Xfree86 4.2.0 Out

According to david_eliasson, Xfree86 v4.2.0 is out, but it'll probably be awhile before all the mirror sites have sycned up with the release, so you may want to just enjoy reading that changelog for a couple days before you bother getting the whole archive.

Comments

4.2.0, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, who wants to smoke a bowl and celebrate?

Re:4.2.0, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait. Did he think that or just say it?

Wait... I mean...

Re:4.2.0, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm appaled by your promotion of illegal drugs in
an environment full of impressionable young minds. (Is a twenty good enough? =) )

Re:4.2.0, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

i wanna smoke a bowl hey i got this sweet sweet cheeba from jamaica is finger lickin good maybe we can sprinkle it with epplets... i dunno i may have to DRI it out a little more.

oh yeah! I have been waiting for this.

[Radnimax]

I hope they made the voodoo drivers and dri more stable. Does anyone know if the voodoo drivers support sli for the voodoo5 now?

Yessss!!!! (What about trident?)

[aussersterne]

Anybody try what was in CVS? Anybody try 4.2.0 yet? Does the Cyber9385 (trident) actually work now, or is it still broken?

Re:Yessss!!!! (What about trident?)

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot of "trident" things listed in the changelog, but I'm not familiar enough with that product line to tell you if the chipset you mention is part of that.

Re:Yessss!!!! (What about trident?)

[Jacek Poplawski]

Anybody try what was in CVS?

I compile CVS version about every week or two. Not many tdfx related changes (I have Voodoo3), but 4.1.0 was worse (Xv _and_ OpenGL). You should upgrade if you have ATI card (for example Radeon VE works only with CVS). There are still problems with Radeon - for example - anyone tried to run RTCW multiplayer demo 1.1 on Radeon? Whole system hangs (every time) !

Re:Yessss!!!! (What about trident?)

[Anonymous Coward]

What does this have to do with his question about trident cards?

Re:Yessss!!!! (What about trident?)

[Anonymous Coward]

hi, i have tried the CVS for some while now and yesterday went to the RELEASE version. only disadvantage is that the CVS used to have

freetype 2 version 7.0 and 1.5 days before they released xfree 4.2.0 they downgraded it to version 6.3 (it was kinda disapointing imo)

e.g. like 'hey we are behind release date, lets agree and downgrade some of the stuff to get the release out'

Re:Yessss!!!! (What about trident?)

[spauldo]

I thought trident cards were all broken out of the factory :)

Re:Yessss!!!! (What about trident?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, an awful lot of ThinkPads shipped with Trident graphics hardware. :-/

Re:Yessss!!!! (What about trident?)

[spauldo]

BAD IBM! BAD IBM! Go sit in the corner!

:)

Re:Yessss!!!! (What about trident?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Poplawsky.
We are watching you ...

Be careful.

Thats nice, but whats with kernel.org?

[bilenkey]

whats going on with kernel.org!? Its down since yesterday.

Re:Thats nice, but whats with kernel.org?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should ask VA whatever-their-name-is.

Re:Thats nice, but whats with kernel.org?

[pthisis]

Most services stopped responding, and the administrative port wasn't turned on when they installed the new hardware. H.P Anvin posted to lkml about this. They're working on getting it back up and running.

Sumner

Re:Thats nice, but whats with kernel.org?

[Dante]

There was a email, about this. it crashed and there is no direct access to the box.

Re:Thats nice, but whats with kernel.org?

[Anonymous Coward]

So were they using 2.4.13-ac8?

3.x

[Ed Avis]

Is anyone still maintaining XFree86 3.3.x?

Re:3.x

[psavo]

Is anyone still maintaining XFree86 3.3.x?

I know that Debian people are patching 3.3.6 continuously. I get -v3 updates pretty often. And that is good, because 4.0.2 didn't support my crappy TP560+trident. (AFAIK Debian people fix X themselves, and port fixes from XFree86 CVS).

Re:3.x

[Warped-Reality]

It's probably worth upgrading, you can probably find a TNT2 for $25 dollars somewhere

Re:3.x

[Anonymous Coward]

i sure hope so, 4.whatever won't play on my laptop, i had to "upgrade" to 3.3.6 to make it work.

Re:3.x

[psavo]

TP560 stands for ThinkPad 560 (or stinkpad as TheInquirer rather likes it), it's a laptop. So I can't upgrade. Which is good, because then I concentrate on making _fast_ applications.
Thanks anyway =)

Re:3.x

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop buying unsupported hardware. If they won't tell anyone how to use their product, they don't deserve money for it.

Radeon support

[itzdandy]

so when will radeon 8500 support DRI in xfree86?
when will there be full hardware support for radeon 8500?

Re:Radeon support

[Anonymous Coward]

How the hell is this supposed to be insightful?

Damn whiners.

Re:Radeon support

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends. You sound like you're waiting for someone to magically code you some drivers. Guess what? We can't: ATi does not share the specs needed to develop good Linux drivers.

Re:Radeon support

[Plasmoid]

1) Sooner if you help.
2) It has 2D support for the 8500 already.

Re:Radeon support

[ignorant_newbie]

so when will radeon 8500 support DRI in xfree86? when will there be full hardware support for radeon 8500?

as soon as you write them. this is the point of the discussion - while there are folks like me and (apparently, correct me if i'm wrong here) yourself who don't contrubute source, it won't do everythhing.

in the closed source world, motivation is applied via funding: the customer's demand (supposedly) drives what's paid for. in the open source, the customer and developer are the same person, (supposedly) so its actually up to us to make it work. if we don't know enough c (my excuse) we should go buy orielly books :)

Re:Radeon support

[Anonymous Coward]

Funding can also be applied to open-source work. If enough people want the driver, you can put your money together, find a hacker, and pay them to write a driver. Some people might do it just for a free video card.

Getting the specs from ATI (without an NDA that would prohibit an open-source driver) is probably the hard part.

Re:Radeon support

[wiredog]

I wouldn't buy the O'Reilly C books. I'm a C/C++ programmer and their C/C++ books are not aimed at language newbies, IIRC.

Actually, the C For Dummies and C++ For Dummies books are pretty good for getting the basics. Then for C get K&R and for C++ get Stroustrup.

That all will set you back about $150, but not all at once.

Re:Radeon support

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweet, soon I'll be waiting for these newbies to write some slick 3D drivers.

Re:Radeon support

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't? I could swear this is what all the anti-nVidia zealots have been saying all along as to why poorly-performing, under-featured ATI cards were better than nVidia drivers that COOK.

Re:Radeon support

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just use an nVidia card. They provide full-featured, fast drivers that knock the socks off even the Windows drivers of ATI cards. They may not be open source, but I'll take features, speed, and stability over source anyday (if you really want source, you can always use the nv driver, too). Is anyone else getting the feeling that ATI and their helpful specs are all talk?

Re:Radeon support

[aardvarkjoe]

Sweet, soon I'll be waiting for these newbies to write some slick 3D drivers.

Well, remember, every last person who has written a slick 3d driver was a newbie at some point. Sure, most of the people who say they wanna learn C won't turn out much before getting bored and quitting, but there are always a few.

Re:Radeon support

[Odinson]

Or just use an nVidia card. They provide full-featured, fast drivers that knock the socks off even the Windows drivers of ATI cards.

In the future they may even come with DRM build right in. Think instant compliance no effort or even choice on the Linux users part.

They may not be open source, but I'll take features, speed, and stability over source anyday (if you really want source, you can always use the nv driver, too).

Microsoft and nVidia on Xbox:
nVidia: "But we don't want to change the Linux PC drivers to include drm. This wasn't part of the deal."
Microsoft:"Pray I do not alter the deal any further."

Is anyone else getting the feeling that ATI and their helpful specs are all talk?

Now that is a good question AC.

Aditionally does anyone know what state the open source driver is in? Is it developed more quickly or more slowly becasue of it's closed counterpart.

Re:Radeon support

[TeknoDragon]

I submitted a story detailing the ATI Radeon problems... thanks Rob... REJECTED

Another good story down the tubes.

Re:Radeon support

[marco_craveiro]

OT i know, but mate dont get stroustrup to understand C++ in depth! not unless you are at the last level of the game :-)))) i'd go for meyers, sutter and all. your man is far too terse, its like getting a ansi spec of the language. hell of an hacker though :-)))

soup

Re:Radeon support

[Anonymous Coward]

Get real. You have a lot more to worry about with your BIOS or hard drive's CLOSED SOURCE firmware having DRM built in than a video card.

Re:Radeon support

[roystgnr]

1) Where are the hardware specs? I've never done any driver programming, but I'd like to help.
2) Does it have dualhead support for the 8500 yet? I can wait months for 3D if it's coming eventually, but I'd very much like to hook up my second monitor tonight.

Re:Radeon support

[Odinson]

"You have a lot more to worry about with your BIOS or hard drive's CLOSED SOURCE firmware having DRM built in than a video card."

That's true but, your bios chip can be replaced and MBs easily avoided but there are only two choices for high end graphics, and the HD thing would kill the industry and the economy with it (hell it might even piss off Joe Sixpack.)

So it may not be DRM, how about spyware or purposly breaking key versions of the Linux kernel (say the version Redhat 7.2 uses for example)

Microsoft broke Windows on DR DOS, why not strong arm nVidia to break on key versions of Linux.

Not everybody that can use linux can build a new kernel you know. I just don't them to be orphaned.

Re:Radeon support

[psavo]

I'd also consider Jesse Liberty's C++ in 21 Days. I really enjoyed reading it. Very comprehensive and good book. I used it a lot for referencing, until my pointy-haired boss stole it. ;)
You can find the book here.

Re:Radeon support

[Anonymous DWord]

but there are only two choices for high end graphics

Maybe I'm reading you wrong, but huh? If there's only two as you claim, Nvidia ain't one of them.

Re:Radeon support

[Anonymous Coward]

I love this response. Code it yourself. Yea ok whatever.
Windows has fully accelerated drivers, linux does not. Why does it surprise you that someone would ask this?
Maybe this has something to do with linux having 1% of the destkop market, I don't know. But saying code it yourself does little to help that person or linux in general.

Re:Radeon support

[spauldo]

I dunno, I'm workin' my way through "Practical C Programming" right now, and so far (not all the way through it yet) it seems pretty good. Albeit I already know some perl and php (and BASIC if you count the C64 and atari 800 programming I did as a kid), but I wouldn't imagine a newbie having too much of a problem (other than the fact that C ain't the easiest thing in the world to learn compared to other languages...).

I have heard good things about the K&R book though. I might pick that up later on, after I'm done with this book...

Re:Radeon support

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you.
Are you advocating return to feudal society where every one created their own forniture, shoes etc ..

Re:Radeon support

[Anonymous Coward]

yea ok i'll spend 3 weeks coding my arse off for you just cos you want a driver. whatever.

i don't mind helping people out, but the expectations placed on people who are mostly developing code for free are getting ridiculous. folks download some iso's and then want professional level support for nothing.

you wannabe geeks gotta get over it. linux is not a product. you probably didn't pay for it, and it doesn't owe anyone anything. or if you bought redhat/suse/any-distro, but didn't check the hcl first, then stiff bikkies.

if there aren't drivers available, don't buy the hardware. if you really need the hardware, use another os (or code your own drivers if you can)

Fink

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet Fink just came out with its 0.3.2a distribution-- hopefully they'll be able to bring these packages up to date quickly, so all us OS X users can enjoy the same XFree goodness as y'all.

ICBW but this looks like primarily bugfixes

[StandardDeviant]

... lots and lots of bugfixes. Glancing through the changelog extract linked to from the story, nothing really *new* jumped out at me. Not that this is a bad thing, bugfixes and increased stability/driver support is always nice. :-) I noticed a lot of things having to do with the Xprt server and having to do with 3d accel (drm, OpenGL man pages, nv driver tuning, etc.).

Re:ICBW but this looks like primarily bugfixes

[Vspirit]

But how about optimization?

SPEED IS AN ISSUE

Re:ICBW but this looks like primarily bugfixes

[Dwonis]

X is already about as fast as it's going to get. The slowness you are talking about is probably GNOME/KDE's fault.

Re:ICBW but this looks like primarily bugfixes

[Anonymous Coward]

XFree86 lacks support for the hardware command buffering features found on nearly ALL modern graphics cards. These buffers can be very deep ( roughly 1 million entries). This allows you to batch up all your drawing operations in memory and tell the card to read and execute them without host CPU intervention. In the time you are waiting for the card to finish, you can call something like usleep, etc. to wait for completion. Many of the XFree86 drivers I've looked at do not do this. The driver just has a while() loop (or equivalent) to wait until the card has finished drawing. This sucks up CPU cycles and eliminates any possibility of concurrency.

With XFree, it's like having a dual CPU system when only one CPU can work at a time.

On the S3 Savage chips there's no need for DMA to do this, the hardware will buffer it in Video RAM. So it should not need a kernel module. I still don't understand why they haven't enabled it in the XFree86 driver. Once it's enabled, all you do is just write the commands to the BCI area (in register space, 128KB long) and the card will handle the FIFO in video RAM automatically.

Re:ICBW but this looks like primarily bugfixes

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe you can give them a hand?
you seem to know what you are talking about...

Moving away from X

[demaria]

Here's a question that I want to address carefully, because it does sound a bit like flamebait.

Should the Unix/Linux world move away from X? Redesign a graphical layer from the ground up, supporting antialiasing, transparency, enhanced programming environment, and a new, well defined and examined user interface? This would be going the Mac OS X route. In this model, I am not advocating abandoning X completely, but instead for backwards compatability run a rootless X server.

Re:Moving away from X

[leandrod]

Why move away from X? All the features you cited are available, our could be, to X thru extensions or rewritings -- except for user interface, which is out of scope of X.

In other words, what you want is just a X + extensions + wm + destop environment combination.

Please do your reading in the subject.

Re:Moving away from X

[Beetjebrak]

Make it emulate the Carbon/Cocoa/Quartz compatible as well then! Hell, easy for me to say, I'm no developer so I don't know how hard this is gonna be.. but it'd be a great stimulant to the likes of Adobe to port their apps to Linux/FreeBSD/*NIX and we'd finally have a proper OS to support the strenuous task of creative page layout. Win98 breaks, Win2K bends, but neither of them are really any good for heavy-duty layout work. I'm seriously considering getting me a Mac for this, but they're so damn expensive!! An Apple-compatible graphical environment on x86 would be a great leap forward for Linux. I for one would never touch anything from Redmond again! ...just wishful thinking I guess ;-)

Re:Moving away from X

[bilenkey]

Have you heard of berlin? There's also an article on linuxtoday...

Re:Moving away from X

[psavo]

I think we have had our share of this discussion.. =)

But what the hell, let's do it again!

There's nothing wrong with your suggestion. That'd be probably the right thing to to.. If we didn't have such a shitload of X11 applications.
Actually there is nothing _fundamentally_ wrong with X11. As you can observe, even that old architecture has lived far,far longer than anyone would have expected. What it is, 20-30 years now?

The power of X11 is in it's extensibility, XRENDER was added and traparency & antialization is now possible, Even over network, any network. TrueType fonts were needed and were added. XFree86 even had sub-pixel antialization before Windows ever had (those loonies just forgot to mention it anywhere).
X11 is perfect example of OO separation between different tasks. Server does drawing and client does it's own things. And message passing comes 'builtin'.

So what is really wrong with X11? You tell me.

Re:Moving away from X

[redhog]

You do not want to merge the widgetset and the windowing engine, as (drawing) area clipping and buffering has absolutely nothing to do with each other. In addition, do you honestly think that would help the adoption of the new system? It would just be a new war such as the Gtk/Qt/Athena/Motif/Tk one. But including the windowing engine. Imagine if you could not run a KDE app inside your GNOME desktop!

I see the need for two things:

a) a new windowing server supporting partial transparency, anti-aliased text, non-horisontal text, virtual colour-depths (that is, that the app wouldn't know what the real colour-deph was, so that they could be moved between displays with different depths without noticing it) and moving of clients bweteen servers.

b) a client-server (or just back-end/front-end) aproach to the widget-set too, so that the programmer could use any widgetset library he/she wants, and the user still be able to switch the look and feel of the app to match the rest of his/her apps.

Re:Moving away from X

[stripes]

Should the Unix/Linux world move away from X? Redesign a graphical layer from the ground up, supporting antialiasing, transparency

There are people working on adding a new rendering model that does antialiasing and sub-pixel addressing. "People" being mostly Keith Packard.

enhanced programming environment

There is no reason you can't do that to X, in fact if you compare things like xlib to Gtk--, or Xt to Qt there has been huge progress. Oh, and there is GNUStep too, which is mostly like NeXTStep which is what OS X is based on...

and a new, well defined and examined user interface?

That is the hard part. In part because backwards compatibility works against you.

