Slashdot Mirror
Rasterman's New Toy: EVAS
renai42 writes: "Rasterman gave a very interesting speech about his new EVAS canvas software at Linux.conf.au this week. This LinuxToday.com.au article gives a fair idea of the gist of the speech. EVAS is interesting stuff for the Linux community - a hardware accelerated X desktop with anti-aliased fonts and alpha blending." They've been claiming that the next Enlightenment will be the fastest WM around thanks mostly to EVAS.
Totally Offtopic Side Note 1: I find it amusing that LinuxToday.com.au snatched my X icon: I always thought it was probably the crappiest Slashdot icon, and I never dreamed anyone would want to take it. My policy on Slashdot Icons has always been steal whatever ones you like, but credit us when you use 'em, and its not a big deal, but its just funny to see who takes what.)
Totally offtopic sidenote 2: while we're talking about toys, check out Jubei, my MAME front end I've been poking on in my enormous amounts of free time.
Finally, just what I need. An HW accelerated desktop. Does this mean I don't need to compile 3 seperate packages just to play a game?
Lousy facepalm.
Later i met saw(fish/mill) and forgot about my experience with enlightenment.
If ever enlightenment gets faster i will happily switch back! (By the way i have to check it again now my machine has 192M ram as it had 64M before)...
Thanx rasterman keep good work!
So, the idea is that Enlightenment will be fast because the tons of junk that it does will be hardware-accelerated? Wouldn't it be logical, then to assume that all of the other window managers out there that are faster than Enlightenment (Sawfish, fvwm{,2}, twm, etc, etc,) will be even faster than Enlightenment given the same hardware acceleration?
Sawfish seems to me to be about 2-10 times faster (purely subjective) than Enlightenment. Can that gap be bridged by hardware? Of course, but it still doesn't make E efficient.
How does this relate to Keith Packard's new X Render extension, which so recently gave Qt/KDE antialiased fonts ?
Choice of masters is not freedom.
One thing people forget when comparing the speed of a windows GUI and Linux WM's is hardware acceleration. Even back in the day of Windows 3.x, hardware manufactures (like Orchid, remember those cards?) built hardware accelerators for windows.
This being said, I think that XFree86 has some (minor?) performance issues when compared to Windows, but if use of hardware acceleration is introduced, at least we can compare the speed on an equal playing field.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Great idea! Should make portability easier! Too bad we're still far from 1.0. Meanwhile, I'll use GLUI... (Wonder why that one didn't catch on?)
Just wondering, you linux guys using a GUI... you don't have that yet in any packages? each and every time I used linux I only used it as a shell. I'm wondering, I thought when you had drivers that worked for X, the hardware features would work as well (3d, antialiasing, etc) no?
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Maybe their next version will be better than 0.16 in this regard, but aside from speed, one of the things I really don't like about E is its desire to controll all aspects of my life. For instance, its background selector is very ungainly, but it wants to use it instead of using the perfectly-good Gnome Control Center. And so on. I see no need to replace Gnome, when it's pretty good already and E is mostly reproducing its capabilities, but prettier.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
Am I the only person who, on seeing the subject line:
Rasterman's New Toy: EVAS
Thought that Rasterman had gone out and picked up some of those oh-so-cool Evangelion figures?
You didn't read the speach, did you? Nor, apparently, did you even read the full Slashdot intro that was given... If you had, you would have realized that this is simply a desktop for X, not a whole new windowing system.
Ranessin
I'm glad to hear that the project is still alive and doing so well and that this issue is being resolved. He's always been very passionate about E and no matter what window manager you use, you have to appreciate this kind of enthusiasm he has for his project. It's this kind of attitude that helps to continually drive the whole Linux community forward.
--It's Pimptastic!--
And of course, other than just for the sake of shear beauty, using 3D accellerators to draw interfaces makes perfect sense. Most companies that make accellerated cards put a LOT more effort and design consideration into the accellerators, but not so much into the 2D accelleration. As a result, 3D graphics are rendered more quickly on just about all cards. Let's use that power for more than just games! :-)
I wouldn't be surprised if the crud, caused by the PC arch insistance to separate text mode from gfx mode - go Amiga!, which X has were removed, E could fly, though it would be further outrun by blackbox, uwm, and others.
