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XFree86 4.0.2 Released
XFree86 4.0.2 is officially
out now. Besides adding a driver for those us with S3 Savage chipset based laptops, support for a variety of other chipsets, mesa updates,
improved DRI support, this new release adds the Render extension which
will hopefully give us anti-aliased fonts, alphablended menus, and a stromboli delivered nice and hot to your door. Mmm. Strom.
Hi,
I did try turning off Xfs. It did not make
any difference. The fonts are still huge.
And using startx -dpi 100 seems to have no
effect on Xfree 4.0.1. Whether I use
-dpi 100 or -dpi 75, xdpyinfo always returns
a resolution of 108x101.
Magnus.
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
Look under the SlashDot FAQ, you'll get some answers. Also note that not everyone is interested in X (dunno why, but they aren't). Specifically, certain SlashDot posters...
It's all about the Karma Points, baybee...
Moderators: Read from the bottom up!
SIG: HUP
XVideo is an extension to X to allow mpeg/video accelerations, and tv tuner support, and a few other things.
Does this mean that the picture from TV tuners will improve? A friend and me have exactly the same TV tuners (Hauppage Cinema, BTTV driver). Under NT his picture quality is worse than the one I get under Linux/X3, but when he upgraded to Windows 2000 it improved a lot, and now the worst quality is on my Linux box. Would an upgrade to X4 improve this?
--- Martin Skøtt aka. Qoumran
A lot of people here missed that XFree86 4.0.2 has support for ATI Radeon and Nvidia GeForce 2 family of chips. Well, 3D support is not 100% functional, but you can get 2D acceleration and use your card with KDE or GNOME.
Dude, your system needs tuning!
My 333 mhz celeron overclocked to 415mhz, 128Mb ram, UDMA/33 HD, loads KDE from startx in about 13s. (no app sessions restored). This is just a stock Mandrake 7.2 installation, with some hdparm fiddling (-d1 -c1).
Dont worry, I count at least 5 grammatical errors; this includes the huge run-on sentance connected by a kilometer of commas.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
A growing number of the cool new features in XFree86 seem to really be Linux only. Granted, that's where the users are and that's where the money is, but it's a shame that XFree86 is becoming less of an X server for free OSs and more of an X server for Linux.
For example, is there any DRI support for non-Linux platforms, especially *BSD?
What about USB support?
What about support for the newer PCI features/configuration knobs?
No silly... it means that you can install and run it on Darwin or MacOS X PB! (which is way cooler :) ) and eventually run X-apps within that environment.
:)
The guy doing the work for OS X and Darwin is on the Darwin mailing lists right now fielding bug reports and such. Fun to watch!
According to SGI, GL means Graphics Library, and not Graphics Language. Besides, what language would that be?
Well, the real reason they aren't using DRI is because they are making a close-as-possible port of the Windows drivers. I guess they think this method is much more superior; it may be, but I dont like it one bit. However, they could be total bastards and not release anything at all.
PS: if there is any FreeBSD + NVIDIA people out there that can code drivers you may be interested in that NVIDIA will be happy to rebuild the closed sourced parts of the drivers if someone will port over all the agp/interrupt code of the open linux module. I am not sure of the status as of yet (last i heard about it was 2 weeks ago), but contact madcat' or ripperda on #nvidia (irc.openprojects.net) if you want to do this.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
What the hell are you talking about? I do full time Java development under the Linux kernel 2.4 (test 12), and everything works perfectly. Just grab the JDK from the Sun site and it should function out of the box.
Yep. Currently we're running Linux on an embedded system with a gig of RAM. Its got X clients, but since the only way to connect to it is via ethernet or serial, there's really no purpose to running the server...
A small follow up to my own post, from what I can gather some drivers don't have support for the render, I have a laptop here using a ATI Rage Pro (MACH64) and I don't get anti aliased text on this machine (RENDER not availible on display messages). The TNT2 in the other machine works fine however. Also, thanks to the xfree team, XFree just keeps getting better and simplier to config (xf86cfg is great for the first version) and in particlar many thanks to Keith Packard for the wonder render.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
You may only want to have some fonts antialiased some of the times, the way it is implemented with render gives more flexibility and more interesting features like alpha transparency
You Like Science?
You Like Science?
You Like bottomquark.
They seem pretty hesitant to talk about it, even in the unofficial nvidia irc channel. That's the _first_ place it'll probably be available though.
/ctcp ice-dcc xdcc list
:)
:(
irc.openprojects.net, #nvidia
Be sure to bother ripperda if he's on - he works at nvidia doing coding for their linux drivers, and just loves to be bothered!
I find myself on there quite often to see if they've improved VIA chipset support, which currently sends my kernel down in a blazing fire
--
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grep "xercist"
I'm sorry... where is that underrated?
The reason you're seeing such delays at startup is because Gnome and KDE are huge, versus the X4 server which starts very quickly. I run X 4.0.1 with the latest and great version of WindowMaker, and startup from the time I type 'startx' to the time it's finished loading is under 5 seconds on a PIII-550. Needless to say TWM and others less intensive (Blackbox is great) start up even faster. Try just running 'X' if you don't believe me, and you'll get the standard gray screen in about 2 seconds. A lot of time the X server might start up slowly if it can't reverse resolve itself for whatever reason, so make sure your own machine is in /etc/hosts.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Please, dear LORD, let it have the GeForce driver and WORK!!! There is no way I'll EVER be able to compile the server from the CVS rep.
Emacs: for people who just never know when to
well.. you shouldn't read slashdot for software updates. you should watch www.freshmeat.net for that.
tres
---
stephen
Hmm, interesting... considering I've been running XFree86 4.0 (and newer) on 2.2.x kernels (with no extra patches) since it was released.
The only extra kernel-related stuff I installed were the NVidia driver modules (which didn't require me to patch the kernel at all). And that was only for OpenGL hardware acceleration (the standard nv driver in XFree86 4.0 worked fine for everything else).
Yeah about time I updated from my 1980s(?) X4 to X11 eh? No just kidding thanks I'll make sure to type the extra 6 keystrokes "free86" next time :)
Is there any text that explains the new XFree 4 infrastructure in plain english?
you've got:
DRI,
GL, GLU, GLUT, GLX,
Mesa,
Utah GLX,
SDL...
I know very little about X/video rendering, but I'd like to upgrade to XFree4 and actually know what pieces of the puzzle i need.
Does DRI replace Mesa? Does Utah GLX replace DRI for cards it supports? Is Mesa even needed? Is plain Mesa included in the Xfree source tree, or is it a fork? If I don't have a 3d card, does mesa still install as a software renderer? Does this give better performace over the 1fps syndrome in xfree3/windows95? Are any of the projects I named obsoluted by the new infrastructure? (utah glx comes to mind...)
maybe someone here can explain it on a level somewhere in between the "gimme URLs of the RPMs so i can upgrade my redhat box" and the in-depth developer documentation on the dri/utah glx pages.
Hopefully any responce would also give others the confidence to take on this new infrastructure.
Also, does the new "render" extention take effect automatically for all new programs compiled that link to the standard libraries?