This would be going the Mac OS X route

I think OS X has a lot going for it, but the biggest thing really is that the apps do mostly work alike, which is rather unlike X11. I know I'm partly at fault since the X11 apps I worked on (xtank and w3juke) are not much alike :-)

Re:Moving away from X

[demaria]

In my original post I failed to mention that, yes all of those features do exist today as extensions or whatnots (except a new programming environment obiviously).

Yes, I want what would be today's X + ext + wm, but is this a good and efficient architecture, or piles of backwards compatability on top of each other? How about color matching of various displays and printers?

Re:Moving away from X

[I_redwolf]

Why?, X does all of that already with the use of extensions not only that but it does a good job at it.

I know alot of people seem to think X is what makes their systems run slow or it's hard to setup etc. Maybe it is a little hard to setup (IMHO it's rather easy even from a compile) but the truth of the matter is X does a brilliant job at what it does. It's a server which allows clients (programs that you use) to connect to it. It will never have the latest drivers for the new whiz-bang cards out but other than that I don't see much of a problem with it, not to mention that it's original design still holds true up to today.

Re:Moving away from X

[Anonymous Coward]

AtheOS has already done this. Soooo, what are you
waiting for - check it out:

http://www.atheos.cx

Re:Moving away from X

[po8]

Should the Unix/Linux world move away from X? Redesign a graphical layer from the ground up, supporting antialiasing, transparency, enhanced programming environment, and a new, well defined and examined user interface?

No. Antialiasing and transparency are most of the way into the X server already. Any enhanced programming environment or better user interface is unlikely to be more difficult to implement on top of the X server than atop some from-scratch thing.

Basically, the X protocol does all the hard parts of a window system fairly nicely. Its rendering functionality was until recently unfortunate, but Packard's client-side rendering via the Render extension appears to be adequate for anything anyone wants to do with GUIs these days.

The current client-side libraries are not so good, but this can be fixed without changing the X server or protocol. See XCB for one proposed step in that direction.

IMHO, if one-tenth the energy that was put into whining about X and flailing at never-quite-ready replacement rendering systems went into these sorts of things instead, we'd have a nicer-than-Mac/Windows desktop GUI for free by now.

Re:Moving away from X

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, I'd be happy if there was a decent config utility.

I have *never*, in 30 tries on 10 different PCs, gotten a working result from the X config utilities. I always have to edit the damn file & put in the correct timings.

Even now, the resolution for my Linux box changes 10% of the time, automatically, without any changes from me. I turn the monitor off, turn it back on, and *boom*... the screen is all jumbled.

Re:Moving away from X

[larien]

The problem with X11 is, in part, the separation of client/server; this causes extra latency and a heap of context switches. It probably also has a lot of extra cruft that a new drawing model could avoid.

As everyone says, though, trying to get away from X11 is very difficult as practically every GUI application on linux/Unix uses X11, so it's got a lot of momentum.

Re:Moving away from X

[psavo]

Aah, my words Exactly, there are sensible people on /. after all.
Really, all those raging newbies that've heard 'X11 is shit!' running and screaming it to everyone.. "Scrap it!!!11!".. And the _never_ tell what's so much wrong with X11.

One 'minor' gripe I have with XFree86 (that is, implementation) is that it freezes all other windows while moving one. I've heard it's because XFree86 server is not multithreaded, and it's too much of a PITA to make it mt.

Re:Moving away from X

[demaria]

I am willing to bet that the need for transparent networking, while really freaking cool and useful, has deminished greatly in recent years, especially with desktops becoming much more powerful and with the move away from terminal/host to client/server computing.

MS Windows 3/95/NT do not have this feature out of the box, and yet it wasn't a huge issue for administrators or especially the users. Plus things like PCAnywhere or Timbuktu let you do screen sharing when needed.

Re:Moving away from X

[leandrod]

New programming environment is also there already -- and alternatives too: the GNU standard is GTK++, if you thing C++ is the ultimate truth you choose Qt, if you're into Objective C or Mac compatibility you have GNUStep... I only miss a Lisp or Scheme alternative, but it's probably I who didn't look hard enough. If you are thinking imaging, then there's Display GhostScript, DisplayPDF and Display PostScript.

And what makes you think it is bad and inefficient?

It is no backwards compatibility cruft -- there is a core API and architecture, and extensions; any part besides the core (which is clean and efficient) can be substituted, and even the core can be rewritten for efficiency if you like.

Color matching is also an extension.

Re:Moving away from X

[pthisis]

The problem with X11 is, in part, the separation of client/server; this causes extra latency and a heap of context switches

The context switches aren't a significant overhead. They weren't even a significant overhead in 1986 when Sun first started spreading FUD about this (at the time, Sun was trying to push NeWs over X11). See e.g. Jim Gettys' posts in the "rendering model in X" thread in the Xrender mailing list archives

It's not all sunshine, he's willing to own up to places where X needs improvement (exposure lists are a big one, througput for e.g. texture mapping is another), but it's way better than a lot of people claim. And Xrender and DRI address the vast majority of the problem cases very effectively.

Sumner

Re:Moving away from X

[I_redwolf]

"I am willing to bet that the need for transparent networking, while really freaking cool and useful, has deminished greatly in recent years"

So tell me why XP has support for this now. Infact Microsoft toots on a horn about the ability to do this. X has had exactly what you say people aren't interested in for years now. Why would Microsoft add this support to XP if people didn't want it?

Re:Moving away from X

[AegisKnight]

Here's what's wrong: Deployment. The reason X has a bad image is that most Linux distros by default *don't* have good fonts. Not every app has antialiased text (although with Mozilla and KDE desktops, things are starting to change). There are a lot of technologies out there that, while technologically sound, have a bad image just because they're deployed poorly. If some upstart Linux distributor built a completely solid desktop experience (WITH *good* TrueType fonts, not just allowing you to import them from your Windows install), the whole image of X would change.

Re:Moving away from X

[demaria]

"IMHO, if one-tenth the energy that was put into whining about X and flailing at never-quite-ready replacement rendering systems went into these sorts of things instead, we'd have a nicer-than-Mac/Windows desktop GUI for free by now"

This would require three things: consistancy, usability, and testing. All applications would need to look the same, behave the same, and the overall environment would need to undergo massive usability testing. Right clicking would need to preform the same action in every program. Most of all, someone would need to write up a user interface guidebook that the application developers would adhere to and follow exactly (much easier said than done in the open source world ;D ).

Re:Moving away from X

[psavo]

The problem with X11 is, in part, the separation of client/server; this causes extra latency and a heap of context switches. It probably also has a lot of extra cruft that a new drawing model could avoid.

AFAIK, any _decent_ windowing system has this problem. It comes with clean seperation. Even WinNT with it's bolted-in-kernel vid drivers has to tackle this. On every windowing system the 'client' and 'painter' run in different processes, so evryone is doing context switches.

As everyone says, though, trying to get away from X11 is very difficult as practically every GUI application on linux/Unix uses X11, so it's got a lot of momentum.

Well, amount of _clean_ GTK+ & Qt applications is rising, and both of them can be rather easily ported to different windowing systems. And they have been (Embedded qt, framebuffer GTK+..).
One day if someone will get really annoyed and does something about it.. Well get new windowing systems with GIMP in it =). That'd be nice. But I really doubt any performance gains.
Slightly OT, I was really impressed by Rasterman's evas -thing, It's such a shame he left it in middle (again ;). OpenGL acceleration would really do good..

Re:Moving away from X

[leandrod]

Don't forget GTK++ and the type servers. They are also helping here.

Re:Moving away from X

[xcomputer_man]

Check out Evas. It features an excellent, very easy to use/simplified API, hardware acceleration, anti-aliasing and all of those cool things and is designed in such a way that you don't need to be concerned what kind of hardware your app will run on - evas will scale accordingly. Plus, there's rumors that rasterman is building an Evas client-server API that could almost supplant X, while not necessarily supplanting X...I think it's a pity not enough people are looking at this excellent library.

Enlightenment 0.17 is built upon Evas, and from my experience with it, it does run very fast.

Re:Moving away from X

[Kryptonomic]

Not to mention that the font handling is horrific.

I still haven't figured out how to change the system fonts so that I'd get ISO8859-15 fonts in every application by default. All howtos seem to be telling me that I've got to edit the Xresources for each separate application like xterm, emacs and so on. That's simply unacceptable.

Re:Moving away from X

[kilrogg]

most Linux distros by default *don't* have good fonts

Its really easy to fix: webfonts-1-3.noarch.rpm

Make sure to read the MS Eula included.

Re:Moving away from X

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a page from Apples playbook on this one. They spent years layering new features on an old GUI and OS, and they realized that al it does is make the transistion to better technology harder. If you keep layering new technology over old, eventualy it will break, and there will be so much there, no one will know why.

If you don't break compatability, progress will never truly be made. It would be cleaner, and perform gfaster to write it from the ground up with those features in mind. Just my $0.02

Re:Moving away from X

[akc]

I don't think so. Why?

1) The performance argument seems to be a non issue with
the entry level machines of today (I've even seem discussion
of Quake Linux blowing Quake XP into the dust)

2) The MASSIVE benefit that is possible (if required) of
running apps on a server and just having a thin client (server in x terms)

Re:Moving away from X

[abreauj]

Should the Unix/Linux world move away from POSIX? Redesign a system-call layer from the ground up, supporting [several important features], and a new, well defined and examined user interface? This would be going the [other OS] route. In this model, I am not advocating abandoning POSIX completely, but instead for backwards compatability run a POSIX emulation layer in a single process.

Re:Moving away from X

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, lovely little piece of vapourware. Expect to see a usable version a linux desktop near you in..ohhh 2015

Re:Moving away from X

[leandrod]

GNUStep with Display GhostScript and WindowMaker or a Gnome Aqua theme for you.

Re:Moving away from X

[abreauj]

Oops, forgot the smiley-face: :-P

Re:Moving away from X

[mythr]

I have a better question for you. Why not? It's not like Microsoft has ever hesitated to add useless features to their products. The flight simulator hidden in an old version of Excel is a perfect example of this.

Re:Moving away from X

[bero-rh]

The reason X has a bad image is that most Linux distros by default *don't* have good fonts.

The reason for this is that there are simply no good fonts under a sane license out there.

If you find any good fonts that are at least freely redistributable for both commercial and noncommercial purposes, please let me know and I'll make sure they get into some distros.

Re:Moving away from X

[zulux]

Growing up with Unix - there were horror stories of a 'Hello World' X11 program compiling to a 500K executable. I was flabergasted - as my TRS-80 only had 32K. (and I was a lucky TRS-80 owner with the memory upgrade). Now days, the perceived bloat of X Windows isen't a big deal anymore - hell, my poket Psion device has 16,385K of memory and it fits in my pocket.

Re:Moving away from X

[Jace of Fuse!]

So what is really wrong with X11? You tell me.

Plenty. Most X11 based applications have a crappy look and feel. Even when you run the nicer desktop environments such as KDE, they still inherit some of that really bad feel, and I don't just mean lagging performance. Everything from how the Windows decide where they want to be to really obnoxious icon placement just irks some people (myself and many people I know) about X11 and friends.

X11 works fine. Yes, it is functionally. But a GUI is an interface, and a system is only as comfortable as the way you interact with it. Me personally, I'd rather sit all day in BASH than once pick up the mouse and do anything on the screen. But if I'm going to use a desktop at all I actually much prefer (in this order) Amiga(2.0+), Windows, and Mac. I can use KDE, but I'd still rather not.

Yes, X11 is extensible. Now, make it comfortable. Of course, comfort is subjective. So in that case they should make it's bahavior much more configurable.

I don't like tiled, cornered, or cascaded windows, for example. I like Window memory and I like Icons to stay where I put them... I like my Task/Tool bars at the top of the screen (where they belong), but I don't like systems that let me put them there and then continue to ignore the fact that I'm not running default setting so some things don't look right or misalign themselves.

I guess the bottom line is that X11 is old and and it still hasn't reached what I considered a comfort level. It's not polished, even after all these years. Maybe it --IS-- time for Unix to adopt something new.

(That's going to hurt the Karma...)

Re:Moving away from X

[kilrogg]

I don't see this problem at all. I can move windows and have have others update underneath. Maybe its a driver specific issue?

Infact, what you described is exactly one of my big gripes I have with MS Window (NT4, to be specific). You just click on a window to move it (not even actually move it) and all other apps freeze. Quite anoying.

Re:Moving away from X

[leandrod]

You are ill informed. Lack of network transparency is one of the reasons why all system administrators love X and hate Windows and the Mac.

pcAnywhere and Timbuktu are hacks, X is the real thing.

But the sum of the history is that client-server was a mistake, terminal-host still works better and with the free software resurgence, Java, Windows Terminal Services and thin clients, it is returning in full force. Terminal-host is cheaper, faster, more manageable and easier to upgrade than client-server.

Re:Moving away from X

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe you want to throw an eye at www.directfb.org

Re:Moving away from X

[leandrod]

XP has full transparency for individual clients or only Terminal Services desktop distribution?

Re:Moving away from X

[leandrod]

Why? Is POSIX inefficient or not flexible enough? Instead, such efforts tend to be less flexible than POSIX, and not so much more efficient -- BeOS, Mac OS X, Windows, whatever.

Re:Moving away from X

[psavo]

Damn!
You are right. I wondered why I have such a good feeling when working on my gateway machine.
It has a Matrox Millennium card (Matrox is still the best..) and X 4.0.2. It can move windows without suspending updating of other windows.
My 'main' machine however has a GF2MX-PCI, and it cannot move windows without suspending everything else. X is 4.0.2(nv driver) too. That's not nice. I'll check settings.

Re:Moving away from X

[mashedpotatoes]

turn your sarcasm detector on.

Re:Moving away from X

[Anonymous Coward]

You've probably checked this out already but didn't Staroffice come with Fonts?

Re:Moving away from X

[nomadic]

I've heard (and very occasionally participated) in X bashing, but only when I got really sick of the latency in like moving windows or the ugly fonts, but hey, it's free and it's powerful and it's stable, so I really shouldn't complain. The strange thing is it just doesn't seem that much faster now on new hardware and graphics cards. I remember running it on a 486-50 with 10 megs of RAM; I could run it with an animated desktop background, and it was still usable. But on newer computers it doesn't seem that much faster.

But, linux itself doesn't seem much faster either. Maybe I should go back to the 1.2 kernel...

Re:Moving away from X

[pthisis]

X extensions shouldn't be thought of as just being tacked on, they're a good and efficient way of doing things. The whole point was that the rendering engine would be replaced via an extension, this was anticipated and designed for.

In fact, when X was originally developed Jim Gettys et al considered putting _all_ graphics rendering in an extension (leaving just the core windowing w/o rendering in the core). They fully expected the original rendering model to be replaced fairly soon, but that's taken a long time. XRender hopes to do that and probably will largely supplant the old rendering primitives for new apps in a few years. Maybe sooner for gtk/Qt/other whizzbang bleeding-edge stuff.

We toyed with leaving graphics entirely to an extension, but the argument that a window system without any graphics would be useless won out pretty fast :-).

We never thought the existing rendering would last as long as it did: we expected significant extensions would have occurred long since.

--Jim Gettys, 2001

We can't get rid of the core X11 primitives because they are a part of the X11 specification and all apps use it and it isn't going to go away any time soon. Once render is complete and stabilized we can just encourge people to not use the core primitives. Eventually we can care less about making them fast and concentrate on making them unobtrusive.

--Keith Packard, 2001

From the thread
Proposal for server-side Anti-Aliased fonts

Sumner

Re:Moving away from X

[leandrod]

Try not specifying ISO8859-15 in your Xdefaults, instead defining your LANG envirnoment variable as en_GB@euro or en_GB@iso885915 or whatever.

Re:Moving away from X

[leandrod]

> Imagine if you could not run a KDE app inside your GNOME desktop!

I meet this situation every day -- I can't run X clients in my (sadly) Windows desktop. I can run a X server in Windows, but Windows makes a good integration impossible.

Re:Moving away from X

[CatherineCornelius]

There's absolutely no reason that I can think of why somebody shouldn't produce a desktop like KDE or Gnome, with its own graphical protocol, that can share native apps and X apps on the same desktop. I was doing that in Windows 95 back in '97, and in OS/2 Warp two years before that. Integrating the two is not a problem.

So yes, let's see someone put a non-X desktop out there, and we'll see how it competes with X-only desktops.

Re:Moving away from X

[Beetjebrak]

This won't let me run MacOS X graphical applications. I already have my desktop (Win2K, sadly) looking like MacOS 9 but that's just looks. What I'd like to see is an actual port of MacOS X to x86, but since that's not going to happen, wouldn't it be interesting for people like Trolltech and the like to emulate Quartz/Cocoa/Carbon? Quark and Adobe wouldn't need much more than a recompile on their apps to port them over to Linux/FreeBSD, or am I missing something?

Re:Moving away from X

[Z4rd0Z]

This is the same argument as always. Just use the extensions. But these aren't transparent to the programmer. Applications that use them have to specifically link to them. If you wanted, for example, AA fonts in an older application you'd have to rewrite it to make use of them.