I've experienced various ranges of performance between E and Sawfish. I've had E beat Sawfish at theme changes and window operations sometimes.
What I can't stand is the Gnome Background Config.
Why is everyone so bloody afraid of heirarchial structures? I love being able to install a symlink to wherever Propaganda.debs choose to install themselves and have it all be reflected in a menu without a lot of fuss. Face it traditional config GUIs make you do more work.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
EVAS and Jubei? Is this '*nix apps named after anime characters' day? ;)
Annnnyways...I had been wondering when someone was gonna use OpenGL
acceleration to render stuff in X... The idea has popped up in more than one
cofeeshop discussion between me and my friends, but no one
ever had the mad X hacking skillz to do it.
Way to go Raster!
--K
Uh, unless I'm mistaken, OS X doesn't use OpenGL acceleration for its interface. I know it supports OpenGL for 3D apps, and it probably uses 2D acceleration when rendering the UI.
Some people around here probably don't remember Enlightment as I remember. Enlightment was the ONLY decent-looking window manager for Linux back when Gnome and KDE didn't exist. I remember looking at screenshots of E running.. Enlightement was probably THE reason I started using Linux.
It wasn't a perfect window manager (and nobody claimed it was since it's still labeled as devel) but it kicked ass back in the early Windows 95 days.. I was so happy when I compiled Enlightement and could take a break for the bleak FVWM.
Why do I keep typing pythong?
...until you check the system requirements: The Lance of Longinus, an affectless fourteen-year-old albino Japanese clone girl, and Your Dead Mother. C'mon, how many people have actually have that kind of setup?
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
And windows can't move this way when not 2D accelerated. Just try out XFree on MacOS X, which does not support it.
The catch is: it only works with ATI's cards.
1) Write a library of good-looking, wickedly fast GUI widgets using the EVAS API (rip some code from Gtk to get this going quickly)
2) Invent a high-level network protocol for creating, manipulating, and responding to events on these widgets. Heck, write one on top of CORBA if you must. Now client applications will connect directly to Enlightenment and build GUI interfaces using its facilities.
3) Give Enlightenment direct access to input devices through a library like SDL
4) Finally, RM -RF THAT CRUFTY PIECE OF JUNK CALLED X11!
Please, Rasterman, realize that this technology won't just enable window managers to have fast eye-candy. It could form the basis for a completely independent, hardware-accelerated display server (not even OSX's Quartz is hardware-accelerated yet)! By managing and rendering widgets at the server, you will blow Windows, OSX, etc out of the water performance-wise, and keep X11-style network transparency!
Uhm. He just said "MacOS X doesn't support GL acceleration" and you replied with "Yes Quake3 does!".
Notice the difference?
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
I see that this is available at Sourceforge.. I downloaded the RPMs, and I noticed that they wanted libGLcore.so.1, which appears to be an X module for the NVidia X servers. The stock XFree86 4.0.x servers come with a similar file libGLcore.a .
Anyway, I'm just wondering -- does this mean that this EVAS stuff only works with NVidia cards? Is there any chance I'll get it to work with my G400?
--
Nice to see portable, machine independent interfaces (X) replaced with non-portable, machine-dependent ones (svgalib, EVAS).
Not.
One more proof that Linux != Unix.
- Hubert (Unix lover)
The themes that come with Debian are pleasing to the eye, and the WM seems easy to use. However, I do miss the right-mouse-button Lower feature (to send a window to the back) which FVWM supports.
But at least Windows users don't accuse my desktop of being "dull" any more
To broaden the appeal of Linux, it needs more work on this sort of thing. However, I think Linux is an awful long way from being a "consumer level" OS like Windows. Having just upgraded my system with the latest Debian, the installation leaves a lot to be desired when compared with Windows. Fortunately, I almost know what I'm doing when it comes to Linux (having first started with Linux when it was kernel 0.12!), so it wasn't a big deal for me to install Deb, but I can't imagine most of my friends (who are not in software development) installing it without my (or some other Linux aware person's) help.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I think you might mean windows 2000 instead of OSX.
a google search of OSX and opengl doesn't produce anything interesting. And Apple is fairly good about issueing press releases if they do something new. I've heard that the new interface for apple is pretty and that it's slick but I haven't heard too much about it being fast.
Anyways, your logic is a little bit screwy about using 3d acceleration to speed up 2d. Because if you could do that then 3d acceleration would be called 3d and 2d acceleration. Perhaps you are associating OpenGL with 3d only instead of 2d? But OpenGL can be used to accelerate 2d also if you add the following line (and one or two others) to your code.
gluOrtho2D(0, EzWinWidth , 0, EzWinHieght);
I think Berlin would have a serious chance if it was able to run X apps. Given that it currently can't, adoption is just not going to be widespread.
Yay, next great thing is happening... wait it is not, rasterman somehow forgot about whole network transparency with X... Your applications ran on the other host will not bring up the EVAS on yourscreen. Rasterman beangered GNOME development team with his hacky programming that only he can understand, and now he is at it again. Why wouldn't he just work with framebuffer? The direction X programming on Linux going, is to ditch XLib altogether, because it is slowing whole eyecandy enabling process for rasterman-likes, so they just communicate directly with GLlib, which in turn calls extended XServer directly without marshalizing calls into datastream... how sad.
... and then I suggest all debian/E-users head over to ljlane's debian repository to check out the stuff :)
Figure out there how to get it apt-able.
heikkih
-------
I run E on a P233 w/ 96Megs ram, a reasonably busy theme, and a $20 video card and have never had speed issues. I've tried other WMs and haven't noticed anything drawing or responding faster. What's the speed problems I'm always hearing talk of?
--
Give it up, Moe's better at this, and he's a cartoon.... Listen to me, you; when I catch you, I'm gonna pull out your eyes with a corkscrew and stick 'em down your pants, so you can watch me kick the crap outta you, then I'm going to shove a sausage down your throat and stick starving dogs in your butt! okay? Oh yea, then I'm gonna use your tongue to paint my boat. http://www.snpp.com/guides/moe_calls.html
Mommy. What's a karma whore?
Evas is more than just a toy, and it's also goes beyond hardware acceleration. It's rendering backends allow for the ability to transparently shift between OpenGL, Imlib2 and plain X rendering - this provides great scalbility. It also means that those machines that can only do software opengl rendering dont get bogged down by Mesa - but use Imlib2 (which is alot faster) - or for those machines that wish to use just X's rendering can use that. It basically means that people like myself that has a graphics card with blisteringly good perfomance can use it - rather than it sit there wasted. Even people with G400's have had great performance (even more so since raster re-wrote the GL engine). And no. This doesn't mean E will have transparent menus as they are still a PITA to have properly.
---
boris at darkrock dot co dot uk
chris at darkrock dot co dot uk
http colon slash slash www dot darkrock dot co dot uk
A lot of people out there (me included) run Linux on much older computers (in my case a p120). WMs like WindowMaker and BlackBox run perfectly acceptable on these systems. Will hardware accelerating Enlightenment perhaps give a ray of hope to those of us with slower cards, or will even not pushing all that graphics work into the video card not help us?
As a sidenote, what kind of graphics cards are we looking at here? Anything that has an accelerated X server (like, say, an old Mach64) or are we only talking high-end cards?
I agree. Max os X interface is better. Period. Perhaps it does not use open-gl but surely it uses 3d feature of cards like z buffer alpha blendins anti alias. 3d is not only for games but also for apps. 2d is not dead. They can improve it
Correct, It utilizes a thing Apple calls Quartz which is a PDF based imaging system. It is vector based imaging system... which mean you can blend, scale, rotate, etc. and the images are rendered at the optimum resolution for the device it is displaying on (this includes things like printers).
Granted not all of the OS currently utilizes this ability to its fullest but as video and processing systems get better it will be leveraged more and more.
A nice thing about Quartz is you utilize its interfaces and its core can be ported to utilize 2D or SIMD acceleration behind your back. This is what Apple has done for the Velocity Engine in the PowerPC G4 (74x0).
It is fast!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
You know, the thing that bothers me about rxvt though is that there's no way I've seen to resize the damned thing. You have to open another window with a different font size. With xterm it's easy to go from tiny to huge, reset the console, etc. Plus, xterm seems just as fast as rxvt on my modest system (piii-733).
--
Oh, yay, and I suppose there's a nice, included PDF viewer that uses Display PDF to view PDF files, then. What happens when you open a corrupt PDF file?
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Let's see if I have this straight:
EVAS is an API or library that allows for the WM, in this case E, to utilize hardware accelerated OpenGL hardware, not just the standard 2d raster stuff found on most video cards, right?
Does this mean E will only work on NVIDIA and 3dfx hardware, under Linux? I've heard other people mention this too.
Is this canvas software, EVAs, akin to Apple's DisplayPDF layer? Will it eventually mature into a display layer that sits between the hardware and the WM? I'm curious if Apple was an inspiration, or not.
Or is it literally just a wrapper around OpenGL? Instead of calling a 2d api, it just remaps to an equiv 3d function call to get the alpha blending and scaling?
If this is literally in it's infancy, maybe a long term design plan to create a Quartz type API would be nice.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Can you please explain where all this contempt for Raster comes from? I've read nasty-ish remarks on E and the man himself on ./ and the linuxtoday page. Quite frankly I cant' understand the reason so many peole can't stand him! I use wm and kde2 most often (I cant' get to terms with moving the mouse at 90 turns) but I'm not bashing the chap. If some dude instead of whipping him with a trout had written a coolish 'point & click' prefs setting I bet the masses wouldn't be so hard! Or is it because he left RH slamming the door?
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Maybe because it's not OSX but "OS X" :-) Anyway, OS X definately uses OpenGL. Just take a look here
Yes, efm had transparent menus. I enjoy them a lot, since I've been using efm as my desktop for something like 8 months now. However they were deemed too slow to add to E17.
(why the hell are you talking about MAME in an article about E)
Wow, i just rean the evas_test and this is VERY pretty. It'll be interesting to see how they pull this off... it's definatly apparent that there is almost no optimized code, my P2 350 with a TNT2 varied between 770fps to 3fps on the demo depending on what was on the screen. I had switched to sawfish a while back because E was so slow... maybe this will be my reason for switching back to E.
- "Never let a computer tell me shit." - DelTron Zero
In modern versions of (stable) GNOME the toolbar is ultra-configurable. It can be a tiny 12 pixels if you so desire.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Mac osX does use open gl and Apple got help from Alias|Wavefront (make Maya and Studio, owned by SGI)
from the apple website: Apple has also integrated OpenGL -- the blisteringhot 3D technology used by games like Quake 3Arena from id Software, and heavy-duty authoring tools like Maya from Alias/Wavefront -- into Mac OS X. And the state-of-the-art plumbing in Darwin actually boosts OpenGL's performance to a whole new level on Mac OS X, making it the ultimate PC platform for 3D games and eye-popping photorealistic graphics
From what I understand. you can make 3d acceleration speed up 2d by simply making the desktop a 3d object (or series of) that is viewed straight on.
3d isnt all perspective and volumetric fog
although E. with fog might be fun, Cataract simulator anyone??????
----
Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
-------
Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
It seems to me that since everybody is crapping themselves over the idea of anti-aliased fonts, Raster just went and said "you know all that good stuff that you want? I'll give it to you (someday)."
If you look at the facts, Enlightenment, while arguable the most visually attractive (not necessarily clean and/or easy to use) of the available window managers, is huge and clunky. Optimization and efficiency is often left by the wayside in order to just put out a hack that works.
Come on, this is the Linux community! <stereotype>We're fascist when it comes to processor and memory usage! We put away all things shiny for the power our OS allows us!</stereotype>
There are other, cleaner WMs out there, and without the eye candy are by far a nicer product. Even Blackbox has its appeal (and would be my personal preference). Simplicity in design and ease of use can override the power of eye candy, in my eyes, any day.