You mean "sentence"? ;-)
DirectX support? You do realize that DirectX is a Microsoft thingy designed to get the OS out of the way so that games can run faster?
Microsoft has nothing to do with XFree86.
The most analogous code for X that can be compared to DirectX would probably by SDL, although I am sure that is debatable.
XFree 4.0 really needs a 2.4 kernel (you can run it with a 2.2 kernel with certain patches, but that is not a 'standard'). VMWare have stated that they will not support development kernels and will only support 2.4 when it has been officially released.
So until 2.4 gets officialy released, do not expect anything from VMWare. Even if they do relase a 2.4 kernel module, there is no way to force them to use XFree 4.0 features, especially when so few people use XFree 4.0 compared with 3.3
The two secrets to success: 1- Don't tell anyone everything.
-13
For all the ppp troubles I have experienced and read about, I finally found a script that just works.
g hlight=rains+ppp+scripts
Rain's PPP Scripts
http://freshmeat.net/projects/rainspppscripts/?hi
You just have to slap your username and password, phone number, and maybe change the login prompt expects (login: password:, or username:, password:)
And it just *works*
And its console based, so no fooling around with clicky ppp windows!
Of course this assumes you don't have a lobotomized modem (winmodem)
Look at the new features! If this were MS code, it would be worth at least a century or two jump in the version number! The cool ones are:
Bug fixes: Yea, those.
Render Extension: The render extensions and additional stuff added to x11perf, xft, and xlib to support it.
Compositing code for Render is complete, but a lot of stuff (polygons, image scaling, seperate alpha, see the summery) are still unimplemented.
Updates to nv for GeForce2: Hah! BeOS had GeForce2 support before X!
xf86cfg: A new, graphical configuration utility.
And much much more!
Here is the link.
It says that Render uses XAA for acceleration, and acceleration on the MGA chip is already implemented. 2Qs
1) If it uses XAA, why does it only accelerate on MGA?
2) Does this mean that it becomes a Render vs 3D choice for NVIDIA users? As far as I can see, the NVIDIA drivers don't support the Render extensions. Or am I just confused.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I would be very impressed if Exceed were anti aliasing your fonts. It may very well be using true type fonts but they will not be anti aliased.
X has had the ability to use true type fonts for many years. Initially there was a separate font server you could run, now it has been incorporated into main source tree.
The two secrets to success: 1- Don't tell anyone everything.
-13
Pages that require extra shit just to display are awesome!
If it ain't javascript or flash, I don't want to see it!
Try visiting windowsupdate.microsoft.com with Lynx, it ROCKS!
What exactly do you complain about? Do you think that it is a bad page because it is loading too fast? What's your point?
Would you be able to give characters fractional pixel positions?
I feel it is inexcusable that they did not hack the existing font mechanism to do antialiased fonts. I want to point out that the much derided MicroSoft managed to add antialiasing to their existing rendering system without requireing the use of new interfaces.
Yes, adding a new and nicer interface is necessary, but they should have made the old interface, which is what existing programs use, work as nice as possible. The fact is that we are not going to see antialiased fonts on the screen for a LONG time even now, because they did not do this.
[receptionist] - This is The Korean Company, how may I direct your call.
/.!
[AC] - Hi, I'm an anonymous coward on this web site called slashdot and I'd like to report...
[click]
[receptionist] - Damn AC's. Back to
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
'Cause if it's not hot, you get it free!
GNOME is not just a "desktop environment". It's a complete application framework and it includes GTK+. Check out developer.gnome.org for more information.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
X can run on a mac using darwin can it use KDE/Gnome or anyother window managers?
The XFree86 pieces are easy to do if FreeType2 is already installed; I expect the distro vendors to just make X require FreeType2 and ship a package for that as well.
I know at least one Linux vendor will.
* Stories can be scheduled to come up at a certain time. This is how they still manage to come up with something to post while everybody is (supposed to be) sleeping. From what I gather, most Slashdot people sleep in the late morning after finishing up around 5 AM.
* There is a system in the admin page where posts can be tagged with comments / info by the admins. Maybe there were 200 some stories in the queue and most were already tagged with something like "wait till later". Also, if you have 200 detailed items to go through, do you start at the middle? Top? Bottom? The admins are human; > 20 submissions at any time is bound to stress anyone.
Ok is that off-topic enough for you?
Main problem I have found with the binary only drivers for geforce 2 is that I can only get it to work with a 2.2.16 kernel. If I try ANYTHING else, I have problems... So far, toying with a 2.4 kernel with the binary drivers isn't even an option for me. This is the biggest problem I can think of. If Nvidia only wants to release binary drivers, then they need to get with the freakin' program! I am hoping that they are just waiting for a stable 2.4 release kernel before recompiling a new binary, but I suspect that isn't the case.
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
Great reply... I wish slashdot had a feature that allowed people to (+1, Thanks) replies to their comments. Doesn't seem very abusable...
Thanks for that info...stuff like
"You can think of SDL as a more powerful version of GLUT."
is info not mentioned on the projects page, but for mortal users, greatly helps to visualize the part each plays. Sure, it may be a bit over simplified, or only 99% accurate, but for curious users just trying to understand the system without reading the source, it's a big help.
One followup question...in Xfree4, if you have DRI working, is all 3d rendering through Mesa done as direct rendering? Windowed and fullscreen? I seem to remember only some applications actually could/would use the DRI. http://dri.sourceforge.net/components.jpg shows a "DRI module" in XFree and the Kernel, under the 2d and indirect rendering, which seems a bit off...
I'm also glad to hear Xfree4 uses the whole Mesa base... I had the impression before it was mostly replaced. I had a lot of trouble installing Mesa and the glide crud in xfree3, this new system actually sounds pretty simple for the user, which is great news.
Thanks again!
This has been discussed on the Vorbis list. The subject was dropped as it was judged that for MS to get that much improvement, it would require about a 10x improvement in codec quality over one release, which those discussion did not see as very plausable. Some also brought up problems in the current WMA codec (like background hiss "intentional"... heh), and the general consensus seems to be that WMA is useless at the moment because there are better and less restrictive codecs (MP3 less restrictive? what have I been ingesting lately?) than WMA at any bitrates where it is better than other codecs. Note that I did not contribute any of the points mentioned; this is simply an editorial comment.
That wouldn't happen to be a KT133, would it? I've just bought a new mobo (haven't installed yet) and you just sent shivers down my spine :P
Or possibly they didn't want to give 3dfx ammo for their lawsuit with an open source driver. That would be the best reason, since with their purchase of 3dfx perhaps they could open the drivers?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
So how much of Render has actually been implemented. Is the transparent menus in twm stuff there?
--
enterfornone - logging in for a change
Hear Microsoft tremble! Now I can run free Office products on a free OS without it looking like crap!!! Someone check and see how much the temperature just dropped in Redmond!
/. without booting into Windows or switching the modem to another machine *sigh*
Now if only I could get my damned PPP connection working in my Mandrake install so that I could read
With submissions coming in by the hundreds, I don't think personalized messages would be practical. That's my opinion anyway.
