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Berlin Packages Released For Debian
A reader writes: "Berlin ? testing packages for Debian are available from the Debian website and should soon be moved to unstable, according to their the Berlin consortium website." The Berlin website (which looks great, IMHO) has an excellent architecture FAQ - the Berlin vs. X is very well done.Update: 09/01 12:41 PM GMT by H : A number of people have e-mailed me about some....wonkiness...if you view the Berlin vs X page using Internet Explorer. I'd advise using something else.
No. You want to free up screen real estate by switching to a smaller appearance setting. You want to make things appear in more detail by switching to a higher resolution. That's two different settings instead of just one, so this actually gives you more flexibility. At least if the Berlin developers got that right, I haven't looked at how it actually works yet.
Running a lower resolution to "zoom into your desktop" is like slowing down your processor to watch a movie in slow motion. The idea is just wrong. Time and performance are two different (but related) things, and so are size and resolution.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
To the use of CORBA: ...
We have hardly any communication between client and server: The client creates graphic objects inside the serverprocess. Those are used to redraw and can handle almost every event that happens (only those that change state in the client get send over the wire). You can manipulate the server not to test for the clients existance. Afterwards the GUI of a client stays around after killing the client itself. You can still move the window, rotate it, set the alpha channel,
Running inside the same address space the CORBA-overhead basically is reduced to a virtual function call.I think we can handle that:-)
Yes, the KDE example is so often flung at us: Yes, the way KDE used CORBA they are way better of with the KOM they invented. But they need way less functionality then we do.
To graphics via openGL:
you can render anything to openGL, you can although render the graphics to libArt (which dumps a raster to the screen) and is the default nowadays. A PostscriptDrawingKit is in the works too: That way you can print anything that can get displayed on the screen. The printout will of course use whichever resolution and colors your printer has to offer;-)
Oh, Berlin _is_ slow right now. But not for the two reasons you give: We have not yet optimized anything and we have _NO_ hardware acceleration at all.
About screen-aligned windows: In the berlin architecture it would be hard work to have only those:-) A window is just another graphic, you expect a line in a graphics program to be reotateable/zoomable/... so we have to support those operations. Nobody forces you to do it. We do it right now mostly to show off.
Regards,
Tobias Hunger