I'm sorry, I think we were fed a bunch of buzzwords, will get to grope at vapourware for a long time, and we're expected to just smile and nod at the prospect of something new.
Oh yes, we want those things. But first make Enlightenment work like a Linux app is supposed to--cleanly, and efficiently.
...is not what stuff like EVAS and Enlightenment and Gnome and KDE are at all about. When your machine requires more resources to make pretty screenshots than it does to do anything actually useful, you're heading down the wrong path.
Fortunately, the brilliant thing about open source is that you're not stuck running this bloatware because someone says you have to. You can happily install the bits and pieces you want and make your desktop anything you like (or just run console and not have one at all).
Thanks.
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Well, it'd be nice to be able to use this kind of thing on FreeBSD, but unfortunately, I have an nvidia geforce2 mx based bored, for which openGL isn't supported under FreeBSD. Damn nVidia, release the drivers' source!!!
Shouldn't all these folks shoehorning accelerated antialiased scalable whojumajigits into WMs more rightly be working on adding it to the X side of the equation? I don't really care all that much if KDE or Gnome or Enlightenment adds somesuch thing because it'll only affect apps written to that desktop environment. When I can get a cross-DE app that does these things regardless of DEs I have installed, then I'll get excited.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I get the same impressions and have the same questions about EVAS, but my take on it is "Fair enough..."
These days, XFree is providing an OpenGL interface, and as long as this interface is hardware independent (I believe that XFree 4.x can software render OpenGL if you don't use accelerated hardware), and if some WM designer wants to try using OpenGL calls directly to draw on his "canvas" and obtains a speedup, then go-on, push that envelope. After all, generally speaking, the WM owns the desktop - How it draws on it is not for the user to worry about.
On the other hand, if what's being done really is that "simple", then I wouldn't call it a product, just a feature. If it subsequently is released as an API/library that other WMs can use to gain the same benefits, THEN it's an application.
--
Enjoy Y2K? Roll-on Year 2037!
I always enjoy coding with Rasterman's libraries. They are not done the Proper Way(tm) - they are better.
Everyone has been told massive amounts of global variables are poor style. Everyone except Rasterman. Current color? Current drawing surface? Font to use? Dithering? All globals. It makes his code clear and efficient, and just as important, it eliminates all of those normally unused paramaters from functions that make code ugly and interfaces difficult to remember.
So what if a lot would have to change to make his code thread safe. He prefers to use one thread for graphics stuff anyway, and he doesn't make sacrifices people who don't.
What I am trying to say, is that we have general coding rules. Like no globals, because stuff like thread safety is lost and have different people design different parts becomes error prone. But he knows he doesn't care about thread safety, and he is the only person writing the library, so he violates the general rule. And his libraries are better for it. Evas is no exception.
-Ben
...and yes, it is that cool. I checked out the cvs version about three weeks ago, looked at the demo application and was very impressed.
EVAS has three modes for rendering: Hardware Accellerated using OpenGL, Software only using various X windows extensions to speed things up, and X lib only for compatiblility with the lowest common denominator.
I'm away from my linux box right now, so the next paragraph is from memory, and by now raster might have added more features and speed.
The EVAS demo I looked at showed off all the features of evas like anitaliased text, alpha blending, image scaling, and so forth. When in Hardware mode, I was able to get around 80 FPS on my system with a Pentium 2 350 and a tnt 2 ultra (by todays standards, this is not an impressive system), in software mode the speed dropped to arounf 20 fps (comparable to the other canvases ive seen), xlib mode was slower, and the image quality was horrible, but the point of xlib mode is not for speed or quality but compatiblity.
Raster's plan is to use EVAS to accelerate E 17 and EFM (Enlightenment's intergrated file manager). With hardware acelleration, E 17 shoud slimply rock.
What I would like to see now, is for evas to be incorporated into other canvases, like the gnome canvas, whatever kde's canvas is, and java 2d. That would rock even more.
--
A buddhist walks up to a hot dog stand and says ``Make me one with everything.''
