now putting some attention on performance. I've made some substantial improvements in the last week, that will be showing up in 4.0 soon.
Finally, Precision Insight and now VA Linux Systems is doing he 2D and 3D work for 3dfx. That work is being done primarily by me. I also did most of the 2D and 3D work under XFree 3.3. (I did have some good contributions by few other developers) So mostly the same people are doing the 3.3 work and 4.0 work. It both cases it was done mostly by a very small group (less than 3) contributors.
The XFree 4.0 support for 3dfx boards is far from laughable. It's one of the best boards supported under 4.0. XFree 4.0 had ambitious goals and we've done a remarkable job pulling them all together. Is the job complete? No. It is running nicely for a lot of people? Absoltely. If you'd like to see it improve then quit complaining and contribute code or bug reports.
- |Daryll
BeOS programmers format their code mostly according to K&R style. And BeOS has nothing to do with DirectX. As for the formatting, I don't know HTML that well, so I stick to preformatted text. And in this blasted little box, formatting is difficult.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Am i misconfigured, or is DGA support for the mach-64 cards not in place?
Any new word on NVidia stuff? I know that they have new drivers out this month, how's it going with XF4.0.1? I'm about to give it ONE more try before I trade my Geforce for a Voodoo 3500.
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) -GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
Amazingly enough, you don't need to KLICK HERE or ORDER NOW for package management- you can roll your own packages too, prior to distribution over your network.
Of course you'd never do that, since you don't want to be seen as a wimp, like us weedy bastards who have to look after more than one box
http://www.mp3.com/tib - lame and lamer!
Does anyone have a list of what the changes in 4.0.1 are? All I can find are the source diffs, not documentation. I'd really like to know what changed before I consider upgrading.
Is it worth the trouble trying 4.01 DRI for 3D with Matrox G400 ? Can normal users have full 3d accel with it ? the readme said multitexturing is not implemented yet because of buggy code.
Or should I stick 2 Utah GLX (and X 3)for a while ?
BTW I noticed the same texture corruption with the latest stable windows drivers for the g400 as I noticed with some builds of the glx code. (like with SOF demo etc)Wrong Textures are rendered or theyre shifted.
What causes that ?
- --[... The secret of the hanged man, the smile on his lips... ]-- -
use there's a lot of support that was left out. Particularly on most 3dfx chipsets. Sure, it says all 3dfx chips are supported, but that's laughable.
Perhaps 4.0 was build up quite a bit more than it should have been - but it comes down to the fact that this wasn't really a next-gen release. It was more of a 'other-gen' release. For some people it was worth while to upgrade, while for others it was not. I would have been much happier to see the folks at XFree86 wait a little longer to release a much better product. Something that everyone could upgrade to. I know at least 3dfx and some ATI chips got screwed. (Next comes my - why does 3dfx support for linux suck so bad? post)
4.0.1 is more significant than a "tiny release". 4.0 was a long-awaited release, but many users have not upgraded because of stability concerns. 4.0.1 is, for most people, more significant than 4.0 was, because it's finally ready for them to use. Once 4.x is stable, I'd agree with you that tiny releases aren't newsworthy.
What you've said is totally incorrect, and somewhat annoying.
Have you read my Bio ? I am certainly NOT stupid.
Please read my Bio before commenting on my level of intelligence."A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
I know the 4.0 voodoo3 support was broken, but it was not a hard fix (well it was more of a hack, but it works for now).. Unfortunatly I deleted the modified source for more space for pr0n.
I think have sexual relations with your PeeCee. Go play with your Linux/Windows Cyrix box :). Windows really blows cus its not UNIX and Linux sucks cus its a non-conforming piece of shit, half-ass attempt at making a decent UNIX. I'll be kicking and screaming with REAL UNIX till the end.
Ok, I have to ask -again-, is there dual head support for the G400 yet? I bought this card to use two monitors with Xinerama months ago, and have yet to see even an alpha/beta release of the code. I know they're working on it, and it probobly isn't stable yet, but how about release early and release often? I for one would be willing to isolate bugs and test it, I'm sure others would be too.
A link to the gzip'd diff, which you then have to search through for the changelog? Nah. I appreciate the post.
And what's with all the "instructions to moderators" type posts - is this some sort of pseudo-meta-moderation?
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The lack of XFree4 packages (as far as I understand it) is mostly the lack of manpower, than the stability of the server.
The X maintainer has postponed the release of XF4 packages, so that he doesn't get "overloaded" with work maintaining both 'woody' XF4 and 'potato' XF3 packages until potato will finally be released. I would guess, that XF4 will be among the first new packages once potato has been released.
I used to get the mystical black screen of video card lockup on this ATI chip.
It's now working (seemingly) properly under 4.0.1, which is great because Xfree86 4.x is pretty slick. I'll have to do some more testing to make sure it's stable though.
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Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot