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.

Comments

Enlightenment -- fast?

[ajs]

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.

Re:Enlightenment -- fast?

[Surak]

So, the idea is that Enlightenment will be fast because the tons of junk that it does will be hardware-accelerated?

It seems like they are saying that Enlightenment will be faster because it will specifically coded for the accelerated X server.

I still kinda doubt it. Just because something's hardware accelerated, it doesn't mean that it will be fastest necessarily. Enlightment just has too much JUNK in it...it tries to do EVERYTHING...its a victim of rampant featuritis, or at least freeping creaturism.

Re:Enlightenment -- fast?

[SCHecklerX]

Exactly.

What I think is humorous is Raster's minimum requirements for EFM. PII-300, 96Mb of Ram, accelerated X server...For a FILE MANAGER???

of course, Konqueror and GMC are just as bloated, and none of them are very functional when it comes to OO behavior (just because it's Drag Drop, doesn't mean it's good...I wanna be able to move something a link points to and have the link KNOW about it, dammit!!! ... think WPS).

Here's one that's fast and nice though, even if not perfect, it's the best Filemanager for X at the moment IMHO:

http://rox.sourceforge.net

Re:Enlightenment -- fast?

[Error27]

You must have misread the article.

It's not talking about a specific X server, it's talking about a different canvas library that uses OpenGL graphics acceleration.

>>Enlightment just has too much JUNK in it...it tries to do EVERYTHING...its a victim of rampant featuritis, or at least freeping creaturism.

I believe that the new version of enlightenment is a complete rewrite. Have you looked at the new source code?

Or on the other hand, your coment about "it tries to do EVERYTHING" may not have to do with code at all but is based on a misconception that adding features is the same thing as adding complexity to the code. This doesn't have to be true with a flexible design.

It is wrong/imposible to describe a program as "a victim of rampant featuritis" without looking at the code. Users don't look at software and say, "This software is too powerfull and flexible for me" (They may say that the interface is overwhelming or unintuitive, but that's not the same thing as featuritis).

Thus a program may indeed "do EVERYTHING" without having featuritis if the code is clean.

desktop

[Kyobu]

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.

What hardware?

[Mike Hicks]

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?
--

Debs for E17

[heikkih]

... 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 and have no speed issues

[ry4an]

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?
--

Slower Systems

[Hrunting]

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?

Re:Windows vs. XFree86 & WM's

[drig]

X uses the same hardware acceleration that windows does. For instance, most modern video cards can draw basic primitives (like squares, lines, etc), and copy portions of the screen in hardware. X will use all of this. It's called the X11 Acceleration Architecture (XAA). /var/log/xdm.errors should show if you have XAA installed and working. Raster's software will use acceleration no one else does. For instance, using 3D acceleration to do pixmap resizing and alpha blending. Basically, rasterman is finding areas that could be used to speed up enlightenment that other people havne't thought of yet.

Re:Enlightenment's backdrop config

[Richy_T]

go Amiga!

I think it's already gone ;)

Rich