Yes, there is an included PDF viewer, although it appears to only support a subset of PDF (some files just appear as a bunch of boxes). As for corrupt PDFs, feel free to send me one and I'll let you know what happens. :-)
Enlightenment rocks. There's nothing else that comes close to it's visual
splendor or ease of use. I truely feel 'at home' on an Enlightenment
desktop - something I can't say for the more clumsy Gnome & KDE desktops.
And I've seen some posts above about E & Esound being incomplete & buggy.
Guys: grow up & troll elsewhere. E is ROCK SOLID. If it EVER crashes, it
gives you the option of restarting, without loosing ANYTHING you're working
on. Brilliant. And as for Esound - I use it all the time I haven't haven't
noticed any probs / performance issues. I run a 500Mhz Athlon - not exactly
top-of-the-range any more... I think the people whinging about E's speed are
hippies with 486s who expect Playstation 2-like graphics to magically emerge
from their junk-heaps. Ain't gonna happen guys.
So enough whinging about whingers.
Crank on Rasterman! It's good to see someone with such a passion doing so
much for the Linux world (man you make my desktop sweet!).
People pirate Windows 2000 every day.
So to answer your question: Yes.
Totally Offtopic Side Note 1: I find it amusing that LinuxToday.com.au snatched my X icon: I always thought it was probably the crappiest Slashdot icon, and I never dreamed anyone would want to take it. (...)
;)
Hey! the crappiest Slashdot icon used to be the WINE icon. I was going to post a comment about that, but I first checked that it still wasn't changed.
And guess what? It is!!!
What a beautiful day !
Stéphane
Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
This is so freaking cool! This is just the type of thing that Linux needs to become better than Windows in every possible way. EVAS is A) Fast. We (I anyway) all love speed, don't we? B) Has anti-aliased text! I haven't gotten Render to work yet (as I don't have a Matrox card) but I *DO* have an NVIDIA card, and from my POV, going through OpenGL is a much better way to integrate Render's features without yet another driver API. C) Alpha blending? Compositing functions? Am I dreaming? I hope not! I think that if the XFree guys keep hacking away at X (another couple of releases with jump as a big as 4.0, and X might get halfway to mediocre) and NVIDIA keeps churning out new Detonator releases, and the LibArt guys find a way to integrate with EVAS (yea, I know it's asking a lot, but everything is there, and it is wholly in the realm of possibility) then Quartz may not be the sexiest windowing environment around anymore. If EVAS takes off, I might even load Linux back on my system, and that is quite high praise indeed. PS> I know I'm dilusional and self-important, live with it ;)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
fuk'n whinge, whinge.
How long did it take YOU to code YOUR window manager? No wonder you posted as a COWARD!
Last time I looked (5 minutes ago) Berlin seems to be tied to Linux via the GGI. That is a problem if you don't run Linux.
From what info I see on here, EVAS isn't, as long as you have the needed X extensions.
OS X uses OpenGL, but not to accelerate Quartz. What it does is allow GL in Quartz views. Quartz itself, is software rendered PDF. (Now if they *did* hardware render it, I'd have an excuse to buy a G4...)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Easy to say from behind an Anonymous moniker, the rest of us have phalluses, and they have names!
--- What
So.
When will it be ready(TM)
I downloaded E17 from CVS the other night and got a screen with a big E (anything with a big E can't be that bad...) in the top left corner. Minimise & Maximise doesn't work yet, you can't switch desktops, there's no pager, I can't work out how to add entries to the empty menus. So I take it it's not ready.
So.
When?
Please.
Thankyou.
Dan
PS Keep up the great work Rasterman!
Instead of looking for /var/log/xdm.errors (which may not exist) try this at the command prompt:
/var/log/XFree*
$ grep XAA
That should spit out something like Using XFree86 Acceleration Architecture (XAA) if you have it installed.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
Jonathan Moran
Oink, Oink!!
Since when?
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
NOT
/. experience than the average linux user (as opposed to programmer) you can make yourself look ever so smart and more cool than Rasterman.
/.)
Anyone can be a critic. Even a complete moron. With a little more technical knowledge and
Your not.
Somewhere down in the hidden depths of your ego you know it too. No amount of clever replies to this post will change that.