Try XML4J, from IBM's alphaworks, or Xerces, from jakarta.apache.org.
I have tried to install several Glide games under Redhat 7 with X4.0 but they never worked,
is there a way around this?
Do I have to have different glide libraries or something?
click here to bring up the comment with moderations listed. Moderation totals are listed under the prev/next comment links.
---
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
The "can't allocate colors" argument is also bullshit. I do not expect antialiased fonts to work without a TrueColor visual anyway, so there is no colormap to worry about!
The Xlib interface is entirely designed to be the same level as the Windows GDI. There is a 1:1 correspondence between the calls in many cases! (Windows copied lots of it, you know). The fact is that X botched the way to specifiy the fonts, so any practical interface requires an enormous and inefficient toolkit that has to enumerate every font on the server to find the correct one (this needs serious fixing with a new font-selection interface). However once you have selected the font you can use the drawing code in Xlib quite easily, without any toolkit wrapper.
Just quit with the lame excuses, and admit that the internal code is such a horrid mess that nobody in 10 years or so has been able to change it to non-binary!
Ok, maybe if you knew *anything* about the differences in the X11 and Windows rendering systems, you would know that this *not possible* using the standard X11 rendering system, since fonts are stored as 1-bit pixmaps, not grayscale or color. Besides, you can probably expect the next versions of GTK+ and QT to support this, anyways, and the applications using these toolkits won't have to be modified. And I'm sure someone will hack it in to the libs even before their next release and put a patch on the web.
Try Gentoo Linux!
...works fine for me, with accelerated video and all. Fullscreen even.
This is necessary...life, feeds on life...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/12/11/2355
I don't quite follow....
<high-level position here>
<name of stupid small company here>
Can you point to some documentation for Xft?
Does it do any kind of sharing when a few dozen applications all try to draw the same font? Perhaps this is not necessary nowadays? However this seems to be the obvious reason to put the fonts in the server.
If the X server does not have the render extension, can Xft work at all (even producing very bad output) or does it just abort? Unfortunately I think you better do something about old X servers, otherwise all the applications will do their own kludge, or worse it may discourage use of Xft at all.
Is there a *SIMPLE* font-naming scheme. By "simple" I mean that if I say "Helvetica" I get a font, ALWAYS! It is far, far, far more important that I get a font, and it be the same one every time, than that it actually be the sans-serif font "helvetica". Any scheme where the font names are not user-friendly will make applications and toolkit make their own translation from user-friendly to system names, and they will probably be incompatable with each other. Notice that it is ok to also support "complex" names that specify fonts exactly, as long as simple names are accepted. Also, ALWAYS return a font, no matter what garbage name is thrown at you, you can report an error, but make the best guess anyway.
Can you do anything about UTF-8? It would help a lot if there was a way to render raw UTF-8 strings (and 16 bit unicode while you are at it), and all characters show up. Best answer is to have a 16/8x16 bitmap font containing the entire Unicode set, and any missing letter from a font pulls if from there (clip and center it, don't scale except by integers).
Please draw something, even a box, for every single code. I recommend small "^A" for the control characters.
Draw the MicroSoft "extension" characters for the range 0x80-0xA0. Don't pretend that this is not a standard. It is and there is nothing we can do about it.
Unfortunately I only got 640X480 out of the xf86cfg option, fortunately I just copied the relevent info out of my 3.3.6 config for the screens, etc. and it seemed to like that. Personally though I really long for the return of the xset package (XF86Setup). Being able to know in advance that you won't have problems with your mouse, and being able to fine tune the display before saving out your XF86Config file is a really nice thing.
You can download the source to the nv driver at nvidia.com.
It sounds like your having issues with the openGL.
XFree 4 does acceleration differently, and it sounds like mesa is now not working right. You will want to use DRI in Xfree. You might want to make a new 2.2.18 kernel with agp. It is in experimental, but it works good.
It has been a while since I've done it, and I forget exactly how to do all this.
Someone with more knowledge may want to comment...
No, the beta releases of KDE 2.0 WERE important because 2.0 was an entire new version. I might have switched the terms 'version' and 'revision', but you know what I'm trying to say. The beta of KDE 2.1, which adds only a few new features, is NOT important.
<high-level position here>
<name of stupid small company here>
I downloaded the nv source at nvidia.com - is the source open now or is there something else they are holding back on? Specs? Because the source seems to be there!
Ah. Typical /. iDot. NVIDIA has "a clue."
.x releases, much less .0.x ones.
A) They can't because some of the stuff is proprietory code.
B) They can't because an ICD isn't just a driver, its a whole freaking OpenGL ICD. OpenGL ICDs are expensive and time consuming to develop, and every other consumer manufacturer is having troube with theirs. Given the fact that NVIDIA's ICD is totally kick ass, why would they give chip makers like ATI an advantage? I'd wager that if ATI's drivers were as good as NVIDIA's, then the Radeon would be at least 20-30% faster. Also, the Matrox G400MAX would have put a serious dent in RivaTNT2 Ultra sales had NVIDIA's ICD been open. Ideally, what NVIDIA would do is split the drive into three parts. An OSS kernel driver, and OSS X driver, and a closed OpenGL driver. That way they could keep the code closed, yet be able to implement extensions like this. Also, I don't think they really planned on this. Who thought that 4.0.2 would include such a innovative component? Stuff like this just dosn't get added in
C) They're a business. Get over it. Right now, you taking your Viper 550 out and putting it in our router probably costs them less than giving ATI free code.
D) Whining and insulting is no way to get what you want. That's why people consider the OSS market a dangerous proposition. If you want OSS drivers ask nicely, help them through it. It is a totally new paradigm, and its benifets to them (if indeed OSS has any benefits to them) will need some time to digest.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
- Qt changes available here.
- Gtk changes in process.
- twm hacks should never see the light of day.
Does that mean they're in this release? Or not?(SCNR - But *please* don't call XFree86 4.* "X4". X4 is something different.)
The X11 protocol and Xlib are not at the level of abstraction of the Windows GDI, Postscript, or other, similar APIs; they are lower level. Anybody dealing with them needs to write a lot of code dealing with different device classes. In X11, you get a Windows GDI-like API, with all its conveniences and limitations, more at the level of the toolkits. Such toolkits can then provide you with antialiased rendering when available without code changes. GTK, Qt, fltk, and wxWindows all have hooks for putting this functionality in.
He is probably complaining that the page is readable, unlike most web pages created after 1996. Or maybe he have configured his browser to make pages unreadable by default, and is complaining that this page doesn't overwrite his settings.
So has anyone gotten the nvidia driver to work with kernel 2.4.0-test12??
Right now I'm using the 4.0.2 nv driver with my geforce 2 mx, but the colors look slightly strange and the fonts are huge.
XFree just keeps getting better and simplier to config (xf86cfg is great for the first version) and in particlar many thanks to Keith Packard for the wonder render
Nevermind xf86cfg, have you tried "X -configure"? Spits out a usable X configuration file. You then just make whatever changes you want to it.
... or a compiler, which has a pretty decent editor built in :)
You mean GTK+? GNOME is just a desktop environment, get over it.
