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Matrox Releases G series X config tool
Deven Phillips writes: "Matrox has released a GUI based configuration tool for Matrox cards. It has the ability to set up Dual-Head, TV out, and Digital Flat Panel configurations. It also configures all of the resolution modes for XFree86 4.0.[2|3]. I have tried it, and it works with or without the Matrox supplied drivers, but you can't switch on the fly with the XFree drivers."
Oh, just for fun, comment out lines 1485-1493 of the source code file callbacks.c - It's amazing how much that improves the compatibility of this software.
"Editing a configuration file" is a big no-no if you want ordinary people like your OS/GUI system.
It's the same problem with all Unices. I recently installed Sparc Solaris 8 on my Sun Blade and spent hours trying to figure out how to set the X resolution. I still don't know exactly how I finally managed to get it to 1280x1024.
And why replace it exactly?
Do you have any other enviroment which supports compatibility with X? stuff like Xlib, DGA(1,2), Xv, DRI, GLX (for Nvidia), the new Renderer and RandR perhaps? what about transparent network so you can see your apps in some other place? no, ha?
Yes, if you do remember XFree 3.3.x it was very sucky sucky shitty shitty - but since then - XFree 4.x came out, you can see all the extensions I mentioned above came mostly when XFree 4.x came out.
It's constantly being developed. Geniuses people like Mark Vojkovich and Keith Packard, as many other people are helping X to keep being develop to any modern graphical enviroment.
So no, I don't think Frame buffer, nor Berlin project could make it and replace X. I still belive that X is coming into maturity and it will give you in short time what others giving today (look at the latest Rendered and RandR extensions lately and see what I mean)
Hetz (Heunique)
Yes, some of the stuff on the drivers are closed source - but only the part which gives you dual head, and the TV out stuff, and the Macrovision part is closed also..
They cannot release the source code since most of those parts are either belong to 3rd party, or NDA signature prevents from showing the code (E.G - Macrovision)...
You'll have to decide what you want - either some close parts of the driver and 95% opened under GPL - or totally not support?
I'll go with choise 1
Hetz (Heunique)
Of course in windows you don't have to reboot to do that.
And I only reboot windows 98 maybe once a week. Win2k maybe once a month.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That's not very useful, as it only changes the physical monitor resolution, and does not correct the size of the desktop appropriately. When I change from a 800x600 desktop taking up my entire screen to a 1024x768 desktop, I don't want the new desktop taking up only a little box in the middle of the screen. And when I change back down to 640x480 I don't want it taking up twice the screen width so I have to scroll around.
I can do this in Windows from the taskbar, with no reboots or anything. Why can't I do it in X?
And I better not even start on changing color depths without restarting.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yes, but I'd argue that's a flaw with Oracle. Not that it has one, but that it forces you to use it. As of 8i release 3, they no longer support a text install. That's fine, except I've just had to try and install it on some Sun servers that don't have X. They're servers (y'know -- the sort of machines on which Oracle is designed to run), so they don't have X installed. I can't just remotely display the installer on my desktop, because the server doesn't even have the X libraries installed. Nor should it. X rocks, and the network transparency is invaluable, but Oracle is making a huuuge mistake by insisting on it being there. I'm seriously thinking about switching to DB2 or Informix (both now owned by IBM).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
- Konqueror TV. Finally browsing on a TV becomes viable. At 800x600 text is very reasonable and the screen is big enough for most webpages.
- Quake III. This really rocks!! If Loki keeps pumping out games there won't be need for a separate console, at least not in my house.
-adnans"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
manufacturers should and the hardware will probably have a longer usefull life. (long term support)
Heh, this is exactly the reason why I bought an NVidia card, believe it or not. I waited almost 2 years for Matrox to come out with quality 3D drivers for their hardware, but that still has not happened. The lasest mga DRI drivers are still flaky for me. However, I've had nothing but rock solid performance from the (closed source) NVidia drivers. The kernel parts of the NVidia driver are open source so upgrading to a new kernel requires a simple recompile of the NVdriver sources (running CVS 2.4.5-xfs right now, cutting edge). And if NVidia sucks, so does Matrox, since parts of their drivers are closed closed source too. IMHO right now NVidia provides the best video card support for Linux on x86 hardware and by hiring Mark Vojkovich and paying him to work on XFree it proves (to me) they are quite serious about Linux/XFree86.