Furthermore, why isn't window management a part of the X server? Look at all the resources that go into the writing of window managers. There are scores of window managers, and they all really do the same thing. Okay, so WindowMaker's titlebars look different than sawfish's titlebars. The look of a window border would be better served by having an advanced built-in theme engine, rather than everyone having to create a new wm just to get the look they want. Window management should be something that Just Happens. After all, there is nothing special about putting windows on a screen. All of the other things that includes such as menus and docks are outside of the scope of window management.

In short, X is too low level and it needs a lot of things built in that are now floating around as extensions and outside applications.

Re:Moving away from X

[Beetjebrak]

If all you do on it is type documents you won't see the difference between a 386 and an Athlon XP 2000+. That is, unless your typing skills increase in line with Moore's law of course.

Re:Moving away from X

[Quazion]

Dont strip Networking support, cause i think we will go back to Dumb/Smart-Terminals in the near future and X in this is proven technology and trust me managers love those words. And also with Linux/BSD its very inexpensive to create, and with the internet it means i can run my own e-mail client at my GF and at work, damn i love networking...

Also i see no realy problems with X except maybe that its hard to compile (which i think it isnt) and hard to configure (which also isnt true), it does all it needs todo and it does it pretty fast on my machine's (a AMDK6/2-350 and a Indigo2 Impact), look and i can run my favorite game Freeciv on IRIX without compiling or installing a binairy (which isnt available for IRIX 6.2) tru X forwarding and it runs just as fast if i was running it local on my Linux Box..

Quazion.

Re:Moving away from X

[posmon]

if you choose to 'show window contents when dragging' from display properties then this problem will go away. if that box isn't ticked then windows assumes you've got a low spec machine and doesn't waste the processor cycles drawing updates until you've moved the window.

Re:Moving away from X

[Anonymous Coward]

Transparent networking is a huge issue for me.
I use it all the time at home and at work.

Re:Moving away from X

[bero-rh]

We're already shipping those - they're in the
"ttfonts" package in Red Hat Linux. (Taken from
OpenOffice CVS a while back).

Re:Moving away from X

[psavo]

Ages ago I planned on doing some small application that would make my desktop 'alive'. There would be one backgroud, and on top of it, there would be many small animations going on.. Mouse-activated and all.
For example there would be some view on forest, and there would be birds, monkeys, people walking.. And sound too. You know, all high-res rendered and stuff. I even wrote all the classes and data-types for it.. But I never got around to drawing and actual programming. Damn. What a fine programm would that be..

Re:Moving away from X

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the same argument as always. Just use the extensions. But these aren't transparent to the programmer. Applications that use them have to specifically link to them. If you wanted, for example, AA fonts in an older application you'd have to rewrite it to make use of them.

Wrong, unless the application is coded with direct Xlib calls. You only need the toolkit to be aware of the extension, and GTK+ and Qt have already demoed support for it.

Furthermore, why isn't window management a part of the X server?

So we have choices! X11 is like Quartz in Mac OS X or GDI in Windows. It isn't supposed to provide GUI elements, window management, or L&F policies. That's up to a higher layer. It's worth noting that both Mac OS X and Windows leave L&F up to the widget library and handle window management in a separate program.

Re:Moving away from X

[David Greene]

I am willing to bet that the need for transparent networking, while really freaking cool and useful, has deminished greatly in recent years, especially with desktops becoming much more powerful and with the move away from terminal/host to client/server computing.

You'd lose that bet pretty quickly. Right now I am connected to a Sun station in one of the common engineering clusters here from my office in the EECS department. EECS can't sport the money for nice tools like Purify (go figure) so I have to run them on the .engin machines. I'd be pretty much out of luck without X's network transparency.

I use remote X from home all of the time. It's a little slow over dialup, but good enough for what I have to do.

If telnet is useful, it seems pretty obvious to me that a graphical analogue would be as well.

Re:Moving away from X

[kilrogg]

That's not the problem. As I recall, with 'show window contents when dragging' disabled, when you move a window it shows a boxed outline, it only moves the window once you've place the box.

What I'm talking about here is what happens to the other windows in the background while moving a window. They don't refresh themselves. Could be a driver issue I guess.

Re:Moving away from X

[leandrod]

You didn't do your reading. GNUStep and Mac OS X Cocoa are both implementations of OpenStep whose first implementation was NeXTStep. Display GhostScript is an alternative implementation of Display PostScript, of which DisplayPDF is a subset plus derivative.

To sum it up, Adobe and Quark could already recompile their apps to any POSIX system using GNUStep.

Please check http://gnustep.org./

Re:Moving away from X

[spongman]

i don't understand why applciations need to be rewritten in order to take advantage of anti-alaised fonts.

Since I installed Windows XP on my laptop suddenly every character on my screen has been rendered in fully anti-aliased ClearType. I didn't have to reinstall new versions of any applications, or even new fonts, the operating system (or the GUI parts of it) just support it (optionally, of course).

Why can't the xfree86 guys just add anti-alising to the existing font rendering code?

Re:Moving away from X

[Anonymous Coward]

" This won't let me run MacOS X graphical applications."
Neither will your x86 processor, but you already know that.

"wouldn't it be interesting for people like Trolltech and the like to emulate Quartz/Cocoa/Carbon?"
GNUstep, It's not by Trolltech, but it's what you're looking for, and what the parent post already pointed out.

Re:Moving away from X

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a project called The Berlin Project that I think is derived from Fresco.
http://www.berlin-consortium.org

Re:Moving away from X

[joto]

This won't let me run MacOS X graphical applications.

Yes it will. GnuSTEP is an attempt at recreating the API's from NeXT. Mac OS X's Cocoa is also based on the NeXT API's. (Erm, actually, both are based on the Openstep spec, but that would never have existed, nor would anyone care about it if it wasn't for the NeXT). No doubt GnuSTEP will include whatever extensions to Openstep Apple has made once it get's a little bit more stable. (Quartz is just a fancy name for Display Postscript, also an idea from the NeXT, and also part of the GnuSTEP project).

wouldn't it be interesting for people like Trolltech and the like to emulate Quartz/Cocoa/Carbon?

I'm not so sure why it would be beneficial for a TrollTech to make Quartz/Cocoa/Carbon libraries for the x86 (or other platforms). It would be a lot of work, it competes directly with their own product, and let's face it: There are not that many apps for the new Mac OS X yet.

Quark and Adobe wouldn't need much more than a recompile on their apps to port them over to Linux/FreeBSD, or am I missing something?

Yes, it could be beneficial for Quark or Adobe (or other application vendors) to make Quark/Cocoa (and maybe even Carbon) libraries on other platforms, if they choose to tie their new applications to Apple OS X. If OS X ever gets popular, maybe some bigname companies will choose to sponsor the GnuSTEP project to get their apps ported. As for now, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Re:Moving away from X

[Anonymous Coward]

Put it on Freshmeat. Somebody'll pick it up.

Re:Moving away from X

[Mr Z]

But, linux itself doesn't seem much faster either. Maybe I should go back to the 1.2 kernel...

I doubt that'll help much. A big portion of what makes a machine feel fast is its responsiveness. My Apple ][ with a 1MHz felt fast compared to many machines these days (at least when you were in text mode), since it was crisp and responsive.

Linux's responsiveness is gated in part by the latencies in the OS, and many of those don't change much as CPUs get faster. Stuff like the low-latency work and scheduler tweaks should help the feel of the machine immensely.

--Joe

Re:Moving away from X

[Arandir]

There's nothing wrong with X11. Nothing other than what a bit of tweaking can't fix. It works and it works well.

There is one major reason people bitch about X: t's big.

They're right that it is big and complex. That's they way it's supposed to be. X is a network GUI. You can run your application on one machine and have it display on another (or multiple machines). This is a very powerful feature. It's awesome. But it makes X big and complex.

If you're running a standalone desktop it doesn't do you any good. If you've come from the Windows world and think that standalone desktops are the only thing that exist, then you begin to question the sanity of using X at all. But Unix (including Linux) is not a standalone desktop OS. You simply CANNOT replace X11 because to many people are dependent upon it.

Adobe Framemaker doesn't exist on Linux or FreeBSD. But I use it on my FreeBSD box anyway. How? By logging in remotely to my Solaris box at work. Now I get to use the world's best desktop publisher at home on my PC. All because of X.

X11 isn't going to be replaced. But there is something that could happen. There could be an XFree86-Lite. An X with the same API as all the other X's, but designed and optimized for a non-networked standalone desktop. Strip out all the stuff that home PCs would never use. But make it compatible with the existing X. Hell, you could write it all as a kernel mod for all I care. But at least you would get your tiny weakling X for your desktop and I would still have my big and powerful X for my workstation and we could still use the same X applications.

Re:Moving away from X

[dvdeug]

Why can't the xfree86 guys just add anti-alising to the existing font rendering code?

Because the current font rendering code hands the program a set of black and white bitmaps; it has no way to pass grayscale or alpha data to the program.

Re:Moving away from X

[RustyTaco]

Why can't the xfree86 guys just add anti-alising to the existing font rendering code?

Because there are no shades of grey in a black and white (bitmap) image. X11R6 core fonts are just bitmaps. Replacing them with greyscale images would be a protocol violation AND would be EVERY app.

- RustyTaco

Re:Moving away from X

[kilrogg]

I am willing to bet that the need for transparent networking, while really freaking cool and useful, has deminished greatly in recent years, especially with desktops becoming much more powerful and with the move away from terminal/host to client/server computing.

This is true for home users and non-technical workers (secretaries, etc), but for Engineering/Scientific corporate and education settings, X network transparency is an amazingly useful feature. Not a day goes by that I don't use a remote X app at work.

For one, some engineering and scientific software only comes for one arch (solaris or HP). In a mixed environment (solaris, hp, linux, and even Windows worksations), you can run these apps from your workstation regardless of which OS the remote computer is running (even windows, with cytrix).

Secondly, these apps usually cost a lot of money and are a pain to maintain. Installing on only a handfull of servers probably makes our admin's job a lot easier (which means less problems for us users).

The only feature I wish it had was the ability to move an app from one Xserver to another while it running, or the ability to disconnect from an X server and have the app connect to a gui equivalent of /dev/null. Both of these are available with VNC, but I wish the X protocol had support for this naitively.

Re:Moving away from X

[mrmag00]

maybe try nvidia driver? you never know.

Re:Moving away from X

[spongman]

i see, so there's no capability for X itself to render the fonts to the screen, it has to pass the bitmaps back to the client and then the client has to pass the bitmaps back to the server? that seems a bit inefficient especially given that X was designed as a network protocol from the start. excuse my ignorance, i'm just used to windows' TextOut() which renders the font directly into the device context. the communication between the application and GDI consists of just the text, a DC and a font handle. the only way to get the bitmap data for a font is to render it into a DC on your own bitmap.

Re:Moving away from X

[psavo]

It just crashes on me every 3-4 hours. Dunno why =/.

Re:Moving away from X

[Sergej]

Have you tried Google?

Re:Moving away from X

[be-fan]

Yet, the problem with X is also extensibility. XRender is nice, but basically only GTK+, Qt, and a few straight X apps support it.

Re:Moving away from X

[be-fan]

I think someone should at least give an honest shot at moving away from X. One of the things I really like about Linux is that the kernel devs aren't afraid to try new things. Take the 2.4 VM for example. It might have destabilized things and pissed off a lot of sysadmins (so much the better...) but it resulted in a VM that was quite good for the loads Linux is usually subject too. There is a lot of work left to be done, but its better than what we had before. Similarly, I don't think people should be afraid to try out new things with the GUI. However, I don't really know how X fits into that kind of scheme. X is really too low level for an archicture that allows experimenting. The reason Linux could change so much and still run all regular UNIX apps is that POSIX is a high-level, clean API that supports lots of different implementations. Similarly, I think we need consistant GUI API that is simple (yet complete, like POSIX) that allows people to really work on the backend. This would not only get rid of the GUI problems we have in Linux today (too many layers of software, little consistency) but would be better all-around for everyone. Users would get a consistent desktops and better implementations. Developers would get a consistant API that would be stable enough to have time to mature. Hackers would have a system that allows them to experiment without breaking compatibility. True, some flexibility might be lost, but not nearly as much as one would think. POSIX is a very narrow standard, but nobody has yet really found something major that can't be handled through the standard API. Nobody complains that there aren't a dozen different ways to call kernel features and I don't think that many developers would care that there was only one standard GUI API. Even if they did, you could always add libraries on top of that and still have fewer layers of software than you do today.

Re:Moving away from X

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes! Here are the problems with X. First, it's not a window system. It's a bitblitter that runs over a
network. That's about it. None of the X designers
wanted to take any responsibility, the whole no policy idea is shit. We need a windowsystem that does a bit more. We need a standard, built in windowmanager that is acutally done well so people won't fuck with it. We need one, and only one toolkit! It also needs to have font installation that is not used to scare small children. Look to the mac for inspiration.
If anyone wants a good example of a fast and sane windowsystem, look at MGR from bellcore. If anyone manages to port it to the linux framebuffer I will personally send them a case of beer.
(Forgot my login) Rob Becker

Re:Moving away from X

[Guy Harris]

It's worth noting that both Mac OS X and Windows leave L&F up to the widget library and handle window management in a separate program.

...although both MacOS X and Windows come with a single standard widget library (although I think Microsoft Office on Windows may use its own versions of some widgets).

As for the separate program, are you certain that's true for Windows? If it's true of Windows NT (4.0, and 5.0 a/k/a W2K), and if by "window management" you mean the stuff done by window managers on X, at least one of those things isn't done as well by that separate program as I'd like - on X desktops, I can minimize windows even if the application is busy and doesn't respond immediately to input events, but I don't seem to be able to minimize windows for busy applications on Windows.

Re:Moving away from X

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for the fact that GnuStep isn't done yet, and Adobe and Quark don't make OpenStep applications (they are using the OS X Carbon API).

In the future, please do your own reading before telling others to do so.

Re:Moving away from X

[be-fan]

Umm, If everything used one widget set, you could run ALL apps at the same time AND they'd all be consistant.

Re:Moving away from X

[Anonymous Coward]

Should the Unix world move away from Motif/CDE? Redesign a toolkit and desktop component layer from the ground up, supporting [several important features], and a new, well defined and examined user interface? This would be going the [other OS] route. In this model, I am not advocating abandoning Motif/CDE completely, but instead for backwards compatability run a Motif emulation layer in a single library.

:)

Re:Moving away from X

[leandrod]

GNUStep base is done already.

Carbon API is just a bridge. The Cocoa applications are probably in testing now.

Re:Moving away from X

[stripes]

Just use the extensions. But these aren't transparent to the programmer

And a whole new Window system would be transparent? Neither a new windowing system nor a new rendering model are transparent, either need changes to at least the toolkit, and maybe the application. Look at Mac OSX, a Carbon program is basically a OS9 program (or older), but the Carbon library basically reimplments the older rendering system on top of a new model while at the same time Cocoa exposes this new model more directly.

If you wanted, for example, AA fonts in an older application you'd have to rewrite it to make use of them.

I assume that would be true for an application that rides directly on top of Xlib like xtank, but if you have one built on a toolkit you can change just the toolkit and get AA fonts to work for all the apps. I believe this has been done for Qt (and thus all KDE apps). There is no reason you couldn't do it for QTK+ and other toolkits as well.

Furthermore, why isn't window management a part of the X server? Look at all the resources that go into the writing of window managers. There are scores of window managers, and they all really do the same thing.

Really? So fvwm2 is a tiled windows manager? And uwm does virtual desktops?

I remember when the first virtual desktops showed up, it was a lot simpler to put that into a single window manager then to get it into X11 itself...of corse I expect it would have been simpler to put it into X11 then the other 50 windows managers that came after...

There are window managers that don't use the overlapping windows approach, they place and resize windows so they don't overlap. Some of the overlapping window managers do better automatic placement then others.

Window management should be something that Just Happens.

And the having window managers be programs someone can pick and choose breaks this how? I have written a lot of X11 programs, and modified countless more. None were aware that window management didn't "just happen", well except for twm and fvwm2, but that's because they were window managers. As a user of X11 I expect the window management to happen.

All of the other things that includes such as menus and docks are outside of the scope of window management.

Really? In OSX the dock interacts with the window manager, it needs to know if the dock is in autohide mode or not, which edge it is on, and how big it is. Otherwise the WM could put windows over it and make life hard for the user by mistake.

There are a lot of nice things about being able to change window managers, I don't think we would have nice ones today if they had been so hard to change.

There are also bad things, the big bad thing is anybody who sits down at my Unix machine and attempts to use my X11 setup has to figure out how my window manager is set up. What do they press to restack things? How do they unhide a window? That isn't all the fault of X11 having user choosable window managers, the guy in the next office over uses fvwm2, and so do I. My setup is extreamly different from his, so much so that he has to ask how to use it.