Oh man, if Eterm uses this for transparency instead of it's current stuff, that would be amazing!
Just had a look at that, nice. xf86cfg seems to just be based on the same idea but graphical. X -configure would have been easier as all I wanted was a working config. You know, one thing I've noticed is that X has certainly got a lot easier to configure. I remember configuring X a couple of years and trying to dig out mode lines was a nightmare. My config file is a quater of the size it was back then. Things are moving in the right direction at least.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
What the hell is a computer? Is it related to pewter?
Has anyone heard anything from Nvidia about when they will release new 'nvidia' drivers (not the 'nv' drivers) that will support the new render extensions? It's a shame they're not open so the X people couldn't add it themselves, but the 'nvidia' driver is much faster than the Xfree86 one.
;)
I really hope they get something out soon, because I'm just itching for readable fonts in X via my Geforce2 MX!
On an unrelated note, did anyone see this on the release notes? :
- Qt changes available here.
- Gtk changes in process.
- twm hacks should never see the light of day.
Classic
I'm sure that if you ever went on a userboard and asked, you'd get tons of people trying to help. (Be users groups are very friendly.) However, that's a moot point. If you don't like it don't use it. If it doesn't support your hardware, then certainly don't use it. If you are into programming, and want to help out, then go ahead to BeUnited and join a project. If you're starting a programming project, and you want cross platform support, then program with non-X OSs in mind. (Use Qt or GTK or something cross-platform.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Those "fucks" don't support the D-Link 530TX for the same reason those "fucks" at XFree86 aren't doing DRI drivers for the Sis630. Limit time, limited resources, limited demand.
And those "fucks" have greast SBLive! support. If you have a particular problem, just ask for help.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
If it were automated, (eg. pusing the reject-already submitted button gives you a certain messege) takes no time at all. And unless the guys going through the messeges aren't doing what we think they're doing (randomly posting messegse, which would account for many of the errors made recently) pushing an extra button really wouldn't increase the time factor.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
That explains why nobody codes directly to xlib. And to tell the truth, the X protocol is just a dumb idea. Yes, you heard it here first (NOT) There is a reason for having some abstraction at the lowest levels: it allows apps to take automatic advantage of new features. The idea of putting a half-finished windowing environment (X) on top of UNIX is the whole reason you have mismatched applications, non-uniform configurations (wouldn't it be great if X display configs would work for every application?) and all the other problems X has. The sheer fact that every other windowing system has the sense to include some layer of abstractions for apps to code to should give you an idea that the X designers are alone in their thinking that a windowing system should implement *no* user-level features.
I would really enjoy it if XRender were as good as it hast he capability to be. Of course, now I know exactly what is going to happen. I'm going to be staring at Netscape's un-anti-aliased fonts until v7, XplayMidi will never give me anti-aliased fonts, and I'm going to have to eventually deal with 3 different config formats for my anti-aliased truetype fonts. (one for each toolkit)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I serious doubt you want only your Qt fonts anti-aliased and your Motif fonts un-anti-aliased. If it were lower than the toolkit level, you could have a config program that specified whether you wanted anti-aliasing or not.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Nevermind xf86cfg, indeed. It wouldn't run on either of the machines I tried it on. The funny part is, it failed with "cannot read config file." So I fell back to X -configure plus vi.
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Didn't you just contradict yourself? Isn't XEmacs an application?
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
A) Who's still running PseudoColor visuals that actually want anti-aliasing? BeOS here works fine with 256 colors, anti-aliasing and all.
B) That's probably a good idea.
C) Who cares? As long as it is cross-machine compatible, I'm guessing the XFree folks have enough clout to change the extensions and have the industry follow.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Yes, but a *very*, *very* specialized one with its own redisplay.
A) Why obther supporting ancient hardware. Mono cards? Good god! I thought palletized cards were as bad as it got! XFree86 4 is supposed to be the "second coming" if you will of X. There is no point in supporting ancient hardware. Either upgrade or stick to 3.3.6.
B) Blanking: Yes, fix it...please
C) Especially for the compile phase. The compilation instructions consist of the standard X 6.4 docs. That's just silly.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
As for doing antialiasing behind the scenes in an X11 server, a hack like that may work most of the time, but it deviates from the definition and may break some applications. Doubtlessly, the same thing was true when Microsoft added antialiasing to Windows, but Microsoft controlled the Windows API. Hummingbird doesn't control the X11 API and if they deviate from the specs in this way, they are simply providing you with a broken X11 implementation.
If anyone else has had this problem, please let me know. Talk amongst yuhselvs.
Try this patch for the NVIDIA-KERNEL package. http://www.linuxgames.com/misc/patch-nvdriver-2.4. 0-test11-2
Note that I have not used 3d acceleration with these boards (my employer has no need of that feature so I did not spend time configuring/testing it, and it is mutually exclusive with xinerama, which we do need).
However, I fried an SGI 1600SW monitor trying to get a quad head digital DVI G200 card to work with the multilink adapter -- I believe hardware was more responsible for this than X, but as I never saw an image (and won't risk another monitor trying to get it to work) I cannot say for certain.
We have been using XFree 4.0.1 in production systems (single headed config) for some time with good success. Xinerama will probably be deployed in a few months, perhaps even weeks depending on demand, after some more testing.
A final word on the upgrade question. I would say that, if you absolutely must have a stable system, then upgrading to the latest version of X, no matter how good the release is, is a bad idea.. Wait a few weeks while others try it out, or try it out yourself on a less critical system. Don't be one of the first to upgrade on a system which must be stable -- let others uncover any bugs/work arounds first, then upgrade once a sufficient body of knowledge/consensus exists as to the quality of the release.
I suspect you will find 4.0.2 up to your needs, but be a little patient and wait until you can be reasonably sure before upgrading.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
doesn't it seem like X comes with crappy documentation for installation?
I tried installing Xf864.0 when it came out a number of times, but i only got it to work by reading an article on some web page. Doesn't it seem like the authors would best know how to install it?
I'm sure there aren't a lack of people with good writing skills, I'm of the opinion that clear code arises from clear linguistic thought. So, whats up there?
But I'd still have to say thanks to the authors for what is arguably the most important part of the os as it exists today....
___________________________
http://www.hyperpoem.net
hyperpoem.net
I have given up on Xfree 4.0.1 and gone back to 3.3.6 because the fonts appear to be completely messed up. At the same resolution, fonts, esp. truetype fonts, appear HUGE on xfree86. The fonts on netscape and Konqueror are especially bad. I don't know why this is, since I have setup Xfs to do the font serving and have merely set the FontPath to unix/:-1. Magnus.
(or just maybe bgr) resource so you get sub-pixel sampled text.
Some links for the humor-impaired...
Sarcasm
Exaggeration
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
While XFree86 decided to change only the minor revision number, the additions are still pretty signifigant... Especially the alpha channel support.