My platform of choice is Linux/x86 (AMD), at least for the next year, and that's exactly the useful lifetime of my video hardware.
BTW, upgrading kernels is not a hassle at all. I have a nice script that is run after every kernel compile, pulls in the external modules effortlessly (bttv2, nvidia, alsa)
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
The RandR extension, which just made it into XFRee86 CVS will allow for just that. However applications must be modified slightly to take advantage of the Resize and Rotate extension. Actually they only need to respond to the X event that notifies the app that the root window has changed size (and possibly color depth). This shouldn't be too hard for well written apps. And chances are good that once support for this makes it into populair toolkits, applications written against them will get support for free (think RENDER). Don't expect widespread support untill XFree 4.1+ makes it into distro's though...
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
I'm sure they are all worried about "what about old window managers that don't expect an XConfigureNotify event for the desktop?". Well my response is: "SO WHAT?". I really expect that they will ignore it, and your windows will end up unmoved and thus positioned off the screen. If the window manager crashes, well then it was written like crap and you should not be using it anyway.
This paranoia about changing anything without making an "extension" is really killing any possibility of X being worthwhile. We should be having anti-aliased fonts BY DEFAULT, not with an "extension", and I really care absolutly ZERO that this breaks programs that use Xor to draw fonts (it doesn't anyway, just turn it off if Xor is being used). It is disgusting that you need to use elaborate interfaces and an "extension" to draw images using shared memory, why the hell does it not select the fastest possible transfer for me automatically? Why haven't we jettisoned colormaps and switched to true-color emulation on all displays?
The much-hated MicroSoft did the equivalent of all of these, and did them in ways so that old programs not only continued to work, but actually could take advantage of these changes. It is pretty pathetic that the X design commitee cannot even match MicroSoft's lame attempts!
Unfortunately for you, hardware support for 8-bit colormaps is going away very fast, and interest in supporting or emulating it is nearly zero since it prevents all the cool 3-D stuff and antialiasing from working. I recommend you get into that code and try to patch out whatever requires it asap.
My guess is the big problem is that it stores colors in a byte inside structures in the program. What you need to do is make a 256-entry lookup table from that byte to an actual X pixel, make a macro wrapper that you then need to put around all uses of color in the program that does the lookup through the table. You also need to fix the code that calls XAllocColor so that it instead allocates a new entry in the table, puts the result of XAllocColor there, and returns that table index.
If your program is using bit-fiddling to draw overlays, well you really need to seriously consider rewriting it. This typically will bypass any hardware acceleration and I have also seen signs that (due to the fact that it is never tested) it often does not work on X servers. The easiest way to get "overlays" is to use a pixmap "backbuffer" and draw the main image there. Copy it to the screen to "erase the overlay" and draw on the main window to "draw the overlay".
I know this is a pain, but I really recommend you fix your program if at all possible.
PS: if they are using this program on Windows, they already fixed it, so see what was done to the code there.
The only practical use for it is if you want to zoom in on a specific part of the screen.
-henrik
I can do this in Windows from the taskbar, with no reboots or anything. Why can't I do it in X?
Because up until recently, there was no way for the X server to notify the clients (which include the window manager) that the resolution had changed.
Rock on Matrox.
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I don't have an example to show you, but it's actually possible to change desktop size in the same manner. You just need to set the resolution to the same size as the desktop. Not sure of the specifics, but it's something like, for examble, "32bit" "1024x768" "1024x768". As long as the two resolutions are the same, you should be fine.
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
People's lack of knowledge is disturbing.
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Oh oh. Another place where we will lose central configuration ability. Unlike Windows, X has no central architecture for GUI based configuration plug-ins. This means we should start to prepare for a boat-load of vendor-specific configuration program. Yet another reason I'm dreading moving to Linux...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Umm, Win2K doesn't require reboots anymore for networking, and only some hardware actually requires rebooting (mostly stuff that requires a reboot in Linux too.) There goes that arguement.