This seldom happens with other windowing systems. One OS X box is pretty much like the others. Plus people seem to have a better grasp on how to make it work without being told. The downside is it's harder to get virtual desktops to work (of corse I don't use virtual desktops on X11 anymore anyway), it is harder to decide the autoplacment sucks and to put in a new one. It is harder to decide you need to do a windowshade like thing and do it. Changing just about everything is a lot harder.

In short, X is too low level and it needs a lot of things built in that are now floating around as extensions and outside applications

I do agree that X is too low level, directly exposing the framebuffer's color model has always pissed me off, it made xtank's drawing code at least five times larger. I don't think the extensions need to be moved into the core, that won't really make it better. Making the presence of some "extensions" mandatory will though. It will let programs start relying on them to be there.

Even without that though some programs will anyway, it will be too hard not too, and if the "major platforms" all have them (with "Linux" probably being enough platforms in and of itself) a lot of things will just assume it works anyway.

Re:Moving away from X

[Colin Bayer]

Stuff like the low-latency work and scheduler tweaks should help the feel of the machine immensely.

True dat.

I installed the preemptible kernel patch about 2 (or was it 3?) days ago, and everything feels much crisper. The only gripe I have about it is that it shaved about 3 or 4 percent off the top of my 3D framerates. Ah, well. :)

Re:Moving away from X

[archen]

comming soon, an X emulator for Linux.

You're goign to emulate WHAT?

Re:Moving away from X

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. Carbon is a permanent API for MacOS X. The big vendors have made it very clear that they will never port to Cocoa. Developing Carbon was one reason the OS was delayed for several years.

Re:Moving away from X

[stripes]

i see, so there's no capability for X itself to render the fonts to the screen, it has to pass the bitmaps back to the client and then the client has to pass the bitmaps back to the server?

Actually there is, as long as you don't want to rotate the text or anything like that. However there is a font server that the X server normally uses to get fonts, that only supports bitmaps. That could be fixed without impacting too many apps.

There is an X extension to do antialsiased text, in part to get sub-pixel addressing, and in part (I assume) to avoid finding some long dead application that would break... (like something that relies on XOR to erase things, or...)

Re:Moving away from X

[stripes]

XRender is nice, but basically only GTK+, Qt, and a few straight X apps support it

Well Qt (incl KDE), GTK+, and GNUStep basically cover all the X apps that don't suck anyway :-)

Besides everything has to start somewhere. This may not be a solved problem, but it's on the way.

Re:Moving away from X

[sbjornda]

So what is really wrong with X11? You tell me.

Have you ever tried to run it over a T1 or slower? Pretty painful, eh? I think that's why VNC is so popular. I think the basic chattiness of X protocol is a fundamental problem. But I'm new to these discussions, so please forgive me if this is old ground. All I know is, I won't try it again.

Re:Moving away from X

[stripes]

Quartz is just a fancy name for Display Postscript, also an idea from the NeXT, and also part of the GnuSTEP project

For what it's worth, I don't recall the NeXT doing transparency (it did do anti-aliased text though). That may be the only real addition made to the rendering model in the transition to Quartz, or at least the only big one...

Unless you count OpenGL, I'm not sure if that is strictly speaking part of Quartz, or just another thing you can get to from Cocoa/Carbon...

Re:Moving away from X

[dsb3]

perhaps also:
# apt-get install msttcorefonts [testing/unstable only]

Again, be aware of the Microsoft EULA - in this case the debianized package is a wrapper to download and install the fonts from the web.

Fonts included:
Andale Mono
Arial Black
Arial (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Comic Sans MS (Bold)
Courier New (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Georgia (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Impact
Times New Roman (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Trebuchet (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Verdana (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Webdings

Re:Moving away from X

[leandrod]

You may be right, but I hope not. Big vendors sticking to Carbon and Win32 instead of porting to OpenStep (Cocoa) means less interoperability.

Anyway, these are proprietary vendors, and the GNU writing is on the wall.

Re:Moving away from X

[Dante'sPrayer]

What window manager are you using? The option to display the content of the window while dragging surely has something to do with it.

Re:Moving away from X

[leandrod]

Just thought somewhat more about the issue -- yes, Carbon (Mac Toolbox) is permanent, but it is suboptimal; when applications arrive that make good use of Cocoa (OpenStep), there should be a natural selection favoring OpenStep (Cocoa) applications over (Mac Toolbox) Carbon ones. Besides, as users get more and more OpenStep applications they will note that Carbon ones, besides using up more resources, also load libraries that otherwise would be unnecessary. Also Mac OS X performance with Carbon will look bad compared to pure BSD and GNU/Linux -- so if the market isn't already corrupted by monopolies we should see a gradual, slow natural phasing away of Carbon.

Re:Moving away from X

[dossen]

Well, in my view VNC and X cover different areas.
If I want to have a remote desktop, over a crappy line, in a window I would use VNC. On the other hand, X works very well on a LAN (or other high bandwidth connection), where it might be useful to run apps on several machines (different architechtures, different sizes, different i/o-hardware etc.).
But that aside, I have on many an occation run a few xterms or emacs' on a 256/256 DSL line, and I will admit that it does not improve the responsetime. But it is usable, and I find, that systems like VNC can be set up in two ways: I have it all over my desktop, so basicly I might as well be sitting at the other machine (except for the physics of being somewhere else), or if you make the window or the remote desktop small, and suddenly you have a small window of clutter. In X any window is under the control of your local server/wm/.../etc. combo, and behaves like if it was running locally (I do admit that some X apps have very nonstandard look and feel, and mixing toolkits doesn't help, but I don't really care, it's my choice).

Re:Moving away from X

[dossen]

Well, I'm not sure what you are missing (onless you can't find a *nix machine on your network to run the app), but I find that X-Win32 does quite nicely (I have to use windows at work, but, work being the CS department of a university, unix machines are not too far away and always ready to run my programs). It has free floating windows, managed by Windows, the clipboard works (though going from X to Windows must be explicit), and the only thing that bugs me is a slight delay on heavy graphical apps like mozilla (yes I could run it locally, but due to some issues pertaining to our rather wierd network setup of Windows 2000 I don't).
A if you would really like to run X apps locally, I think you could compile Xfree86 on cygwin and use that.

Re:Moving away from X

[AshPattern]

I think what you're talking about is rather a _protocol_ change to X, which falls outside the bounds of merely drawing a button on the screen.

It'd be indescribably badass to have X forward a request for a button to the _window manager_, which would then draw a themed button in all its glory.

This would give us the capability to have the nice matching widget set that we envy in the Big Corporate OSes. It'd also reduce render time over a network, since you'd be sending only a few bytes instead of the myriad draw commands to make a menu happen.

Re:Moving away from X

[Baki]

If deployment is the problem, than rewriting the complete windowing system seems a bit drastic to me (apart from getting incompatible with the rest of the unix world and the past). Better just fix the deployment problem.

Re:Moving away from X

[scrytch]

> Ages ago I planned on doing some small application that would make my desktop 'alive'.

Microsoft did this and slashdot screamed for their heads.

Anyway... Web developer friend of mine has a flash desktop, has very subtle animations going on in the background. It's tres cool.

Re:Moving away from X

[scrytch]

Jeepers, it's the "memory is cheap" nonsense again. I got news for ya: L1 cache still isn't cheap. Page sizes are still 8k. Think of how much more responsive your apps are going to be when they're not constantly paging and blowing away cache. RAM might be cheap, bloat still costs not only the app, but everything else that has to share a CPU with it.

Re:Moving away from X

[leandrod]

The integration still isn't good... clipboard fails often, configuration is finicky, Win32 can't act as window manager to X apps. It's a kludge, a pain.

Re:Moving away from X

[rice_burners_suck]

X11 isn't going to be replaced. But there is something that could happen. There could be an XFree86-Lite. An X with the same API as all the other X's, but designed and optimized for a non-networked standalone desktop. Strip out all the stuff that home PCs would never use. But make it compatible with the existing X. Hell, you could write it all as a kernel mod for all I care. But at least you would get your tiny weakling X for your desktop and I would still have my big and powerful X for my workstation and we could still use the same X applications.

That has got to be the smartest thing I've heard anyone on /. say all day! Honestly, why shouldn't there be an XFree-Lite for non-networked use? As it is, XFree86 runs very efficiently, even on my slower boxes, so a Lite version for single box use would haul ass. Hopefully, something like this will get implemented in the near future.

Besides a Lite version of X itself, I think the widely used toolkits need to begin using X's facilities correctly, or more correctly than they currently do. With these changes, home PC users will have some good alternatives to Windows and Macintosh.

Finally, I'm voting to keep X. It's a good system, developed when computers didn't have nearly as much power as they do today, and it's still just as good as it was back then. I believe that implementing a new, from-scratch system (with backward compatibility) would be stupid, because the overhead of backward compatibility would probably defeat the purpose of a new implementation anyway. Implementing something without backward compat would be the dumbest choice on the planet, because it would be a useless system.

Just my $0.02.

Re:Moving away from X

[vandan]

A recently posting by Rasterman on the Enlightenment developer's group says that he's working with DirectFB at the moment. His goal is to get a nice interfact for embedded systems and the like, but an interesting side-effect is that the new version on Enlightenment may be an easy port to DirectFB.
Of course many apps would need to be rewritten, but that may also be a good thing.
Then again, there is a lot of quality work in X, and it would be a shame to abandon it and start from scratch - especially since VA Linux are now VA software and no longer propping up the DRI developer team...

Re:Moving away from X

[Reteo Varala]

Actually, the Berlin Consortium ( http://www.berlin-consortium.org ) is making efforts to do exactly that. They're not there, yet, but it's an interesting thing to look out for.

Re:Moving away from X

[zulux]

Jeepers, it's the "memory is cheap" nonsense again.

Just because an app is large, doesen't nesessarly mean that it's data structres don't fit in cach well, and doesen't mean it's slow. Case in point: Databases with an index take up more memory than ones without indexes but are substantially faster in execution speed.

Granted, a 500K 'hello world' in X11 does raise some eyebrows - but I still like it better than a 10K Win32 executable that's linked to Windows-DLL-Hell - and subsequently crashes.

You deride the 'memory is cheap' as nonsense - but the argument can be valid in some circumstances. I wrote a crappy database for a customer, and it mad more sense for me to throw $200 of memory at the server than waste a day trying to attempt to optimise the querys - and making matanence of the database difficult to boot.

Re:Moving away from X

[swingerman]

(Quartz is just a fancy name for Display Postscript, also an idea from the NeXT, and also part of the GnuSTEP project)

Actually, MacOS X does not use Display Postscript. That was replaced by Display PDF.

Re:Moving away from X

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe stick to talking about GNU and not about things that you haven't researched.

Carbon is not just a Toolbox compatibility layer, it also provides features from Cocoa. In fact a good chunk of Cocoa now depends on Carbon (and visa-versa), so you'll probably see little or no resource usage differences between the two environments. You will see Obj-C apps being slow do to runtime binding however.

Interoperablity - With what? All 2 GNUStep apps and all 12 OpenStep/Cocoa apps that survived? Ha. The vast majority of commercial applications for the Mac have decades old codebases and will not be rewritten in ObjC/Cocoa. Get used to it.

Besides, if they are targeting MacOS/Carbon/Win32 already, that means that there's already compatibility shims in place. They can adapt to Unix if a Unix desktop market ever reappears.

Performance -- Wake me up when OpenOffice loads, OK? I don't think Apple has to worry.

Re:Moving away from X

[leandrod]

You are so sure of things you don't understand but are still an AC... even if OpenStep in Mac OS X reuses the Toolbox, they are still two very different programming environments; Toolbox will never be able to take advantage of the intrinsic OO-ness and coherence of OpenStep. One thing is to take advantage of specific libraries; other thing is to build upon an extensible framework.

Nothing will be rewritten if OpenStep and Objective C prove to be of no advantage. But if they are what NeXT, Apple and GNUStep think they are, we should have a big advantage to native apps.

I now this is hypothetical. But Objective C has its advantages, and it's hard to dismiss the platform that gave us the HTML, HTTP and Lotus Improv.

Re:Moving away from X

[RustyTaco]

i see, so there's no capability for X itself to render the fonts to the screen

No. If that were the case then anti-alising would be pretty easy to do(thought not the ideal quality).
X can render the fonts itself just fine, but only as bitmaps. So again, no antialising from the X-core font code.
- RustyTaco

Re:Moving away from X

[scrytch]

The database example is apples and oranges -- the database with an index is using an O(1) algorithm instead of O(n). This usually isn't the case with bloaty apps though. Perl for example, love it to death, but the damn thing just doesn't free many structures like anonymous subs, thinking it'll be able to reuse the activation later. Or apps with string copies all over the place when it never uses the original copy again.

Certainly for quick one-off apps it's better to waste memory and cpu cycles than time. I'm not suggesting a return to micromanaged handcrafting of code, I am saying that the tradeoff for convenience is still a tradeoff and in the big picture can't be handwaved away with price quotes on RAM.

Interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

* 2002-01-19 19:13:40 XFree 4.2.0 out. (articles,x) (rejected)
* 2002-01-19 19:43:24 XFree 4.2.0 out (articles,news) (rejected)

Re:Interesting...

[LighthouseJ]

You do know why it was rejected, right? Yesterday wasn't my birthday but today is. I'm just that good.

Re:Interesting...

[J'raxis]

Xfree86 4.2.0 Out was accepted, while Xfree86 4.2.0 out and Xfree86 4.2.0 out. were not. Looks like they just dont like lowercase or periods.

Re:Interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

it may come as a shock to you, but they can't accept all submissions for same article at once...
just because they posted it later it does not mean they had not had it in their queue when you submitted yours

I hate slashdot mor^H^H^Heditors as much as the next guy, but I think this is absolutely ridiculous how all the idiots whine about rejected articles

Re:oh yeah! I have been waiting for this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know about the status of dri in xfree86 4.2.0, but sli support for voodoo 5 should be in dri cvs. Not sure about how well it works tho.

Just my luck

[Dragon218]

I guess I should have waited a month or so for SuSE to come out with a distro containing this. Hopefully they will also have fixed the strange problems I get while trying to configure and install GTK+. I am so overdependant on Gkrellm , it's not even funny. Oh well, I guess I'll have to wait for my bank account to reach double digits again.

At the top of the change log

[fireboy1919]

I think its pretty significant that they've finally made the system work with the old Rage cards. They still sell those (for about $12), and they have a strong hold on the non-gamer market. Heck, I have one on the workstation I'm working on now (don't worry, I've got a game station too). It could help convince businessmen with old Pentiums that they should use Linux if they can get it to work with their typical hardware on the first try.

Mirrors for Xfree86

[Adrian Voinea]

Here's a nicely formatted list of mirrors for you lazy bastards ;)
Let's make the slashdot effect on xfree86.org a little more bearable :)
ftp://ftp.calderasystems.com/pub/mirrors/xfree86
ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/XFree86
ftp://ftp.cs.umn.edu/pub/XFree86
ftp://download.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/XFree86
ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/XFree86
ftp://ftp.infomagic.com/pub/mirrors/XFree86
ftp://mirror.sftw.com/pub/XFree86
ftp://phyppro1.phy.bnl.gov/pub/XFree86
ftp://ftp.rge.com/pub/X/XFree86
ftp://ftp.valinux.com/pub/mirrors/xfree86

Great news for laptop users!

[Adrian Voinea]

One of the major problems I had running XFree86 on my laptop was having to switch between a port replicator (aka docking station) and using the laptop's display. For those of you that don't know, a port replicator lets you use a standard monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. Switching between various XF86Config files got to be a royal pain in the arse.

So... those with laptops give this option a try in XF86Config:
Option "UseBIOSDisplay"

Re:Great news for laptop users!

[cymen]

So will the TV out work on my Dell Inspirion 4000 (ATI Mobile chipset)?

Re:Great news for laptop users!

[Devil's Avocado]

Intriguing post, but I can't find documentation of this feature anywhere in the 4.2.0 docs. Can you point to a description somewhere or describe what this option does? I've got an Inspiron 4000 and would like to be able to run it on an external monitor at times.

Cheers,
DA

Re:Great news for laptop users!

[Bake]

Interesting.

Do you know how it will handle different resolutions per monitor on laptops?

On my thinkpad I can have a max. resolution of 1024x768, whereas on my external CRT monitor it's 1600x1200.

In order for me to get 1600x1200 res. on my crt monitor on my laptop was to add a special directive in the XF86Config file (usecrt or something), but that meant that I had to change the XF86Config file everytime I switched to and from my LCD and CRT.
Windows however does this automatically.

Re:Great news for laptop users!

[Anonymous Coward]

You still cant use XV with neogmaic, so I don't really think this is great news. Since, even metrolinks has XV support on negomagic. And trust me.. 50% of all laptops use neomagic video cards. And most of those of us on anything below 400mhz PII's would just wince when playing video on such a box.