---
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
Don't sweat this. I went through Slack 7.1, Caldera 2.4, RedHat 7.0 (Patched), Turbo, and eventually back to Slack. I ended up rebuilding the full XFree 3.3.6 and patched the savage on an IBM T20 with the chipset and it runs beautifully at 1024 X 768 on this quick little laptop. The patches are here, along with instructions, here. I built mine without xfs (the font server). Tim's XF86_SVGA binary needs the font-server by default, but, this can be suppressed with startx -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/fonts/misc/.
I only wish they'd had this done 2 weeks ago. Would have helped my presentation today for VMWare with a dual-boot Slack/Win2k workstation much more effective. >:)
Linux rocks!!! www.dedserius.com
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
ok, vrml has had very little take-up as an interactive multi-user networked 3d environment, what hope for X instead? How large would an equivalent X program be to a vrml world? How much bandwidth does a GLX connection take for anything decent and what happens if you route it over the net? How light can the load and footprint be from these 3d X clients, e.g. how many clients could a normal (if you must lets say 1/2 gb dual 750) internet server deal with. What sort of 3d performance would we see on consumer OpenGL hardware? Can we let the windowz users play with us? How cool would it be? Does anyone know?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I noticed that the mga driver that comes with 4.0.2 still doesn't support dual head mode on my G400. I had to copy over mga_drv.o with the old one Matrox released for 4.0.1 to get Dual head working. Any ideas when the current driver will have these features?
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
Changes: This release adds a lot of driver updates, Darwin/MAC OS X support, an update for Mesa 3.4, a Radeon driver, DRI updates, and a "render" extension which provides Porter/Duff image composition (i.e, anti-aliases text and geometric objects).
Does this mean it will run Mac OS X programs? because if so, then that would kick ass!
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Free Mac Mini
Perhaps 100 dpi is too big for your monitor.
With a 14" - 17" monitor you should try 75 dpi instead.
If only "common" sense was actually that common...
I don't think so: ftp://ftp1.detonator.nvidia.com/pub/drivers/englis h/XFree86_40/
While it would be nice to have Free drivers that worked, I see no problem with using the binary only drivers, if they are of higher quality. After all, if you have work to get done, which is worse, having to use binary-only drivers, or using Free drivers of marginal quality?
NVidia has done a good service providing high quality drivers that WORK NOW. While I applaud ATi with their support of the XFree driver writers, the quality of the drivers has been lagging far behind their Windows cousins.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
Okay, if you're going to do font handling at the user level (and I agree that there are some compelling advantages of doing so), then you should do all the font handling at that level. In other words, you should be putting all this stuff in Xlib. So the API to fetch a new font and to draw it to the window remains exactly the same and Xlib itself worries about how to get the X server to render it, whether through the Render extension or through the traditional protocol call.
Because otherwise, (a) full font support in an application will require that application to be aware of every X-level font library (like Xft) in the system and know how to use it and (b) applications that need full font support will be less portable. That's more complicated than it's worth and gets you less overall benefit in return (the idea here is that as many fonts as possible should be antialiased/alpha-blended, and that includes Type 1 fonts, Truetype fonts, etc.).
By putting it in Xlib, you get the advantage of being able to back things out later (the API is what matters to the applications, ultimately) just as you can with Xft, but the added advantage of applications not having to do anything different than they already do. Upgrade the library and bang...all applications running on the same system that the library resides on can now make use of alpha-blended fonts transparently.
Support of application-level fonts will obviously require some kind of library support. I'd argue that it should be implemented in a separate library since we're talking about new functionality.
--
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
God bless open source (*sniffle*)
-Legion
What you probably downloaded, was the source to the nvidia driver kernel module. That's only part of the story. The other part, which is conspicuously(sp?) missing, is a binary only download of the nvidia server for X as well as the libGL.so and GLX portions of the OpenGL ICD. So, yes you did download the source. Nearly 1/3 of it.
No thanks. I don't smoke anymore.
Hm.
/. reader with moderator status will consider redundant.
Sounds like you did something wrong.
I'd explain it, but it'd be offtopic, and is surely covered on some website somewhere else that some lone nut
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I mostly wrote that post because whenever I read a story about XFree86 on /. everyone bashes it. I mentioned in my post that I didn't agree with the comments that I made. You may have overlooked that. I am glad, however, that you brought up a lot of key points. It's nice to hear people defend XFree86 for a change. I try to stay away from pixmap UIs. Enlightenment was slow on my P3. Sawmill is an excellent window manager (although it still suffers from pixmap-bloat). I really enjoy the Sawmill-Gnome combo which as we all know, includes XFree86.
Keeping
As some have said, there are nv drivers on the nvidia page.
But, in the notes, it think that it says that there are some problems with the GeForce2...
They have an opensource driver available on the page as well. It is for the XFree 3.x and not 4...
I know that the SGI Linux machines are now shipping with the GeForce2 cards and that the drivers are a combined effort of nVidia, SGI and VA.
I have been told that you can find better drivers on SGI's page by downloading some of the patches for the SGI Linux systems. This may not work. I went to far and messed mine up.
I have tried using the nVidia drivers with some software on my box and it seemed to be messed up.
If you can get any further, let me know.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Quake, being a wanker program anyway, has a hacked implementation of DGA 1.0 mouse support.
Me reads that 4.0.2 should improve things somewhat...
NVIDIA_kernel-0.9-5.tar.gz is the source to the kernel module, but it only exists in source form because it would be too much trouble to keep binaries for all possible kernel versions. It contains only the bare minimum of information required to perform its task. It's pretty much just linking to their binary driver.
.o files) libraries&driver, some docs and a Makefile that simply copies the libraries to where they need to be.
Contrary to what you may have been lead to believe, NVIDIA_GLX-0.9-5.tar.gz does not contain any source code at all. All that's in it are binary-only (.so and
---
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
Just for the record, 3 out of 4 articles I've submitted have been accepted. However, sometimes it take a while to get posted (like, the 'id' story took about 15 hours). Someone probably submitted it before you did, and it finally got posted.
My submissions:
2000-09-11 16:57:24 Startup Claims 16.8M Pixel Camera Sensor (articles,tech) (accepted)
2000-10-08 16:48:59 XML Parsers (askslashdot,java) (rejected)
2000-10-09 23:34:50 Proton Polymer Battery (articles,news) (accepted)
2000-12-07 18:54:41 id on Linux: "disappointing" and "support nightmar (articles,linux) (accepted)
[note that they edited my 'id' submission headline... heh]
To all of you that whine about getting constantly rejected, it's simple -- just don't submit lame articles. :)
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The mouse support providing DGA 1.0 in XFree86 4.0.1 was subtly broken and gave jumpy and unpredictable mouse behaviour which was most noticeable in Quake 3, among others. This has been fixed in the CVS Xfree86 tree for a few months now and I assume therefore it is fixed in 4.0.2.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Anyone who's regularly dist-upgrading the unstable branch for Debian have probably noticed that we're getting the the 4.0.1pre2 release candidate packages. Hopefully we're only a day or two away from having the real 4.0.2.
Kudos to G. Branden Robinson and the X Strike Force for helping us Debian users keep up!
Jay (=
I love being moderated for being "offtopic" by someone who hasn't read the thread that I am replying to. (especially when the original post in this thread was moderated up to a 4).