Of course, its all moot. BeOS has been able to have different resolutions/color depths in each of its 32 workspaces for ages now, but that doesn't count, does it?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Umm, X is bigger than all the servers and related support libraries in BeOS! And it doesn't even have a MediaKit! Or a TCP/IP stack. Or a memory manager. Yikes! Also, stripped down X is more or less useless on the desktop, where all the (bloated) features are needed to make it feature competitive with other windowing environments. Besides, QNX Photon does everything X does, and is less than a meg in size. Eat that.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Wow. You're a dumbass. The Voodoo1 doesn't even DO 2D. Secondly, if you used a *real* 3D OS, you'd find the Win2K drivers are rock solid.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
What the hell? I like BeOS! Is that a crime? Does that mean I'm a rabid Mac user out to destroy everything else? Hell, I even mention that Win2K is the *real* OS for 3D. How is that promoting BeOS? Or do Linux zealots think that all closed source OSs are interchangable?
PS> Dislaimer: Not all Mac users are rabid. Not all Linux users are zealots. Not all BeOS users are bitter.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Yea, and a lot of drivers require recompiling the kernel. Few drivers are distributed in binary form, and even when they are, they are usually specific to a particular (usually several months old) kernel version.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Does that have DRI? Does that have all the extensions? Is that fully competitive with Windows2K in terms of features in addition to having network transparency? If so, why the hell is the X distribution 20MB of code?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Umm, Win2K doesn't require reboots anymore for networking
No. Windows 2000 doesn't require rebooting for changing one's IP address it. Requires rebooting for every other optionsin Control Panel -> Network.
You can change your resolution in X by doing just what you say, however you have to have your Config file setup so it knows about the other resolutions.
I've left out the whole "thin client" aspect, because it has been overhyped and may not always make sense. However I think that a really logical IT infrastructure would put an xterminal rather than a PC on the secretary's desk. Every PC is an ongoing cost center, and an invitation to store company documents on un-backed-up disk.
1 TV output support is currently limited to G400 board level products only. Please consult the Matrox website for details www.matrox.com/mga
Does anyone know why there's no G450 TV out? I can't seem to find any links to any work being done to resolve this. Is it that Matrox won't give out the specs or just that noone is willing to write the drivers? What other options now are there for TV out under linux? G400 aren't really available new anymore, Geforce2MX drivers for TV out appear to support only a small subset of MX cards and look very beta (but promising :). Anyone know better??
Modules exist for exactly this reason and have been around for quite a while in Linux. You're only technically right. I don't know the numbers for sure (any more than you do), but I can say from personal experience that none of my recent hardware purchases have required me to recompile the kernel and hence reboot.
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
As for the framebuffer-GTK, this is really neat but will only fill a niche I think. You see, the framebuffer means that it will not be possible to use the special functions found on todays cards without building special support for all cards. A new windowing environment with its own drivers would have to be build upon it to support that.
Also, X is not that bloated as people think and can be stripped down a lot. Remember that X is being used on Linux handhelds, and it's not like the developers didn't have a choice. Further it must be noted that X recently had a lot of sweet additions like Mesa3D, anti-alliasing and soon a RandR extension according to another post.
Monkey sense
Ok This is one of my "GRRRRRR!!! WHY can't X DO this!" Rant-o-matic topics, so I'll try to keep it short.
I'm fairly new to linux, but I think I've tried looking through EVERY config file and how to I could find, and STILL haven't come up with a way to change both Screen Resolution and Desktop resolution at the same time...
And God loves Linux, but That really pisses me off- as that's something I'd LIKE to do now and then...Meanwhile Wundoze just has a neat and tidy little icon in the system tray that does it...
Yeah-yeah-yeah...don't tell me...Time to learn programming...
I think Mandrake had some strange utility that would do it, but I switched over to SuSE a while back and have been missing it sorely...(Of course now I can't even remember what it was!)
end of line.
Sig currently under construction. Mind the gap....
From the 'COPYING' file included with the powerdesk source .tar.gz:
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June 1991
I'm glad to see Matrox actually 'get it'.
--
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Damn, you're bitter. But then, I'd be bitter if I hitched my wagon to BeOS, too.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.