Re:Great news for laptop users!

[GrenDel Fuego]

The way I usually dealt with that was to have two seperate XF86Config files, and symlink to the correct one during bootup.

The script selected the correct output based on a search to see if it's docked or not. I used lspci looking for the docking stations network card.

Of course, this 4.2.0 may fix this.. who knows?

Re:Great news for laptop users!

[terabittwiddler]

This is good for boot time but it is not the complete answer for a portable desktop. The ability to dock and undock without closing all windows and restarting X is still needed.

The beauty of having a laptop with 802.11b in the office is the ability to take the computer to meeting, take minutes, read e-mail, etc then go back to your desk - without shutting the computer down and rebooting it. I concider restarting X equivalent to a reboot.

Resizing the root window is also high on the wish list of those using a docking stations. is a start but Gnome/KDE should be informed so new windows are opened on "active" part of the desktop and the taskbar can be kept in the field of view. In my case, my LCD is 1024x768 which looks very bad on a 21" trinitron. My docked resolution is 1600x1200.

DRI savage4

[YellowSubRoutine]

Yes, another (well, pretty lame) vote to get dri workin on savage4 chips, especially the /MX version for laptops.

(can't get DGA to work either, whatever I try)

Re:DRI savage4

[blowy]

Yes, this should be great! However, i don't think this is gonne happen ;(

Anything wrong with KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

"MHO, if one-tenth the energy that was put into whining about X and flailing at never-quite-ready replacement rendering systems went into these sorts of things instead, we'd have a nicer-than-Mac/Windows desktop GUI for free by now."

The KDE gui is looks better than the Windows one even now... Well, everything except the fonts that looks bad when small/italized.

Re:Anything wrong with KDE?

[loopkin]

The KDE gui is looks better than the Windows one even now... Well, everything except the fonts that looks bad when small/italized.

More likely you have a problem with small/italized antialiased (or not) fonts.
Try adding:
# antialias adjusting
match any size > 8 any size < 12 edit antialias = false;
at the end of your XftConfig file (well, if you're using freetype, which i do)

Re:Anything wrong with KDE?

[srichman]

Hmmm, which fonts?

Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that's just great... after yesterday's posts about sorcerer linux and gentoo linux, I decided to take the long weekend and venture into the world of source only distros... now after downloading tons of source... and almost ready to say "I did it!!!" Xfree86 makes me download more!...

OT (Re:Moving away from X)

[cymen]

The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.

Great sig. I'm feeling better already :)...

Re:Replace X with what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo Mama...of course.
she has too much to display perhaps...I'm gonna need Xinerama.

threaded Xfree

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone else believe that threading XFree86 might be a good idea?

While moving a window in X, all updates to other windows are frozen. Try this simple experiment for a demonstration:

1. Open an xterm and make it visible along with another window.
2. execute "find / " on the xterm window
3. while stuff is zipping by, move another window and notice what happens to the xterm window

One would believe that making XFree86 multi-threaded would be the desktop Linux experience better.

Any thoughts/comments?

Re:threaded Xfree

[Anonymous Coward]

A great idea, but difficult to do given the direction Xfree has gone in this regard. IMO Xfree needs replacing, people need better choices for windowing systems. Xfree can't cut it for highly demanding stuff, and no number of extentions are going to change that.

Re:threaded Xfree

[Kryptonomic]

Huh?

What's supposed to happen? I'm moving a Galeon window while xterm is showing "find /" output without freezing. I've got two CPUs, though.

Re:threaded Xfree

[tempfile]

I did and noticed xterm continuing to update without a hitch. What are you trying to say?

Re:threaded Xfree

[kilrogg]

Yes, I see, it continues to scroll perfectly fine. Perhaps check you xconfig, you must have something not set properly.

Erm, binaries?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this another example of slashdot stupidity? If it is 'out' here are the binaries? I don't consider having to get tarballs or cvs signs that something is released.

Wise up!

Re:Erm, binaries?

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously have no idea how the open-source development process works then. Please, get off slashdot and do not use open source software if you cannot handle such a thing.

Re:Erm, binaries?

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, compiling from source take quite a long time. When a release is announced *binaries' are usually available, understand dummy.

Re:Erm, binaries?

[Cheesy Fool]

Don't think so, i'm pretty sure that the 4.10 release didn't have binaries (and then Linux x86 only) until a day or 2 after the release.

Re:Erm, binaries?

[Anonymous Coward]

A release should have binaries. When something is release, it is supposed to be ready for general consumption. The so called release, is nothing of the sort. I could have grabbed almost exactly the same code from cvs a few days before the 'release'. A release should have binaries.

Re:Erm, binaries?

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, compiling from source take quite a long time. When a release is announced *binaries' are usually available, understand dummy.

Yes, it does take a while. The developers have to compile, package, create checksums and a whole lot of other things for binary releases. They have to do this for many different platforms, and package formats. This take a long, long, long time. Also, guess what they have to do before this? CREATE A FUCKING CVS RELEASE TAG. If you had even the fucking slightest idea about any development process you would realize how things work. All they did was create a moment in time in the development process for reference which they call a release. They do this so they can go on with development at the same time as other people do binary creation. It is called a release because that is what it is. People picked up on the fact that there was a release tag on the cvs and the changelog announced it as well. They have to do this sometime for a release, and they cannot create binaries without it (picking a time in the development cycle for the release).

You are just a fucking moronic luser who cannot comprehend the slightest thing about computers. You argument is based on ignorance and stupidity. You are just a computer illiterate who shouldnt be here. Please, do not argue this any further because you are completely wrong. Nothing you say is coming from knowlege, only idiocy. Please, do not breed; We do not need any more of your kind in our world. Just fuck off and die you retard.

README, Release notes, etc.

[Lac]

I found additional documents looking through the website. These are much more interesting to read than the changelog.

The README
The release notes
Installation details
Driver status

Enjoy!

Re:README, Release notes, etc.

[Some Dumbass...]

Driver status is actually at:

Driver status

Re:Nvidia works better (nv)

[akc]

wtf

Modded as informative - but the link points to an investigatation
of first post trolls.

I am sure this is a troll - but no mod points to say so!

Re:420! WHERES MY BONG!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux does not have good driver support for bongs yet. Many updates have been merged into the -ac branch, but full waterpipe support is not coming until sometime in 2.5.x

Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[Error27]

I think it is interesting to compare kernel development with X development.

LKML has 1-2k emails per week. We have Kernel Traffic, Linux Weekly News kernel summary, kerneltrap.com, #kernelnewbies and there is generally one kernel update per day on linuxtoday.com. There are tons and tons of other articles about kernel development on Linux websites.

Compiling and installing a new kernel is easy enough that people are doing it on linuxnewbie.org

As a result the Linux kernel is one of the greatest pieces of software that exists today. People are willing to do a phenomenal amount of work to have their code included into the kernel.
We are at the point where even the most excelent code has to compete to be included. There were at least three different scheduler implementations for 2.5, two different VMs, and two different asynchronous io implementations. It is very good to be in the position where you can pick and choose what code will go into the kernel at this level.

On the other hand for Xfree had a closed email list until a year or so ago. There are about 250 emails per week to the Xpert mailing list. There are few websites with Xfree development articles.

Compiling and installing Xfree is difficult.

People constantly complain about X needing to be replaced. While there are real problems with Xfree, most of the stuff that people complain about to slashdot is complete crap.

To me this suggests that Xfree needs to concentrate on their PR skills. Xfree guys need to make development easier for newbies. Key developers need to have more interviews. They need to prove that developing X is just as cool as developing the kernel. There need to be more frequent updates--posted to linuxtoday hopefully.

Compiling and installing Xfree needs to be easier. I think about it this way, once you compile something, you are only one step away from developing. All it takes after that is to open up an editor and change something.

To me Xfree is as important as the kernel. Without it I would not use Linux. This is true for the great majority of Linux users. Xfree deserves more attention and credit than it currently gets.

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[chromatic]

That's an interesting analysis. While I could argue some of the finer points (kernel development is different by not using CVS, many Linux servers never even install XFree86), that's not really the point.

I nominate you. Find out all you can about XFree86, watch the changelogs, write stories for Linuxtoday or wherever, and spread real information about it. Open up an editor and start developing.

If not you, who will do it?

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who founded XFree were stuck up snobs with very little interest in Linux. They were openly hostile to Linux actually. Fact: the orginal XFree team had very little interest in Linux until Linux companies such as Suse and Red Hat funded development. Now almost 100% of the XFree budget is subsidized by Linux companies, and has been for several years. From a the financial perspective, XFree86 is Linux.

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

As a minor player in the original XFree86 work (back when it was X386) I can say you are wrong. The work started before linux was a viable platform, instead it was SVR4 on 386's - but one of the earliest goals of the project was, and continues to be, mutli-platform compatibility. That's why you can run XFree86 on SCO, SVR4, *BSD, Solaris and Linux. Just because they don't focus *ALL* their efforts on linux doesn't mean they were stuck up snobs - if anything you are the stuck up snob for suggesting that they should dedicate themselves to Linux alone. A monoculture - whether it is microsoft or Linux is not a healthy environment.

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[JollyTX]

The XFree86 source tree looks absolutely horrible the first time you try to find out how to compile it.

I looked at the make files for a _long_ time before I though "hell, let's just do make World and see what happens".

X built without a single hickup. Why doesn't the README say "If you're using Linux, just do make World and it'll work" ? ;)

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[leandrod]

Technically and license-wise Linux is GNU, and GNU has adopted XFree... but this does not mean that XFree is GNU.

Do not judge thing with finances. Finances will pass away pretty soon, but technical and moral fundaments will take longer or just remain.

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[horster]

> Compiling and installing Xfree is difficult.

I would strongly disgagree with this statement. True, windows is still easier when it comes to configuring video, but XFree86 > 4.0 is really pretty straightforward to install. Especially in comparison to the linux kernel.

Before 4.0, it was a pain to install,and compiling was practically out of the question, but now it pretty much comes down to doing a `make world` to compile.
Configuring has also gotten a lot easer. There is xf86cfg which can be run in gui or text mode and is pretty straightforward. on top of that, the config file, has been overhauled and is really quite readable, but most importantly well documented. `man XF86Config` gives a detailed explanation of every section. This, combined with the config program do away with almost all the problems I had with XF86 3.

Also, I don't think peoples gripes about X11 are due to pr. For myself, I think that X is an ugly protocol on top of an elegant system (unix). The implementation of X though, namely XFree86 is a great program that nobody should be complaining about (does anyone really?).

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[leandrod]

Pray, why X is an ugly protocol?

And I think Lisp is more elegant than Unix -- but that's an esthetical statement.

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[1%warren]

Compiling and installing Xfree is difficult.

O.K., here's how - from The LFS Hint (read all of it, there are some helpful details about customizing the install that the XFree86 Build doc doesn't explain, read that too though.)

Download & extract: X410src-1.tgz, X410src-2.tgz, X410src-3.tgz

Install with (from inside the xc/ directory that the archives extract to):

make World &&
echo /usr/X11R6/lib >>/etc/ld.so.conf &&
make install &&
make install.man &&
/sbin/ldconfig

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[horster]

mine is an aesthetic opinion as well, I've just come to think that the plan9 window system is a lot cleaner and smaller code wise and api wise than X.

for one, they don't have mouse events, they just read from the mouse file (which is multiplexed over the network). other things like implementing the window system as a file server (ok, this can't be done in unix without extensions) are also quite nice.

all in all though, I think you're right that the ugliness of the x protocol is probably overstated. I tried windowmaker/gnustep on freebsd last week and was quite pleased with the performance.

I do think that there is room for other ways of doing a windowsystem, and with toolkits like gnustep and qt which abstract the underlying system, there really isn't a reason why other windowsystems can't be explored and those api's just ported (gnustep has an especially good division of front end and 'backend'- window system specifc, code).

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[RustyTaco]

That's why you can run XFree86 on SCO, SVR4, *BSD, Solaris and Linux.

Don't for get Darwin x86 AND PPC, Aqua, and one or two windows ports hanging around. I believe there is both a GDI And a DirectX port hanging around. I think the OS/2 port is mostly working still to.
- RustyTaco

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[Jacek Poplawski]

X built without a single hickup. Why doesn't the README say "If you're using Linux, just do make World and it'll work" ? ;)

IMHO it's bad idea to just "make World". Do you really need support for all gfx cards? I compile only support for card I own. It's my compilation, so I can also set -march=k6. And do you really needs to build fonts every time?

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[leandrod]

On one hand the question is not PR, but that Linus has had a much more open attitude than not only X people, but also than most GNU people -- even today Emacs development is pretty much done very discreetly. As X and GNU become more and more open, their visibility will also enhance, as people who today look only at the kernel realize they are actually more interested in X, glibc or Emacs.

On the other hand, the kernel has always been a glamourous topic... X with its own terminology and lots of borderline cases, besides reliance on pretty complex and sometimes even theoretical and statistical stuff is much less accessible. But this high-brown attitude in X is not absolute, and some X problems can be traced to initial pragmatism; also in Linux pragmatism has been the source of some problems, so it is probable that in time kernel development will be less accessible, aligning Linux with Emacs, Hurd or Lisp development.

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[haduong]

I am still looking for the bugs database!

Is the problem with the chips driver on
CT65550 chipset solved? Last time I tried
(7 days ago), the server would start (better than in 4.1) but freeze shortly after that.

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[eyez]

Compiling and installing Xfree needs to be easier.

Alright, come on. I agree with almost everything you say except for this. On a linux system:

make World && make install && make install.man

That's it. /MUCH/ easier than compiling and installing a kernel.

The biggest problem i see with X installation is that almost every distribution changes the default X installation. All setup files are in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 by default; yet most distributions put them elsewhere to their liking... debian uses /etc/X11 and puts everything in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 as a symlink to the /etc/X11 directory... slackware uses /var/X11R6/lib or something like that..

It's insane.

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a Linux newbie, and I compiled X with very little difficulty. Just edit the platform-specfic makefile, type in "make World", and your done. How much easier can it get?

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[jdavidb]

I went through all that, and then I went through the even bigger problem of trying to figure out how to configure the thing. I still have issues I can't seem to work out myself; I have to get an existing operating system (Windows, previous install of RedHat, or whatever) to tell me the answers. RedHat, Debian, and everything have these great autoconfigure systems that seem to figure out everything. How do I do it myself? I can't really understand the software if I can't configure it properly. (And tweak it! :) )

X seems to come with three different ways to configure: xf86cfg, xf86config, and X -configure. None of them seem to work the same way, none of them work as well as Windows, and none of them are really understandable to me.

Yet. :)

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[Anonymous Coward]

See, I don't need to build anything.
I have binary drivers written by nice folks at XIG.

Sure, they want some $ for their creation but don't you ask for compensation when you do some work ?
This is how civilized society works; people specialize at what they do best and charge for their services.
Evidently, Open Source advocates have much better ideas, namely medieval system where everyone "does it himself"

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[spauldo]

Hmm, there's a utility that used to come with X that would allow you to change the monitor settings while X was running... unfortunately, it's been a long time since I've used it and nothing under /usr/X11R6/bin rings a bell...

Essentially, it was an athena app that you would use to make minor adjustments and then print a modeline to stdout. You'd just have to edit the modelines in the XF86Config and it would work.

Someone on one of the linux irc channels probably could tell you the name of it and give you pointers. It'll solve those problems with the screen being offset or crooked and whatnot.

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[Anonymous Coward]

hey dude! Slackware also uses /etc/X11 (and symlinks) - so don't tell such crap in the future about Slack, if u dunno about somthing u better shut up.. btw: Slackware rox!

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[Anonymous Coward]

hey dude! Slackware also uses /etc/X11 (and symlinks) - so don't tell such crap in the future about Slack, if u dunno about somthing u better shut up...

Slackware used a /var/X11R6 tree up until at least slack 4. I was pretty sure it was in 7 and up as well, but slackware did use that for a long long time.

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[Chirs]

It's called "xvidtune"

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it over write the files that are already in that directory? What about uninstalling or going back to a previous version if the new one breaks?

Thanks for the info.

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[ideut]

I think you're thinking about xvidtune

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[Anonymous Coward]

A monoculture - whether it is microsoft or Linux is not a healthy environment.

That's why there should be an alternative to XFree86 ;-)

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[ChazeFroy]

Compiling and installing Xfree is difficult.

What's so hard about reading the INSTALL file and doing "make World; make install; make install.man"?

Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR

[stripes]

for one, they don't have mouse events, they just read from the mouse file (which is multiplexed over the network).

I like a lot of things aobut Plan9, and eight-and-a-half (the windowing system). However I do want to point out one disadvantage of how they handle mouse events. If all you care about is "has the mouse moved into/out of this box" you still have to use a ton of bandwidth to track the mouse. In X11 if you make that box a sub-window you can ask for enter/leave events and not consume 56+Kbits watching the user twiddle the mouse around.