Enlightenment may not be perfect, it may be far from perfect, but it is far more impressive than anything I, or the vast majority of the critics, will ever create.
Rasterman (from what I have read of him) couldn't do what he wanted to with X and so with pretty much no formal training went ahead and created a solution. (instead of harping on about how "I can't do nananana or nanananana in X" on
It might not be an elegant or ideal solution, but it just about works. You might be able to do all the things E does better in GNOME,sawmill,(insert whatever Holy Grail WM or DE you like to bang on about to demonstrate your intelectual superiority here) but pound to a penny you could probably do it in E FIRST.
I notice that the only comments in this thread that I remember reading from people with any real experience in programming WM's were from people working on Enlightenment.
If you critics are such kick ass programmers and could do a better job than Rasterman then prove it, take the code and rewrite it 'properly'
My guess is that none of you have the balls to stick your necks out in the public arena and risk suffering the sort of abuse and criticism that you are directing at Rasterman for fear that your fragile egos would collapse.
As to all that 'All this eye candy gets in the way of productivity and wastes system resources' nonsense, use the Terminal.
Almost every task can be performed from the Terminal. The purpose of 'eye candy' is to make control easier and the visual experience more pleasurable (its easier to work if whats on the screen doesn't make your eyes throb and your brain ache). I believe an alternative description of 'eye candy' is GUI.
Every succesive generation of GUI has better and more user configurable 'eye candy' and Enlightenment is consistantly on the cutting edge. Everything that you consider 'feature bloat' or 'unproductive' now will be commonplace in two years.
EVAS is a great idea. It may not be done 'properly' but Rasterman will make it work before anyone else does anything similar.
And in two years time you'll all have hardware accelerated desktops and be criticising Rasterman's next innovation because the GL acceleration in E isn't done 'properly'
(almost)Total Newbie, please post comments regarding content rather than childish remarks about spelling/grammer/formatting/nettiquete
Trust The Computer, The Computer is your friend.
A company called Skinux is developing an eponymously named GUI for Linux that features anti-aliased fonts, alpha compositing, arbitrary transforms, etc. There's a
screenshot up, and you can browse their site for more info.
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
humph, don't know about HIS window manager, but mine,
at least the last one that I wrote, took about six months.
That was a tad over 8 years ago and the WM was a 'clone' of OS2's Presentation Manager that ran on 80386 hardware. It would have been quicker, but I was also writing an application to capture and process 16Khz seismic signals on a custom built add in board based around the Texas Instruments C30 DSP chip.
How long did your WM take to write ?
This is most exciting because we can use it to develop a really super kick-ass XDM replacement, or so I hope. The easiest way to get the largest group of people able to develop new login screens for it would probably to combine XDM-EVAS (for lack of a better name) with the flash player. Then you could develop flash movies with special properties which would handle gathering login name and password. Just be careful about bounds checking, eh? :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In the summer of 1999, we released Synapse, an OpenGL-based GUI for Linux.
We got pretty far - Synapse has support for TrueType fonts (via freetype), a complete set of controls (buttons, scrollbars, progress bars, windows, etc.), support for multiple applications running simultaneously (without CORBA), anti-aliasing support (with the right video card), and multicontext rendering (applications can call GL functions directly). We wrote a couple of sample applications: a Macintosh Finder-like file browser, and a text editor. We also received a sound mixer/volume control applet (which uses scroll bars because sliders haven't been implemented yet).
Synapse was released binary-only, so no one paid attention to us. We couldn't release the source code to it until conditions changed later that year (it has been available under the GPL since October 1999).
Our chief mistake was in billing it as a 3D GUI. I thought the 3D aspect would make it more popular.
Perhaps it would be more widely used today had we kept the camera locked, and had the ability to distribute it under an open license.
Even though Synapse hasn't been under active development since 1999, I'd like to pick up where I left off. Send me an email (or reply to this post) if you're interested in using Synapse or helping out with this.
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
1. Enlightenment is slow 'cause a lot of people run gnome with it, and they're two quite big applications. Sawmill is a much better window manager for gnome.