At least I have the Karma to spare.
Spend that Karma, spend that karma... yeah yeah yeah!
And... if they ever knock my Karma down below 20, I can always bring one of my other accounts back out of retirement... fphlyer lives!
And if I ever drop down below zero, I'll
Amen to that, brother!
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
You now have a QT with render support, anything you compile against it will get anti-aliased text including the whole of KDE2.
It seems I'm missing something in the process... aside from compiling Xfree86 (I got the ready made binaries), I did all steps you mentioned, and nothing has changed here. :-/
libqt.so.2 is evend linked to libXrender.so (according to ldd), but the fonts are just like they were before.
Has someone got things working with the released binaries?
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Marcelo Vanzin
> Mmm. Strom.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
> Mmm. Strom.
CmdrTaco has a thing for Strom Thurmond?
EEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Check out the article on Gnotices. Owen has added OpenType support to freetype and Pango. It uses the XRender extension to achieve this.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
You need to build/install FreeType2 and then build/install the Xft library with FreeType2 support. Yes, this is a pain, but I expect Linux distros will include support by default.
Owen Taylor is hard at work getting Xft working with GTK+ 2.0, KDE has taken my Qt patches and incorporated them into their copy of the Qt tree. We're on our way to the magical land of anti-aliased text, and it's happening faster than I thought possible even a couple of months ago.
Any idea if problems related to DGA and proper use of modifier keys have been fixed?
--
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
My NVIDIA
When I said 15 hours on the 'id' story, I mean it came up 15 hours after it said "accepted"! I actually sent an e-mail to Taco, and one of the other Slashdot guys answered me and says that it sometimes takes a long time to appear on the front page. I don't know why, and he didn't explain it. :)
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Did you notice there are two source files needed - NVIDIA_GLX and NVIDIA?
They do require that the application call the render extensions directly, but you can add support to many applications simply by recompling apps using libraries that have support(eg, qt-2.2.3 with patch applied). Anyway the XFree86 project are well on their way to giving us the windowing enviroment that we all want. And shutting up the nay sayers along the way.
ftp://ftp1.detonator.nvidia.com/pub/drivers/englis h/XFree86_40/0.9-5/
The source is for nvidia_kernel not nvidia_glx, the glx part is the real driver.
ftp://ftp1.detonator.nvidia.com/pub/drivers/englis h/XFree86_40/0.9-5/
I think that you get the point. Since I did all of the complaining, please limit your replies to positive comments only.
Amen brother...
If you don't like it, hey, you got the source - fix it!
No thanks. I don't smoke anymore.
How? Well, the X server is Exceed and runs on Windows. I created font entires for Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New, etc., in the X server. So, an X app could request to draw with Arial if it knew they existed (which almost none do). So, the trick is to make an alias for "helvetica", "times", and "courier", and point them to the MS fonts. Now, all the X apps get the scalabe TrueType fonts and don't need to know about them.
MS may stink at a certain things, but they did a good job on fonts. Their typography website is a great read.
My point is that if it can be done without protocol extensions on a PC X-server, it should possible to do it in XFree86. Granted, the Exceed server simply passes the font draw command to Windows, which has the TrueType renderer. But Exceed could use the FreeType render, right? Or can it already, and I'm just missing out because I can't figure out how to do it?
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
I am positive that Xfree86 will be arround for a while.
;)
I am also positive that those that whine the most about some opensource code are doing the least to better it.
I am even more positive that this is not what you were looking for when you said positive comments only...
Thanks for getting all those uglies out of the way...
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Linux already is in embedded market. Most applications there won't have a graphical user interface, usually not textual either.
Still, some embedded Linux products have X (and XF86 even) in them. While others may have eg. W Window System, which is considerably lighter than X. But mostly they do with serial console which is partially or fully disabled when going from development to production.
And I do remember running X on Linux with 2 megs of RAM. It was sluggish, but when the amount of RAM was raised to 6MB, it flew. That was around '92 I think.
Heh, I know. I had a story about 3x better than MP3 compression being released by Microsoft (48kbps near-CD quality, 98kbps better-than-CD) and it got rejected. I, too, figured maybe someone else submitted it, but nothing at all about it went up.
:I
Nice.
BytesTemplar.com
Some say application, others say operating system. I'd say it's arguably an elisp development toolkit. ;-)
sigs are a waste of space
>>never knew VA was a non-profit org
Not intentionally.
Bwahahahahahahahaahahahahah.
Okay, so where can I download a truly transparent terminal?
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Celebrate the finer things in life
Actually, X11 was released in 1987 at about the same time that Windows 2.0 came out.
Go to irc.openprojects.net in channel #nvidia and get them (and some help if you need).
siri
Here's another compelling reason to put the font support in the X server instead of the application layer: if you put the font handling in the application layer, each system on which the clients will execute will have to have all the fonts those clients wish to use available on that system. Hence, the fonts available to the applications a user might run will vary depending on where he's running his applications from. This probably isn't a desirable situation.
--
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
X4 would be a whole bunch of versions ago.
We're all running X11. X11r6 in many cases. Many are running release 4.0.2 of Xfree86, which is a port of X11r6 for the pee-cee.
It isn't what I run on one of my 'toy' machines, however, which is a Mac SE/30 with NetBSD. X in a tiny 512x384 display is kinda cramped. It works, though, if you resort to TWM. (imagine running KDE on a display that small- it'd be 50% widget-waste!)
Hay thar.
Um, support for that card was added in 4.0.2, which is what this whole discussion is about.
Not according to xfree86.org. There's no mention at all of support for the Geforce2. Radeon, yes. Geforce2, no. So is it supported?
Not only that, but NVidia's driver supported that card under 4.0.1.
Theoretically, yes. Try as I might, though, I can't get NVidia's kernel module (part of their driver) to install. Compiled from source or taken as a binary from NVidia's site, insmod just doesn't seem to like that damned kernel module. And no kernel module, no X11!
There's this great little invention I've heard of. . .I believe it's called a modem. . .
No, they didn't invent it. They did put money behind it, improved it, and stuck it in their OS. X never had decent font support because fonts are hard, and fonts cost real money.
They also did a good job at hinting these fonts at low monitor resolutions (75-100). Adobe and other font type suppliers didn't really care about this because their prime support is for high-resolution devices like printers. This is why, IMHO, TrueType fonts look better on screen than the equivalent Adobe fonts. Think I'm an MS apologist? No. But I'll give 'em credit where I think they've done good work.
As for doing antialiasing behind the scenes in an X11 server, a hack like that may work most of the time, but it deviates from the definition and may break some applications.
How would it break the definition? What protocol message or Xlib API function does it break? Please tell me, because every X app I have, including GIMP, runs fine.