Other then that eight-and-a-half rules. I really like that the same devices it offers to client apps are the ones that appear on the bare machine so (a) you can run a window app full screen without the other stuff, and (b) you can run eight-and-a-half inside eight-and-a-half without doing anything special like you need to with XonX or the like.

Plus Plan9 is cool, so I am compelled to like everything about it :-)

420

[Anonymous Coward]

smoke weed every day :P

Re:420

[Anonymous Coward]

Advice gladly taken. Thanks brotha!

*sparks a bowl*

Why doesn't some one pay?

[DAldredge]

Why doesn't someone pay to have some good fonts created and then release them freely?

Re:Why doesn't some one pay?

[chromatic]

You're someone.

(So am I, and I don't know anyone who is capable of doing this. Raph may, though -- he's discussed it before.)

Re:Why doesn't some one pay?

[Anonymous Coward]

I say we just use linus's handwriting and then we can have everything displayed in the word of god.

Does this fix the problem with KDE 3 betas...

[Anonymous Coward]

not being able to anti alias text.

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[Ozwald]

Disclamer: I'm not a fan of MS, I'm a fan of whatever works the best for the job.

There are VERY obvious performance differences between any version of Windows and as new of version of X as you want. X Windows programs flicker like mad when moving or resizing, objects aren't responsive, the mouse frame rate is low, applications all have inconsistent look and feel, keyboard support is lacking... And if you say that I need to tweek it to get it as fast as MS, then MS wins.

I really want Linux and BSD's to thrive, but if they really want to become desktop operating systems, they need some fundamental changes to the GUI.

Here's what I suggest:
- Build new server built around a sort of COM (like ActiveX). If the COM objects are installed on the server instead of client, there will be less traffic going through pipes (less latency) and makes the GUI more object oriented at the root (remember NeXT?).
- Separate Server and graphics drivers. Why the frick is ATI Raedon changes in the X11 change log? They should be driver changes, not server changes.
- Design the GUI interfaces without a mouse. Everything should be accessible through a keyboard, no exceptions.
- And speaking of NeXT, they had some great ideas on how to take advantage of 8 of the 32-bits of color.

May the flames begin.

Ozwald

Where are the binaries?

[Anonymous Coward]

The directory does not seem to have anything in

Re:Where are the binaries?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what ? Compile it.

YOU are a Microsoft TROLL

[W.B. Yeats]

What are you talking about? Check out the XFree stuff yourself instead of complaining about other people's links. Maybe it was an honest mistake.

and wtf is wtf? Why did you say that?

For the record, I am noticing marked improvements as well.

Re:YOU are a Microsoft TROLL

[akc]

No I am NOT.

The statement itself was informative - heck I may even check it out myself. What I was complaining about was the link at the end which pointed to something completely unrelated to the information, but placed in such a way that it appeared to be so. I wasted my time following the link - and was annoyed when I got there. Why not complain about it.?

I have subsequently discovered this link has been placed all over the place - and been modded as OT by most. So I feel justified in complaining.

wow what excitement

[Anonymous Coward]

The xterm updates a tiny bit slower. Whoop-di-doo. That's an interesting definition of "frozen" you have there.

We dont really need X anymore

[HanzoSan]

Not for the desktop, what we actually need, is something more like directFB which is simply compatible with X.

X can stay around too for computers which cant handle the it.

I think X shouldnt be replaced, however there should be alternatives.

Berlin + X

[HanzoSan]

Berlin will be good if its compatible with X but the problem with berlin is its so new that its dangerous.

I think something more like directFB will be fine, however if berlin development gets some kinda boost, well ill switch to berlin as long as it runs all my programs.

Re:Berlin + X

[Anonymous Coward]

To be truly effective, we would have to drop X entirely. All the important applications would have to be ported ASAP to Berlin. Mind you, this would not necessarily take very long since the elimination of X and adoption of Berlin would simplify the vast majority of graphical application code bases.

Re:Berlin + X

[Guy Harris]

Mind you, this would not necessarily take very long since the elimination of X and adoption of Berlin would simplify the vast majority of graphical application code bases.

Mind you, this would not necessarily not take very long, as the elimination of X toolkits and adoption of Berlin would mean that all the toolkit-using code of applications would have to be rewritten, even if the rewritten code would be simpler than the original code.

Re:Berlin + X

[be-fan]

I think a more salient point is that since most important apps already use a toolkit like GTK+ or Qt, only the toolkit would have to be ported to Berlin.

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[kilrogg]

One of your points address non-xfree related thing:

Design the GUI interfaces without a mouse. Everything should be accessible through a keyboard, no exceptions.

This is totally a toolkit issue. gtk/gnome2 has addressed this issue and everything will be easily accessible via keybaord. I'm not sure where qt/kde stand on this.

Xfree 4.2.0 is not released, slashdot is dumb.

[Anonymous Coward]

It has not been released. A release usually included binaries, and the 4.2.0 ones are where?

You are confusing the window manager with X11

[Sigfried_Blip]

Everything from how the Windows decide where they want to be to really obnoxious icon placement just irks some people (myself and many people I know) about X11 and friends.

I agree that it is obnoxious when windows and icons are not placed where you want them.

But get your facts straight dude! It is the window managers fault and not X11's. The X server just does what it is told, layout policy is handled by the window manager just like the widget policy is a function of the toolkit (gtk, Qt, motif, ...).

Re:You are confusing the window manager with X11

[Jace of Fuse!]

It is the window managers fault and not X11's.

I've always suspected that, but I've used quite a wide variety of Window Managers and they all seem to act the same, leading me to believe that the underlying X is the problem.

Either that, or everybody in the world is so used to being told what to do and how to live that they don't mind they're computer telling them where things go. I for one tell my computer what to do, not vice versa.

If X11 is really so extensible that the Window Managers should be able to be made more usable, I'm lead to wonder why they HAVEN'T been? Once the obnoxious bahavior is done away with, and the performance issues are done away with, I'd be more inclined to use X more often. But right now I'll just hang around in Bash, thanks.

Re:You are confusing the window manager with X11

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one tell my computer what to do, not vice versa.

Maybe you should try twm as your window manager. ;) You probably already have it installed too.

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[leandrod]

Obviously you are so pragmatic you failed to do your bit of learning...

Have you any hard data to say your flickering X desktop wasn't misconfigured? Configuration is not tweaking, but most GNU/Linux distributions suck, and there aren't yet good autoconfigurators for dump people like you.

You fail to realize that the GUI not inconsistent, it is flexible -- if you install only Gnome, only GNUStep, or only FLTK apps you get a consistent desktop; the problem here is lack of enough well written applications, as most programming effort has been into either backend code or else wasted in forks and competitive efforts because of licensing or technical issues. But here X and POSIX are a good foundation, what still is missing is a popular enough GUI side combination of widgets, window manager and applications.

Drivers are there for performance and cleannes, and so are they there in Linux and BSD. Freezing drivers interfaces for too long creates cruft.

Keyboardability is arriving, at least in Gnome.

As for NeXT, have you heard of GNUStep?

Finally, I didn't quite got your COM rant... if you want things in the server, X terminals to you!

Mr. Taco Effect

[Andrew Dvorak]

Mr. Taco just wants us to hold of on our little /. effect ritual until further notice, after he has downloaded all of the archives!

--Andy

Re:Mr. Taco Effect

[Art Tatum]

Well, he should just do like I did--and download it before it's announced!

We do need alternatives to X

[HanzoSan]

We shouldnt ditch X completely, however newer computers should not be using X.

Berlin, DirectFB, or whatever decides to become the alternative to X, should get support from the community as X does. The alternative to X should be backward compatible with X, it should run all or most of our programs, and most people on the desktop will be fine with this.

X should remain around for people with older hardware, people who arent on the desktop who need absolute stability etc.

For the desktop, I'd rather have directfb, berlin, any of these alternatives as long as my programs run.

No one who supports berlin or directfb is saying to move away from or ditch X, what people are saying is we need an alternative to X, X has flaws which will take 2-3 years to fix through extentions, why? Why not use something better if its better for the desktop user? Use whats best for your hardware.

Also the Xfree86 people and berlin people should think about setting up a subscription like transgaming style service so they can boost development somehow, because sure you can claim X is great, but if it takes 2-3 years to catch up to OSX, its not great at this very moment.

Re:We do need alternatives to X

[HeUnique]

Sure, why not?

GTK apps? QT apps? GNOME? KDE? Motif? TCL/TK? Xlib? FLTK? all those application which are based on the above libraries - ditch them - who needs them anyway...

X network transparency - nah, who needs it? ditch it also...

Support by 3rd party vendors (Nvidia, Matrox, ATI, Kyro) - heck, who needs them anyway...

And all those Unix porting apps - ditch them too...

Wine? heck, who needs it?

sounds a bit crazy, right? thats EXACTLY what you sound like with your pretty stupid remark...

X will be here for a very long time - get used to it! you don't like it? go ahead, join berlin (3D hardware acceleration? OpenGL? yucks. no need), or DirectFB (so you got GeForce 3 and it behaves ike you have Cirrus Logic cira 1995 - so what? and the 3D part is dead too)...

You don't have any other options!

Re:We do need alternatives to X

[HanzoSan]

You act like stuff cant be ported.

Port GTK if it isnt ported already.
Port QT (its even ported to windows)

Port Gnome and KDE.

The other junk you dont need.

The boring stuff

[fm6]

Not that this is a bad thing, bugfixes and increased stability/driver support is always nice. :-)

Indeed. Besides which, it indicates that the XFree team is committed to the boring, unglamorous drudgery of maintaining their product. This fact is important to everybody who uses XFree, not just those who benefit from the bug fixes!

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[pthisis]

There are VERY obvious performance differences between any version of Windows and as new of version of X as you want. X Windows programs flicker like mad when moving or resizing, objects aren't responsive

If you had read the thread I mentioned in the article you replied to, you'd see the anser to this one:


> > Not to be too non-technical...
> > > > If the protocol overhead is so small, why can't my 1200 mips (600mhzPIII)
> > machine resize windows without widgets streaking? My 486 could do
> > this fine running MS Windows. Is this because many widget toolkits (GTK,
> > QT) use XPutImage? There must be some way to speed things up.

blame your widget set. basically (sorry owen and co on the list) gtk a
(and i presume qt) dont render optimially at all. the do a semi-decent
job.. EXCEPt for opaque resizing, and when redrawing is more than a few
lines and boxes... this is a toolkit issue and imho the current set of
toolkits (motif, qt, gtk etc.) do a god-awful job of this kind of
stuff. right now i have silky smooth "opaque resize" stuff working here
with enlightenment 17 - but i do the rendering completely differently
to gtk/qt - its all a canvas and thus the rendering happens in a
"backing" so updates are smooth. on todays hardware this is the best
way to do it and have almots no artifacts ANd retain speed.

> "Streaking"? Are these opaque resizes? Alot of apps aren't doing
> event compression. They repaint the whole damn window every time they
> get an event. They could have at least checked that there weren't
> more events in the queue and got rid of them instead of handling each
> one in turn.

true. its a very bad thing that there are a LOT of apps that behave like
this... a LOT. some of the most commonly used are guilty of this
(netscape for one....)

the mouse frame rate is low

If you enable Silken Mouse in XFree86 4.0 and later, this should be fixed. Certainly an implementation issue and not an architectural issue (i.e. not a reason to throw out X and start over)

applications all have inconsistent look and feel, keyboard support is lacking...

These aren't X11 problems but GUI problems, GUI standardization is certainly a huge issue. But, gtk-2.0's accessibility enhancements include excellent keyboard support and some steps toward simplifying and unifying look&feel. KDE is moving in that direction as well. Obviously you need to use a single unified UI on your desktop, but having two decent ones available to choose from is not a bad thing (not to say that either is decent yet, but they're both heading there rapidly).

Sumner

hmm

[nomadic]

I'm curious, anyone have any experience with the other x86-based X systems? I know there are a couple of non-free ones, but I've never had the chance to see any of them. How do they measure up?

Re:hmm

[madrouter]

A little over 2 years ago...there wasnt very good support for some old video cards I had in some 486's. A friend lent me the disks for XiG accelerated X. Installation was fast and easy, and had a pretty small footprint.

mind you, I never played any games on this system or had dri-this or nv-driver that. but it was fast and usable in slackware 7 with 2.2

Re:hmm

[demon]

I've not used MetroX myself, but I did use AccelX some time back on an S3 PCI video board I had. It sucked. It was horribly unstable, much more so than XFree was at the time (3.3.x then). For all their talk about high performance and stability, IMNSHO their products didn't bear out their promises. And from what I've heard from some other people, they still don't.

Re:hmm

[stripes]

I'm curious, anyone have any experience with the other x86-based X systems? I know there are a couple of non-free ones, but I've never had the chance to see any of them. How do they measure up?

I used Metro Link X's server, it supported acceleration for cards XFree86 didn't at the time. Other then that it was about the same as a slightly older XFree, because I think it *was* a slightly older XFree with new module loading bits (since donated back) and accelerated support for a few extra cards (some of which were donated back).

It also had a problem where it made the clock run slow on some machines which really sucked because once your clock was more then 5min out of whack Kerb4 stopped working. So some of us switched XFree. Their support channel took months and months to deliver a fix. So nothing makes me want to run out and do it again (except maybe if I got stuck with the wrong video card).

Drivers for my laptop!

[Mike Hicks]

Heh, cool. I picked up a copy of the CVS version yesterday. I knew that as soon as I did that, a new version would come out..

I need this version, as it should have accelerated drivers for the Radeon Mobility chip that came in my Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop.

I just wonder how long it'll take to whip up a Debian package for it ;-)

Re:Drivers for my laptop!

[Bob The Cowboy]

I picked up a copy of the CVS version yesterday. I knew that as soon as I did that, a new version would come out..

Could you possibly download the CVS of Enlightenment 17?

;o)

Re:Drivers for my laptop!

[Sleuth]

Yeah, that'll help. E17 needs more people downloading and not writing anything...

Re:Drivers for my laptop!

[HanzoSan]

I have the same exact laptop hahaha

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[psavo]

Finally, I didn't quite got your COM rant... if you want things in the server, X terminals to you!

I think he means that for example toolkits should be moved onto server side, which could be potentially faster than what we have at the moment. This could probably also be handled by simple OpenGL:ish 'DisplayList', or 'Macro' which would expand into certain graphic shape.

This would potentially ruin much of the extencibility of X11 system as components should be installed on server before using it. So if You didn't have GTK-5 'extension' bolted on your server, you wouldn't get application to work.

Are you kidding me?

[NitsujTPU]

1) Irix is not a microsoft product. Score 1 for SGI.
2) The truely high-end stuff tends to be done on unix type workstations. Perhaps this graphics card garbage is true in the home market, but not on the professional one.
3) If you're willing to pay for X (you're willing to pay for windows aren't you?) You can always buy implementations that support the latest hardware.
4) There are X-Servers/Clients with extremely advanced graphics features. Again, you generally have to fork up some cash, but you're willing to pay for windows, aren't you?

With all respect

[HanzoSan]

X sucks at rendering compared to its competition.

OSX totally destroys it, even WindowsXP,

The Xrender extention is nice, but its going to take years like you said, just to get stuff like alpha channeling.

I agree X should use Xrender extentions however what are people to do in the meantime while OSX and XP kick our asses in the eye candy department and everyone says "Linux on the Desktop is dead" Before it even gets a chance to come out of the gates?

Whats wrong with having a directfb or berlin alternative which unlike Xrender, do the stuff you talk about RIGHT NOW.

I honestly dont think the media will sit and wait for 2 years or more while you slowly code Xrender.

So the option is, wait a few more years for Xrender to be completed, or check out stuff like directfb and berlin which claim to do what Xrender will do years from now.

Whats the best option? People want alpha channeling, scaling and OSX like effects, alternatives claim to be able to do it now, they port GTK and QT, and they claim to be compatible with X.

I think this should be discusssed more.

Re:With all respect

[Anonymous Coward]

The Xrender extention is nice, but its going to take years like you said, just to get stuff like alpha channeling.

I agree X should use Xrender extentions however what are people to do in the meantime while OSX and XP kick our asses in the eye candy department and everyone says "Linux on the Desktop is dead" Before it even gets a chance to come out of the gates?

Whats wrong with having a directfb or berlin alternative which unlike Xrender, do the stuff you talk about RIGHT NOW.

You're joking, right? XRender is pretty much coded right now, I'm running it on some of my machines (including my ipaq handheld). It'll be ready long before berlin is, the "a few years" is how long it will be before most new apps use it. Moving to Berlin would take far longer, and directfb is absolutely wrong since it's clearly slower--by treating a graphics card as a framebuffer, you lose all your 3D acceleration.

Re:With all respect

[HanzoSan]

We arent talking about where Xrender is, We only care about when apps will actually use it.

We need apps using it right now. Apps can use berlin and directfb right now.