2. EVAS - Anyone who watches good anime (even taco at least has the sense to watch NGE) would know that EVA's are the biomecha from the great Anime: "Neon Genesis Evangelion"
--
Laptop006 (RHCE: That means I know what I'm talking about! When talking about linux at least...)
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
You haven't got half the clue your namesake had during his time.
3D and 2D are separate fields of coding. Not one thing in one field could improve the performance of the other.
First they focus on completely different things.
2D is focused on quickly clearing and replacing a flat array of pixels or filling a line of pixels quickly to draw the common rubberband selection tool.
3D is focused on calculating the color values that will go there. This involves calculus geometry and trigonometry as well.
One is the backbone the other the final picture.
You can't mix performance anymore than you could compare apples and oranges. You can't just move it from one place to another.
Second using 3D circuits for 2D is going to end in a disaster. It could even produce slower performance. In 3D you have a starting graphic which you then rotate and work with within certain approximations.
That's fine for window animations. In 2D however every pixel counts because every pixel will sometime be in a word written on a button or checkbox. You can rotate a picture and lose very little but something as precise as typed text will easily become unreadable.
It's like trying to add using a multiplier circuit.
That's all there is to 3D really.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
That's because most people including yourself couldn't tell Pokemon from Disney's Fantasia (the original) or Grave of Flies (Animated story about WWII) from Power Rangers (which isn't animated).
Evangelion happens to be the hardest hitting animated drama yet made. It would be even without the classical music soundtrack (Symphony #9, Jesus Bleibet Meine Freunde, Air on a G string, and some of Shiro Sagisu's original compositions).
Oh and here's a freebie, Harry Potter seems to be in the same category.
But feel free to walk with your head up your ass I won't stop you.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
So what *is* EVAS? I take it it is not replacing X? But instead some intermediate library between the application and X? Is this correct?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
> Err, actually you've got it backwards. E predated Gnome, and in most instances where they overlap, it
> is Gnome that duplicated a feature that was in E ( or any other WM).
Chronicologically you are correct, but in the order of installation it doesn't happen that way. If Gnome or KDE is installed, then the Window Manager that works with them duplicating, or worse, overriding, their features it unpleasant. I understand that it's extra work to remove the stuff that was a lot of work to put in, but that doesn't change the fact that the stuff makes it less useful as a window manager.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Perhaps you forget, but Rasterman actually gets paid to develop Enlightenment. If I was his boss I would have told him long ago to get something finished or get out.
And where the hell do you get the idea that people are only allowed to complain about things if they themselves are actively working on something like that? I paid for a boxed RedHat. If you pay for a car, do you feel that you're only allowed to whinge if the doors fall if if you yourself build cars? If you pay taxes to the government so that they can build roads, and the roads are full of potholes, do you only have the right to complain about it if you yourself help build roads? If you pay taxes to the government for decent schooling for you children, are you only allowed to complain if their schooling sucks if you yourself are helping to build schools? Don't be ridiculous. Get real. I don't have to write wm's to have a right to call other wm's as I see them.
What most people don't seem to understand is that E is meant to be run *without* Gnome. You can add Gnome to it, but it's designed to be a "graphical shell" in itself, so relying on Gnome for bacground management would go against this goal.
So, having a background selector is a good idea for people like me who don't use Gnome (I use a P133, so Gnome is a bit slow). The background selector is there for people who use E by itself, the way it was intended, so it *shouldn't* be removed at all.
hi troll
I never claimed that rxvt was userfriendly or intuitive. Really this issue with rxvt has nothing to do with the "user friendliness of Unix". If you want a gui menu use xterm or the KDE, GNOME, or E equivalent. My response "read the man page" was because I do not know what the key sequence to change fonts is, but I know that it is documented.
Rxvt does not have a gui menu to save ram. The author wanted a small xterm like app that would use as little ram as possible. If you were a user that did not have the same goals as the author, you could use something other then rxvt. User friendly is really an abused idea. What your grandmother finds easy to use is probably not want I would want to use. The features and behieviour I expect in a program (and hence its level of user friendliness) are not always the featuers that others expect. This is one of the reasons I don't find WinXX user friendly: it dosen't have a good shell, or non-click mouse focus.