Now, if you're talking about the server-side font format, how does that matter to the client app at all? X may have a default cruddy font file format, but I don't see that affects the client in the least.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Ah.. just installed the binary release from XFree86 ftp-site.. (actually, from mirror :) oh man, this time these true type fonts work by far better than on the previous release, scaling is correct... whoaah! Great! this rocks!
there seems to be some bugs, since some lines in my olvwm virtual desktop window go missing... but as long as this problem will not spread, it's ok. i don't know are bugs in XFree86 or in olvwm..
ound the message used repetitively over and over still nothing grows silen
I must be nuts, 'cause these look anti-aliased to me.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Does anyone know if this release supports YUV overlays with a Voodoo3? Cool to see that the
XRender support is there, but I am really intereseted in the status of the Xvideo stuff.
It will be interesting when this support gets folded into the toolkits, and maybe all the existing, ugly anti-aliasing and alpha blending hacks can go away in favor of this. Cannot wait for gtk, qt, evas, gdk-pixbuf, and eterm to support this natively. This stuff could also *greatly* improve the speed of nautilus and kde 2.1. Very good to see XFree advancing so nicely, getting the needed features to do any multimedia stuff on par with other OSes.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Sure, but (a) most people use a truecolor visual with at least 16 bits of depth these days, so allocating extra colors isn't a problem, (b) just because alpha information is provided doesn't mean the X server has to use it...it can draw the fonts the same way they would be drawn had they been supplied as a straight bitmap, and (c) alpha font support can be turned on or off with an option to xset(1) or, if that's not possible, a switch to the X server itself if necessary.
Yeah, but the problem is that the common API amongst all these things is Xlib and, underneath, the X protocol. Font handling is such a fundamental role of the X server that I believe newer methods of rendering fonts should also be handled by the X server.
Otherwise, you get the X server handling some fonts while the toolkits handle other fonts. That's insane! It's also wasteful.
The deal is this: users expect the fonts to look good. They don't give a shit what toolkit is in vogue at the time, nor should they. Good looking, toolkit-independent fonts can be had by implementing them at the X server level, so why isn't this being done? This may be a religious issue, but I strongly believe that if you're going to implement functionality that the X server already handles in some manner, then you should implement it in the X server. Otherwise you're just contributing to the mess we already have, namely the proliferation of toolkits that all provide roughly the same functionality but in slightly different and incompatible ways.
--
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
...are drivers for the very popular nVidia GeForce2 chipset. Why the decision to support the Radeon natively and not the GeForce2?
Because that was a beta release for a revision for a desktop environment that some people use. This XFree86 release is stable and affects (pretty much?) all of us running linux as a desktop.
<high-level position here>
<name of stupid small company here>
Um, support for that card was added in 4.0.2, which is what this whole discussion is about. Not only that, but NVidia's driver supported that card under 4.0.1.
Well, I was just going from the FAQ...
That's from http://www.libsdl.org/intro/author.html
Yippee. Try as I might, I still can't get 4.0.1 to work with my Geforce2 MX.
XFree86 4.0.2 is officially out now. Besides adding a driver for those us with S3 Savage chipset based laptops, support for a variety of other chipsets, mesa updates, improved DRI support, this new release adds the Render extension which will hopefully give us anti-aliased fonts, alphablended menus, and a stromboli delivered nice and hot to your door. Mmm. Strom
I ran this through babelfish several times...and I still don't get it. I better lay off the penguin mints for a while.
The anti-salmon
Xfree86 is a version of X, on of many. It was not developped in 1963, X itself was developped after Windows 3.1.
Is there any reason for anyone to listen to what you have say with any degree of confidence at all.
YES!
They should feel confident that you are a truly magnificent idiot - there are many round these parts, but you are as a god to them.
Btw. Nothing else you wrote made any technological sense, either. Pull my finger, fool.
Ok, admittedly this is not my strong point (I'm more of a server hacker) but, what kind of effort would be involved to get XFree to supply all of its available fonts, automatically, to GhostScript? It seems to me that if this could be done, all installed fonts would be available on both the screen and on the printer at the same time.
This would take us one step closer to desktop parity with Those Other desktop operating systems.
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Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
so don't bother. Just keep running what is working for you then there is no problem...
I am positive you've never actually looked at X4 - unlike some companies (and you know who I mean ;), GNU software is often completely re-written from the ground up, X4 is a great example. is slimmer, faster and better than ever - seriously - you should be experienced.
Xfree86 sucks. Classic example of Bloatware. Designed in 1963 by some unix hacker who wanted to run visual apps remotely via network. Everything and the kitchen sink has been hacked into the code since then. Not stable. Takes up too much RAM. Linux better come up with a good alternative if it ever wants a piece of the embedded market. Piece of crap. blah blah blah.
I think that you get the point. Since I did all of the complaining, please limit your replies to positive comments only.
Keeping
As long as they keep it updated, I'm not concerned. I bought a GeForce2 GTS yesterday, it works in Linux with nVidia's drivers, and I'm happy. Yes, it is very nice to have open source drivers but in the absence of those I think closed source drivers are a decent gesture. Of course, this still doesn't obsolete Mesa for me. Mesa is amazingly useful for compiling applications that require opengl. I can use the mesa headers and run the app with the nVidia GL libs. Seamless =)
I send you this message in order to have your advice.
I suppose that applications will have to be specifically designed for XFree 4.0.2 for them to have antialiased fonts, right?
Alex Bischoff
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Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
ATI non-radeon/non-r128 changes for the Render extension are in XFree86 CVS. Dirk (Hohndel) and Linus both have laptops with Mach64 chips and complained about this little problem over the weekend (after the 4.0.2 code freeze). Ya just gotta get more recent bits.
Actually, both stories got rejected within an hour of submitting each. My second one got the rejection stamp after less than 5 minutes, and there were over 230 submissions ahead of it. I dunno, maybe someone decided to flush the queue without really going over them.
Now this story comes up and isn't credited to anyone, which means Taco probably got it from the xfree86.org homepage rather than from the submission queue. Perhaps slashdot needs more descriptive rejection messages, like "rejected by timothy - reason: already submitted" so people aren't left wondering how their submissions are being used.
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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
Or a separate library?
I'm about to talk out my ass, but...
This is ridiculous. Why not instead: design a separate font server protocol that takes the same font specification as the older font server and outputs a font with alpha information and set up the X server to automagically detect that the font server is talking the newer protocol and treat the font data as including alpha information, then render it appropriately to the screen.
As for fonts in the font path, just have the X server detect that the file is of the new alpha-capable format and deal with the font appropriately.
I mean, the whole point behind having an abstraction like the X server that deals with fonts is that the applications don't have to know things like whether or not the fonts are antialiased...they Just Work.
So please, tell me why this won't work, and why it's not being implemented this way.
--
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
I always check off "No Score +1 Bonus" for the same reason I never post as the Anonymous Coward. If you take a look you'll find that for some reason someone decided the comment was underrated.
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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
All ya do is install whatever package in the distribution (I use Debian) that provides just the headers for mesa. Then you go find the libGLU.so in some mesa package and throw that into /usr/lib with the nvidia libGL.so and various other libraries.
The only problem I had in Debian was a dependency on xlibmesa3 before one could install xlibmesa-dev. I had to build my own packages to get around it. I'm still no deb package Jedi so I won't be releasing them any time soon but if someone wants to take them out of my hands and try to get them up to specifications I'll let them =).
I send you this message in order to have your advice.