Re:With all respect

[Anonymous Coward]

We arent talking about where Xrender is, We only care about when apps will actually use it.

Apps don't need to be recoded to use it. Just patch the GUI toolkit to take advantage of it, which has already been done for GTK+ and Qt. Haven't you seen any of the demos? And if you want new types of fonts, just patch the font server and all the toolkits & apps can take advantage of them automatically.

We need apps using it right now. Apps can use berlin and directfb right now.

Berlin is still far from complete, and directfb doesn't actually support any rendering model. It just provides direct, unaccelerated access to the framebuffer, that's it.

Re:With all respect

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, yeah. Apps _do_ use XRender already. Both KDE and gtk CVS versions use XRender. framebuffer isn't a player since it would be slower and a step backwards. Berlin has far less support, and it will be a long time before it can do things that XRender does today (if ever). Plus, Berlin has horrible speed issues surrounding it's use of CORBA. Even with the work Stephen Davies did with respect to omniORB4 speedups and Berlin, this is still a huge speed problem that isn't likely to go away. They're looking at switching to TAO instead of omniORB but a lot of the problems are just architectural problems with CORBA that can't be easily optimized away. It's doubtful that Berlin will ever approach XFree/DRI in speed, let alone XRender.

Re:With all respect

[dvdeug]

Whats wrong with having a directfb or berlin alternative which unlike Xrender, do the stuff you talk about RIGHT NOW.

They do? That's news to me. So far, Berlin is a technology demo that runs one (1) practical tool, a Jabber client. It's designed in such a way that it's hard to port GTK or QT to it. At best, Berlin will be useable replacement by the time XRender is done. The framebuffer is a framebuffer, not a windowing system. Berlin and X can use the framebuffer, but it's not a windowing system, and it doesn't support all the stuff a windowing system needs (say, fonts for example.)

So, no, they can't replace X RIGHT NOW.

Re:With all respect

[Darren Winsper]

Apps can use XRender right now.

Re:With all respect

[Anonymous Coward]

We arent talking about where Xrender is, We only care about when apps will actually use it.

Most of the apps are open source. Go to it if that's such a huge priority to you.

Re:With all respect

[HanzoSan]

Oh Really?

So which app is using Alpha channelling?

Re:With all respect

[HanzoSan]

KDE only uses Xrender for its fonts.

It cant do true alpha channel effects.
It cant do scaling it cant do much anything from Xrender except some stuff to the fonts, big deal.

Speed isnt as important as you think when you have a fast computer, frame buffer is slower? SLOWER? Its frame buffer, if you have nvidia and a pentium 4 is it slower?

Berlin I cannot comment on.

Re:With all respect

[Anonymous Coward]

Berlin I cannot comment on.

You have been commenting on it throughout this entire thread! Of course you're a goddamn idiot to any of us who really know how this stuff works. Quit crying like a pussy and do some coding yourself if you want to see it done faster.

Re:With all respect

[pthisis]

KDE only uses Xrender for its fonts.

It cant do true alpha channel effects.

Qt 3.0 and later supports XRender for alpha transparency, etc. Requires XFree86 4.1 or later. KDE 3.0 supports this (in CVS), using it for transparent menus and other stuff. Not released yet, and added 29 December (which was after the first KDE 3.0 Beta release, I think). The transparency is hardware accelerated on supported platforms (including lots of them, e.g. nvidia, ATI rage128, Matrox, etc)

Speed isnt as important as you think when you have a fast computer, frame buffer is slower? SLOWER? Its frame buffer, if you have nvidia and a pentium 4 is it slower?

For anything where speed really matters (e.g. video playback or other Xv stuff, 3D) yes, fb is definitely slower. It's probably slower for "normal" 2D stuff as well, that's true of most 2D cards but I don't have an nvidia so I can't bench it.

Sumner

Re:With all respect

[Wdomburg]

>So the option is, wait a few more years for
>Xrender to be completed, or check out stuff like
>directfb and berlin which claim to do what
>Xrender will do years from now.

Well, Berlin is at 0.2.2, and requires some sort of underlying graphic system - directfb, ggi, sdl or glut.

Both sdl and glut require an underlying graphics system as well, usually X. So those two are out if you want to do away with X.

Now on to GGI - at least the library (libGGI) is release quality. This is actually just a userspace graphics library that sits on top of an underlying system - X, svgalib, fbcon or glide.

We'll assume you want acceleration, freedom from X, and reasonable hardware support. So out go X, svgalib, and glibe. FBcon can be accelerated, as long as it used kggi, which is currently only available from CVS.

DirectFB also depends on FBcon, but it is does at least have what looks like a near final release.

So, our choices are:

Berlin on DirectFB on FBcon
Berlin on GGI on FBcon
DirectFB on FBcon

We may want to nix Berlin on GGI on FBcon, if only for the sake of having something which is SOMEWHAT near completion.

I'm not sure where you're getting this figure of "a few years" for Xrender to be completed, as Keith doesn't have timeline information on his website at all, but alpha compositing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel positioning are all written and included in the current XFree86 distribution. As the primary author states, the big pieces left are polygons and image transformation. Given that the initial discussions were at the 2000 USENIX Technical Conference, I'd say their progress is remarkable.

>Whats the best option? People want alpha
>channeling, scaling and OSX like effects,
>alternatives claim to be able to do it now, they
>port GTK and QT, and they claim to be compatible
>with X.

Xrender is already able to do alpha channeling and anti-aliased text, which are a major part of the deficiencies. Image transformation for things like scaling are forthcoming.

The alternatives, as discussed above, are not at a final release stage, rely on a linux only graphics layer (FBcon), have a narrower range of hardware supported (or supported well), and have a signifigantly different paradigm, thus complicating porting existing toolkits.

So is moving to a completely different toolkit, possibly with an unsolidified API, with the added headache of bringing all the drivers up to the same level of stability and performance as XFree86 already enjoys the "best option"? Or is the best option really updating toolkits to take advantage of the features available in XRender now, and planning on supporting the upcoming portions of the extension as they become available?

Matt

Re:With all respect

[puetzk]

all of KDE3 :-)

now, styles aren't using it yet, but qt3 has more or less ripped out all of the hacks it used to have and is using RENDER extensively throughout it's codebase for these kinds of operations. KDE2 uses RENDER as well, in a more limited fashion, to allow antialiased text.

The new X11 Rendering model is here, and it's real, and apps are using it already. Not all of them, not to it's full abilities, but that's changing fast already.

Re:With all respect

[Hydrogenoid]

Being able to render apps on a different machine is really useful...

(Sigh) here we go again ...

[Space cowboy]

This is of course completely dependent on whether your window manager "grabs" the X server while doing a 'move window'. Switch that off, and your windows will update asynchronously. There is a minor performance hit on some (mainly older) graphics cards when this option is selected. Personally I can't tell the difference on my G450.

The other thing of note is how ...

A great idea, but difficult to do given the direction Xfree has gone in this regard. IMO Xfree needs replacing, people need better choices for windowing systems. Xfree can't cut it for highly demanding stuff, and no number of extentions are going to change that.

(above) appears to sound knowledgeable whilst being completely and utterly wrong. (S)he is simply spreading FUD (why, I don't know - perhaps (s)he likes to appear clever when (s)he isn't). Don't you just love it when people try to use stuff they don't know about to advance their personal agenda ?

Almost as much foot-in-mouth as

Ich bin ein Berliner

Simon.

Re:(Sigh) here we go again ...

[Anonymous DWord]

How's your German?
http://www.serve.com/shea/germusa/jfkberl.htm

Re:(Sigh) here we go again ...

[Space cowboy]

>
> How's your German?

Not that bad actually, considering it's my 4th language. I lived in Munich for a short while.

I actually found the self-same URL when checking whether Berliner had one or 2 'L's in it. Isn't Google great ?

The point is though, that I'm not judging history's take on the famous phrase, I'm making use of its' perception to point out just how foolish you can potentially seem when talking complete bollocks.

Simon.

Re:(Sigh) here we go again ...

[Anonymous DWord]

Gotcha. It all makes sense now. I can sleep tonight. :)

Re:(Sigh) here we go again ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Simon,

I posted the original. Thanks for the tip on the Window Manager....I tried a different one and sure enough the windows updated.

-Mike

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[Ozwald]

Thanks, finally someone who understands compared to others assume suggesting COM is a trick to sneak MS technology into Linux.

I'm not for destroying extensibility. Instead, I would love to see a system where objects are installed onto the server, maybe even at run-time off the web if an application needs it. Even better, a system where a developer can extend an existing control to add new functionality or build a new control off of generic objects.

Just a suggestion, if you guys don't like my ideas, I won't lose any sleep. Just trying to help.

Oh, and the driver thing too, don't forget that.

Ozwald

ATI Rage Pro (mach64) support

[Lycestra]

How is the 4.2.0 mach64 support? In the past, in order to get XVideo support, I had to use Gatos (linked off of LIVID, hosted by SourceForge). Play an mpeg1 full screen with full framerate and nominal CPU usage is nice. Without it, I can barely get one to play at resolution without dropping frames, and pinning the processor. The Changelog doesn't seem to say much. Am I stuck having to download Gatos? Any plans on merging these, or have people already dubbed mach64 as "POS obsolete that I need to upgrade"? (fat fscking chance)

I like my hardware support, and I won't upgrade if it's a pain to maintain it/save it from upgrade zeolots.

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[psavo]

Oh, and the driver thing too, don't forget that.

The driver thing is already there. NVidia, for one is doing it. Half-assedly, though =). (Matrox too??)
You are corect however, that maybe they should separate drivers from infrastructure a bit.
Actually the whole difference of XF86v3 vs XF86v4 was about it. (including binary compatibility accross OS). They have now all the possibilities to seperate drivers from other things.

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[Bert64]

Flicking when resizing / moving the mouse really depends on your display hardware... i have NONE of these problems on my ATI and Permedia-2 based machines, however i recently had the misfortune to use some kind of trident chipset which was integrated into a via motherboard... and i had all the problems you described, plus considerable instability. Also the same problems occured when using generic (VESA/Framebuffer) drivers as opposed to those designed for the particular displaycard. But don`t try to tell me windows is very fast/usefull when using the generic vga driver either..
Ofcourse XFree86 will never have such good hardware support as Windows until hardware manufacturers start releasing drivers with the same priority.

compiling and installing

[bcrowell]

Compiling and installing Xfree needs to be easier.
Amen, brother! My most recent attempt to install Linux was completely successful, except that I couldn't get X to work. Very frustrating.

How much of this is an issue where the companies that make monitors refuse to open their specs? The proliferation of hardware is insane. The Mandrake distro I was trying to install had a list of hundreds and hundreds of monitors -- a list which didn't include my monitor. When I searched for my monitor's model number in Google, nothing even came up! You'd think there would be standards, but even old standbys like SVGA didn't work for me. Seems like the lack of standards might be one side-effect of the MS monopoly -- hardware manufactures know that as long as their product works with Windows, it doesn't matter if they conform to any standards, and it doesn't matter if they publish their specs.

Apple sure has it easy. They only have to make Quartz run with their own monitors.

Re:compiling and installing

[vanguard]

Apple sure has it easy. They only have to make Quartz run with their own monitors.

Actually, that's not true. Apple only resells LCD monitors. However, graphics professionals consider LCD monitors to be too weak with regards to color accuracy. That's why Apple needs to support CRTs.

Apple supports far more than their own monitors.

Re:compiling and installing

[RustyTaco]

Um, damn you're ignorant. I don't mean to be so rude, but dude.
Anyway, monitors are NOT the problem. They are dumb devices. As advanced as monitors get (aside from digital flat panels) is to respond with their capabilities when the video card asks. It's called DDC and has been implemented in most monitors made in the last five years. XFree86 doesn't directly use this information expect for the physical screen size because it would totally hose things up if the monitor was turned off, or not connected, when X queried it.

Apple sure has it easy. They only have to make Quartz run with their own monitors.

Again you've confused monitors with video hardware. Quartz doesn't care what monitor it's feeding. At most it cares about some of the basic capabilities of the monitor, like size, resolution, and maybe refresh rate.
- RustyTaco

Re:compiling and installing

[stripes]

Apple supports far more than their own monitors

Yeah, but they do require that the monitors send back sizing info (via DPMS, or USB), and they still pretty much only support a tiny handful of video cards. Plus Apple gets to choose all the new cards. That does make life simpler for the people who write Quartz...of corse having to support all the extra stuff that Quartz does, and doing it with fewer people, that makes it a bit harder too.

Fast Free Windows X Server Anywhere ? (Off Topic)

[Quazion]

First why i seek one, i tried Cygwin-X (its SLOW!) and i need it for my Roommates to run programs from my machine, they all use windows and arent the Computer Geeks i hoped they would become and i cant get them to try or even use any Unix like OS (meanly cause they only play Illegal Downloaded Games), but nevertheless there some programs i would like them to try and or use, but these need X, and cant seem to find a X server for windows, which i can use freely and is pretty fast, i tried some Commercial ones and they work really good, but i hate to make people use illegal software and so i wont distribute it.

And idea's or coders who want to start a new project ?, cause look windows is used for Office and Games...now if you get other X apps running on your Company Network of a Linux/BSD server for free wouldnt that be an Enhancement ? you can then also mix MacOs/Linux/BSD/*nix and Windows in a Company and still run all your software on nearly every machine....i see good use here i think..

Quazion.

Re:oh yeah! I have been waiting for this.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's "SLI support," but it is non-functional (Glide3 SLIAA-1-0-branch and DRI tdfx-2-1-branch contains Bill White's work from December 2000). It was never finished, though (I think we all can guess why).

2, Main Contenders, IMHO

[Trevelyan]

There are two main contenders for possible replacements for X, but both are not ready at all.

1. theres the berlin project, mentioned on /. b4
2. the Linux Kernel FB is pretty much ready to build a wm for, all though i dont know if any one has, i know there is a widget lib though, wslib or something like that.

-Trevelyan

Got mine before story on Slashfart

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah! Got my copy of 4.2.0 this morning for my latest Linux from Scratch install. Didn't know it had just come out or was about to experience the slashvagina effect. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!

Re:Fast Free Windows X Server Anywhere ? (Off Topi

[Anonymous Coward]

X-Win32 from http://www.starnet.com/

Its not free... but the downloadable demo works for 2 hours at a time.

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[Fnkmaster]

Very interesting post - I agree that Gtk and Qt are probably culprits for not properly playing nice with X Windows and its rules. I think part of the problem is the fact that there never seems to have been any coherent work done on this. The windowing system oriented people who work on X say "the toolkit authors fault". The toolkit authors would say "it's your drivers or the limitations of X Windows".

While I do appreciate the flexibility of X Windows, I honestly DON'T think the windowing system and toolkits should be these totally orthogonal projects, and the toolkits just "draw as they see fit" on a canvas that they expect the windowing system to render dumbly. This is the X model, inherited from the dumb terminal days. I have had this argument out several other times here on /., I am not a newbie or a moron, and I AM a professional software executive with over 8 years of programming experience (though admittedly not writing windowing systems or toolkits).

I certainly believe firmly in the benefits of choice and competition, and agree with most /.ers on that. I just don't think that the toolkit is the right place for it. Linux is competition for Windows. Berlin (could be) competition for X (someday). But Gnome/Gtk and KDE/Qt as competing toolkits, desktop environments, etc. that are totally decoupled from the Windowing system? It should honestly be enough to have competing apps built on the same toolkit. A somewhat similar aesthetic for the desktop.

I appreciate what X Windows does for us, I just don't think it's the right solution for a desktop operating environment. Because of all the X apps out there, I think anything that comes out needs X compatibility as a backwards compatible route, but I don't feel that we should look to X Windows for the future. Just my opinion.

Says who?

[NDPTAL85]

Can you provide us with a source that demands a release must have binaries?

Re:Says who?

[Anonymous Coward]

common sense? Name me another open source project that makes stable 'releases' without binaries?

Re:Says who?

[netsharc]

The kernel?

Re:Says who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, kernel binaries are always available.

Re:Says who?

[spauldo]

mplayer - linux movie player
libjpeg - the jpeg library
netpbm - Graphics utilities

There's countless others, but I don't feel like looking for them.

I remember back when binary packages weren't released for damn near anything - after all, with gcc, everyone could have a C compiler. Wanted to run the newest afterstep or fvwm? Guess what? Download the source.

For linux, it's the distribution's job to provide binaries. For other systems like solaris and HP-UX there are places like Sun Freeware or HP-UX Software Porting Archive to get it. Some projects do so as a courtesy, but it's hardly required.

For something like XFree86, a binary distribution would almost certainly screw up your linux distribution's packaging system. Very few people would be able to utilize a binary distro of X that isn't tailored for their flavor of linux.

Besides, if you run something like linux from scratch then you don't want to download binaries anyway.

Silken Mouse?

[raistlinne]

How do you enable Silken Mouse in XFree86 4.x?

Re:Silken Mouse?