Am I the only one who hates anti-aliased fonts? It makes me feel like I need glasses. I want my text crisp and clean. The OSX on the mac has everything anti-aliased, it's a mess. It looks like my monitor is worn out.
Just say no,
Sheldon
For a while there I was afraid slashdot wasn't even interested in announcing this release.
:-P
When they started putting the build online:
2000-12-19 03:22:54 XFree86 4.0.2 release(ing?) (articles,x) (rejected)
When they finished putting the build online:
2000-12-19 22:55:45 XFree86 4.0.2 is out (articles,x) (rejected)
Go figure.
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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
I have given up on Xfree 4.0.1 and gone back to 3.3.6 because the fonts appear to be completely messed up. At the same resolution, fonts, esp. truetype fonts, appear HUGE on xfree86. The fonts on netscape and Konqueror are especially bad. I don't know why this is, since I have setup Xfs to do the font serving and have merely set the FontPath to unix/:-1.
Sounds like your resolution settings are royally fubar'd. The renderer will try to guess the dots per inch from your monitor size and pixel resolution and will plot the fonts in an appropriate scale. It is sometimes useful to override this calculation - either
or edit your /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers file to read
To be honest, I have no idea why you would want to use XFS alongside XFree86 4.0.1. The 4.0.x family includes rendering support for bitmap, Speedo, Type 1 and Truetype fonts in X and is therefore a lot easier to set up than using an external font server. I ran 'chkconfig xfs off' as soon as I installed 4.0 and I haven't looked back.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
- standard S3 support (LOTS of "business" PCs found in companies have S3 cards - the one i am writting this onto has a s3trio64v2)
:) and there is NO way i could have one X (matrox) and one text (hgafb) setup. X will blank the text console at startup.
:)
- mono / 1bpp framebuffer / hercules support. 3.9.x had it. It vanished beginning with 4.0.1.
- an option for "DO NOT blank the damn text console/tty you're starting on". I have at home a dualhead system (one matrox + one hercules
- extensive documentation
Other than that - it's K3Wl !
--
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
I would so love to use Darwin on my iBook with X support, along with gtk, gnome, gimp, fvwm2 and whatever else my heart desires...
but I took it off before because the X binaries for darwin only had static libraries & not dynamic (*.so ? I believe) libraries.
Can anyone say with some assurance that if I dl the X binaries for Darwin from xfree86's site or a mirror that it will have the dynamic libraries I need so much to compile just about anything of value?
>ATI is providing specs and paying VA Research(I believe) to develop open source drivers. NVidia has decided to keep their drivers closed source
so which card would be perfect to use with linux and some 3d apps like softimage in windows, maya on linux?
what is the difference on the hardware side and which chipset will be the better choice?
parasew's non-uber-geek blog
Similar setup here (GeForce2 MX with Peanut Linux distribution, I think it is based on Slackware), no success either. At least you got as far to install it correctly, from your post I assume you made X running (even unstable). :-/
I first tried to make it run with XFree86 3.3.6, but I gave up on that. Installed XFree 4.0.1, no success either: this night I'll try to integrate the NVidia binary drivers. Wish me luck
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
So when do this message pop up on /.? Just exactly when I'm leaving for my Xmas vacation, where the ONLY computer I'm gonna be able to use is the laptop. But now I don't have time to download XF4.0.2 since then I'd miss my plane.
Perfect timing as usual. :-)
- the Crazy Fraggle
After upgrading to XFree86 4.0, I tried playing quake 3, but the mouse didn't work. Disabling DGA, etc, did nothing. The mouse was still sporadic and unpredictable in nature. The game also played quite slow.
Is this fixed in the new version, and are there RPMs available?
Thanks.
- Mike Hughes
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Though I'm the first to bitch about /., it is fair to note that they used to get slammed very, very regularly for posting things too early and destroying servers before things could mirror. Whether or not they should have given you credit is one thing, but they should be commended for waiting up (one of the few things about /. that truly has improved over the years.)
IAAL,BIANLY
And as long as you don't switch OS, plan to use out of the ordinary (like 2.5 soon) kernel versions, and don't try to fit it into an Alpha or Mac.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I spent last night downloading XFree864 from CVS and compiling, now binaries are out! Well, I did it for anti-alias support anyway so no loss.
b le/freetype2-current.tar.gz
/usr/local
I'm writting this using KDE2's konqy fron CVS (also last night) with anti alias text and it looks great.
There is a real easy way (?) to set this up without applying patches to QT etc. A Simple HOWTO based on what I did is below HOWEVER, I have no idea if this is needed for the final 4.0.2 release.
Download, make and make install freetype2 from www.freetype.org, this should be a recent CVS checkout or snapshout, i used this: ftp://freetype.sourceforge.net/pub/freetype/unsta
Download X in source form, create the file:
xc/config/cf/host.def
To have this line:
#define Freetype2Dir
Make and install X with make World & make install.
Get an updated qt that contains the patches to use the new render, the easiest way to do this is to do a qt-copy checkout from kde's anon CVS. This already has the patches applied and a configure option to turn on render use.
Configure qt with:
./configure -xft -sm -gif -system-jpeg -no-opengl -no-g++-exceptions
make QT...... You now have a QT with render support, anything you compile against it will get anti-aliased text including the whole of KDE2.
Good luck!
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
Does anyone have a link to information about GTK and/or Gnome adding support for this?
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Why would I want a volcano delivered to my door?
Sorry for the AC post... (I never log in from work) I have a gf2 MX on a kt133 (abit kt7--it rocks!) and had some minor problems (something to do with the agpgart module) with the detonator install, but I got everything to work (none of these font problems). feel free to email me if you run into any probs: neo_phyter@sympatico.ca also: check http://www.evil3d.net/articles.shtml for a detonator howto that's specific to a couple of distributions (suse and mandrake). The folks at evil3d are very helpful and very nice-- Avatar played email tag with me for a couple of days while I tried to fumble my way through the install. Allan
Wow! So you agree!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
There's a file you can edit to change this, however I can't quite remember what it is as my Slackware machine doesn't have it.
/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc. I just tweaked it myself.
I think its either
/etc/X11/xdm/serverrc
or
/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc
probably the first one, I'm pretty sure its xserverrc though
I don't know how different the distros are, but on Debian it's located in
If you're only going to use the 75 dpi fonts on Debian, you may want to deinstall the xfonts-100dpi package, and put it on hold so that apt-get doesn't download newer versions of it as well. (This is how I was preventing the 100 dpi fonts from showing up previously...)
An easy way to hold packages in general:
# dpkg --get-selections > installed.txt
This will dump a list of all of the packages and their status (install, deinstall or hold; purged packages don't show up on the list). Edit the list with your favorite text editor, replacing "deinstall" or "install" with "hold" and then:
# dpkg --set-selections < installed.txt
Jay (=
XFree86 4.0.1 crashes about 75% of the time when I try to suspend my laptop. (Dell Inspiron 4000, ATI Mobile Rage128) I have heard this is a known problem -- does anyone know if a fix has been found for XFree 4.0.2? I see no mention of this in the release notes...
Chris