[pthisis]

Check the docu, you need to have it compiled into your X server and might need an Option line in XF86Config-4. If it's on, you'll get:

(==) R128(0): Silken mouse enabled

or similar in the XFree86 output.

If you're running a kernel with good latency (e.g. 2.4.17 + Andrew Morton's LL patches, I use 2.4.17-jl11) you'll no longer see any mouse cursor dragging/skipping/etc problems. If the kernel has bad latency, there's nothing X can do about it.

Sumner

ftp.freesoftware.com

[L. J. Beauregard]

I suppose you just copied that list off of xfree86.org. I don't blame you, but they need to strike freesoftware.com from that list. It's been AWOL for months.

Cursed be Wind River for all eternity.

Re:Fast Free Windows X Server Anywhere ? (Off Topi

[yomegaman]

There is a free X server written in Java called WeirdX that you might try. I've used it before on my Mac and it actually isn't too bad. You can find it here.

Re:We dont really need X anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

DirectFB just provides access to the framebuffer. If you want to build a full UI on top of the framebuffer, you'll need to code font support, widget sets, window management, etc. In other words, you'll need to start over and build the equivalent of Berlin from the ground up on top of DirectFB, except it won't be accelerated.

which card does xfree86 love most?

[timothy]

That is, what video card(s) could I buy that are absolutely, unconditionally, all-features-but-the-hamster, no-problems, all dancing 3D-whizbands supported by XFree86? No recompilation, no binary-only drivers, no unexpected visits from Dr. Murphy ...

That is, what card to choose for setting up a system that it would take a concerted effort not to get right just by installing, say, Mandrake 8.1, that will run GLTron and Tuxracer without hiccoughing, that will never call attention to itself, at least in the bad way?

timothy

Re:which card does xfree86 love most?

[glwtta]

Sorry, as far as I know, the best way to go is to buy nVidia and use their binary drivers - if you want to have decent OpenGL support that is.

On the bright side, it's so damn easy that even a Red Hat user could do it (can I start saying that already? ;) ) - install two RPMs, add 4 words to the config file and start XFree, works like a charm.

I actually am a bit surprised that Mandrake doesn't include nVidia drivers itself, and I'd say that unless some sort of licensing troubles are involved (hey, you never know) they probably will at some point.

Re:which card does xfree86 love most?

[Spazntwich]

It's certainly not any Geforce series card. My geforce3 for one, isn't zbuffering or something in Tux racer, so the courses look like crap.

GLTron segfaults before it even starts, but I blame mandrake 8.1 for that, not my video card. In short, I think that if you get ANY 3d card and you want any sort of good 3d performance from it, you'll have to download some official drivers, or get 3rd party ones (not included with X).

I wish you the best of luck though.

Re:which card does xfree86 love most?

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't tried GLtron, but Tuxracer and Q3A work fine on my ATI Xpert 2000 (rage 128).

Re:which card does xfree86 love most?

[damiam]

My Voodoo3 works super for tuxracer, but OpenGL screensavers freeze eventually if you leave them running all day. I might reccomend an older Radeon, or a Radeon 8500 once they get DRI drivers for it.

Re:which card does xfree86 love most?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could try an ATI Radeon based AGP card. It has both FB support and DRI support, and Mandrake 8.1 configured mine without a single hiccup. I'm running an older machine, but I can play quake 2 (compiled from source) @ 1024 X 768 w/ 16bpp at 50 + fps. . .

_James

Re:which card does xfree86 love most?

[slashdot_commentator]

Sorry, as far as I know, the best way to go is to buy nVidia and use their binary drivers - if you want to have decent OpenGL support that is.

Its not the best idea if you wish to have "closed" source drivers. The consequence being that Nvidia can decide not to develop their Xwindow drivers on future cards. The Xfree team would have to reverse engineer the cards and would not get the informational support from Nvidia. The company is very cagey about providing what they consider "proprietary" information that give their cards a "competitive" advantage.

On the bright side, it's so damn easy that even a Red Hat user could do it (can I start saying that already? ;) ) - install two RPMs, add 4 words to the config file and start XFree, works like a charm.

I don't run Red Hat, so I don't know if Red Hat provides Nvidia's version of XWindows. If not, then you're just getting the stock (slow) version of Xwindows.

I actually am a bit surprised that Mandrake doesn't include nVidia drivers itself, and I'd say that unless some sort of licensing troubles are involved (hey, you never know) they probably will at some point.

All the more reason not to buy/use Nvidia graphic chips.

Re:which card does xfree86 love most?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I am glad that Nvidia (unlike almost every other Gfx card company) actually offer drivers for there graphics cards, for some time they have offered source rpms and tarballs, which build an interface for the (binary) driver so that they can be used with any custom kernel / X build (using it with a Geforce 2 GTS, 2.4.17mjc and Xfree86 4.1 under debian here atm) Currently X seems to be 100% reliable with this configuration, and I hope Nvidia will continue to support there drivers under Linux (maybe they'll bring out some BSD ones too :-). It would be nice if they made them GPL, but even as binary they are IMHO the best OpenGL gfx card drivers for Linux.

Riiiight.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most apps look exactly like the author of the app coded it to look like. Maybe you just don't like the authors idea of what the app should look like.

Here's the thing with that. The source code is freely available, go get it and arrange everything just like _you_ want. Put up or shut up.

Window placement and icon placement is fully configurable.

I have my menu at the top of my screen in every wm that I have ever used.

>> I don't like tiled, cornered, or cascaded windows, for example.

Do you like anything? What kind of window _do_ you like?

If you want polish and a consistant interface, limit yourself to one window manager, and one set of applications.

The wide variety of interfaces and apps are a _good_ thing. They mean that we are free to use whatever we want.

I do want the next thing in GUI's, I want a 3D interface. I want to be able to run an app in a window and then spin the window that the app is running in, while it is updating the window. :)

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[pthisis]

I think part of the problem is the fact that there never seems to have been any coherent work done on this. The windowing system oriented people who work on X say "the toolkit authors fault". The toolkit authors would say "it's your drivers or the limitations of X Windows"

Nope, read the thread I quoted and you'll see that gtk developer Owen Taylor agrees and that gtk 2.0 includes some of the optimization mentioned. The toolkit and X11 authors do work together on these things, and the toolkit authors have had a huge amount of input into the design of the XRender extension and the DRI infrastructure.

While I do appreciate the flexibility of X Windows, I honestly DON'T think the windowing system and toolkits should be these totally orthogonal projects, and the toolkits just "draw as they see fit" on a canvas that they expect the windowing system to render dumbly. This is the X model, inherited from the dumb terminal days.

Actually that's not the X model (BTW, X wouldn't run on a dumb terminal--even vi wouldn't run on a true dumb terminal (ie glass tty)). The X model is to provide high-level graphics primitives to the application, which then submits them to the server which can turn them into whichever low-level calls are most efficient on the hardware in question. Not only that, but the library used to submit those request can (and does) batch them together so that the application writer can have a simpler model and still get efficient code--for instance, multiple XDrawLine calls are batched by XLib into a single XDrawLines call that's sent on to the server, saving on round-trips and in some cases saving on bus traffic to the video card by eliminating redundant traffic. Or servicing those high-level requests in whatever manner is most efficient for the hardware in use.

Highly efficient graphics can be done this way. Witness SGI, who were for years the undisputed leaders in the graphics field. They used X11.

But think of X as being more of a device-driver with a unified API, the GUI is to be built on top of that. It's a highly reasonable and well considered model that is ideal for building the high-performance GUIS of the future on. Far better than e.g. a framebuffer, which is already obsolete (doesn't handle many 2D features like overlays & alpha blending, doesn't do 3D acceleration, doesn't allow for hardware security a la SGI, doesn't handle hardware video decoding, etc) and is low-level enough that you can't have the driver do intelligent optimizations without rewriting the apps. And designed with the foresight to be extremely flexible.

Sumner

FreeBSD 4.5

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder if it will make it into the 4.5 release, RC2 was released yesterday.

Re:FreeBSD 4.5

[jquirke]

I highly doubt it. It's January 20th now (AEDT) and the release is scheduled for 26/01/2002. I doubt 6 days is sufficient time to do something as major as an XF86 upgrade. So, they would never make such a change in this stage of the "stablization".

--JQ

Re:FreeBSD 4.5

[glwillia]

Well, the FreeBSD 4.4 CD installs XFree 3.3.6 by default, so probably not :/

XFree86 4.0.3 is included on that CD (you have to install it manually), but 4.1.0 (and soon, 4.2.0) is easily had via the ports tree.

Yay

[Kourino]

Hopefully the ATI drivers do TV in/out without lots of finagling now ... I got TV in to work (kind of) with old gatos CVS drivers, but TV out under X never worked.So, how many releases until someone gets around to converting this to autoconf/automake? -_^

hahahahahahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

oh, man, that's a good one, you pussy.

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[leandrod]

I didn't quite got it yet. If you have a client installed at the host and the (non-hardware related) libraries are also there, what's the problem? The X server at the terminal should (IMHO) use them all right.

Obviously hardware-related extensions will still need to be at the client.

Not Mirrored Yet

[gnugeekus]

Okay... since Xfree 4.2.0 according to the article hasn't reached all the mirrors yet.. what was the point of posting the release on slashdot, thereby slashdoting the xfree site, and making it more difficult for the mirrors to get their copies?

Couldn't you have waited a day until the mirrors were caught up?

Re:Not Mirrored Yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly what I said. The packagers have not even put binaries together yet. Just slashdot needs to post anything it can to get page impressions for those ads to pay off.

Re:Not Mirrored Yet

[bruns]

Thats because it would require having a clue... Something news sites seem to not have picked up yet...

Try again!

[NDPTAL85]

Sorry, "common sense" isn't a credible enough source. Seeing as how "common sense" usualy equates to what's obvious to one person and oblivious to another.

Re:Try again!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, the other open source project that makes stable releases without binaries is?

Re:Fast Free Windows X Server Anywhere ? (Off Topi

[sgifford]

I've had OK luck in the past with MIX:

http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/docs/MIX-HOWTO. html

Most important feature for me

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the big show stopper for X is that I can't change screen-depth while running.

When I play quake3 I want's to get the highest possible framerate and runs 16 bit. But Return to Castle Wolfenstein should run at 32 bit to get maximum eye candy.

But since it is impossible to change color depth, I am pretty much stock in the 16 bit always.

The worst part is that people using Windows doesn't take my operating system seriously because it can't even do such a simple thing.

I don't care if isn't the most clean solution to change colordepth on the fly, because it so lame that it isn't possible.

At the moment I can't think of any other showstoppers for Linux.
The gui's is shaping up, configuration tools could be by 3. party since everything is documented and configs tends to be in plain text.
Installation of 3. party apps is really easy. And all the games I have installed lately have installed and run (nearly) without a glitch. Much better than installition on windows imho.

But it is still not possible to change colordepth :/

Please please include this "feature" in the next Xfree (or at least convince me that it isn't a necesary feature:).

//lean

Re:Most important feature for me

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the big show stopper for X is that I can't change screen-depth while running

I'm not trying to sound snarky here, but ... why? I mean, you can shut down and restart X in about 5 seconds. (i.e., without GNOME, without KDE, etc. -- if you just want to play a game, you don't need those anyway.) It's literally faster than it would take you in Windows to bring up the dialog box, look for the right tab, find the right bpp setting in the drop down list box, etc.

Re:Most important feature for me

[Anonymous Coward]

So you want's me to close all my programs just to run a game in a different resolution.

Usually I just start another Xserver if I want's to use another bit or screen resolution. But comeon, it is waste of resources to start another X-server (not to mention all other features you loose by having your programs run in different screens):

//lean

Re:Most important feature for me

[Jimithing DMB]

Running another X server is not going to waste resources.

When you start up another X server it has full control of the graphics card and thus the only resources you are using as RAM.

However, remember that the other X server is no longer speaking to the graphics card and thus is more than likely not running very much at all. Except I am sure it does still service X protocol requests, so it'll be doing some of that, but as far as blitting out to the screen I would think no.

So that would mean that most of its image is going to be swapped out so the only thing you are using is some swapspace.

Couple this with the advantage of being able to pause the game and then Ctrl-Alt-F7 to the other server and then Ctrl-Alt-F8 back I don't see the problem here.

You can always use the xinit command from within an xterm on your usual display (probably :0) and tell it to load up and X on :1 or whatever with a different config file and to start the client /usr/bin/quake3 or whatever.

I did this myself a lot except that NVs drivers tend to crash when switching. However I have found that the absolute latest drivers (1.0-2313) seem to work perfectly when doing this. However sometimes it was possible to do a Ctrl-Alt-F1 before hand, wait for the text screen to show up normally and then Alt-F[78] to whichever one you wanted to go to then. But eventually even that method would sometimes crash. New drivers seem to make this work right.

Happy X-Free Release 420! :-)

Re:Most important feature for me

[Anonymous Coward]

But you have to remember that most games have an ingame option with color depth. This is also the case in q3 and rtcw but they are just "fake" buttons.
I am guessing that it probably would be a major redesign of X to make this feature work, and maybe it will destroy some backward capability.

But I think it is the way to go, because otherwise you will never be able to sell Linux as a gaming (newbie) OS.

But I guess people just have to buy a new card that can handle all games in 32bit :)

//lean

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[psavo]

I think I fucked up the terminology. Sorry. ;) (client vs server)
The point is that the tookit related stuff would be thrown at client (as you call it). To the 'drawing hardware' end. So the server would just pass a request 'draw button at X,Y' and nothing more. Now it is done somewhat at the level of: draw polygon X,Y,W,H; draw box X,Y,W,H; draw text X+2,Y+3, ...
This would speed up at least toolkits, as there would be less redrawing related bandwidth waste.
But I'm not sure what would be the total impact..

And I really think that OpenGL style display list would ROCK the X11 ;)

try gnustep + window maker

[horster]

hey, I think I know how you feel. kde, as much as I love it is always a little klunky and frustrating, not to mention slow.
gnome is cool, but tends to be little jerky and uneven in both look & feel and performance.

I've found windowmaker & gnustep to be the first environment that really makes me feel like I'm in a clean, professional desktop, where everything looks good AND perfomes well.

please not that the experiences with gnome and kde are my own - I haven't done a big study or comparison of the two - just my observation. so, if you're observations are different, that's great, I was just trying to offer some help to another poster who seems to have the same opinions.

FreeBSD + GNUStep IS FAST

[horster]

ok like the subject says, the windowmaker/gnustep/freebsd combo is just as fast as windows. I really think that part of the problem rests 1) with the linux kernel, as it needs some more work to be a desktop friendly os (windows has had many years to make optimizations specifically for this task), and 2) with the desktop environments of both gnome and kde which just aren't as fast as gnustep.

that said, a new windowsystem would be great - competition is good right?

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[leandrod]

> I fucked up the terminology.

So did I.

I see your point -- the toolkit would be at the terminal, the X server. I thought there was a way of doing so already, may be wrong 'cause don't remember any specifics.

I wonder what the X core people would comment on this.

It's not X

[Arandir]

Most X11 based applications have a crappy look and feel.

The fault of the application or it's underlying toolkit. Blame GTK+, Qt or Motif. Actually though I've seen some awesome widget themes for all of the above. Themes that are aethetically pleasing without being garish. My favorite is QNiX (and it's derivative Teax) for KDE. Clean, simple, pretty.

Everything from how the Windows decide where they want to be to really obnoxious icon placement just irks some people

That's the window manager. And I don't really know what you're complaining about, since the typical windowmanager for X11 is light years ahead of the window managing component of Windows in terms of usability. Take your pick of window placement policy and focus policy. You can make your better WMs behave just like you want them to. As for icon placement, just place them where you want them if your desktop even uses icons.

X is not a desktop. It is a low level graphical library. By design X does not tell the window manager how to layout windows or icons. It is policy-less. This is a Good Thing(tm). So direct your complaints to where they belong. If you don't like your WMs policies then use another WM. There are a million to choose from. Try Enlightenment, Windowmaker, Blackbox, KWin/KDE, Sawfish, or IceWM.

I don't like tiled, cornered, or cascaded windows, for example. I like Window memory and I like Icons to stay where I put them... I like my Task/Tool bars at the top of the screen (where they belong), but I don't like systems that let me put them there and then continue to ignore the fact that I'm not running default setting so some things don't look right or misalign themselves.

Then use smart or column/row window placement, don't autoarrange icons, and drag your taskbar to the top of the screen. KDE does all of this without unarranging your layout. If you want "window memory" then use the title bar menu and choose "store settings".

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

> I thought there was a way of doing so already...

Yes and No. There is nothing there at this time. However, the XServer(XFree's anyways) is designed to be extensible. Now that we have had GUIs around for 40 years, perhaps it is possible to come up with a higher-level protocol that would allow us to pass messages back and forth. For anything complex, it could still use both drawing primitives combined with these widget primitives. Hopefully then, we could swap in and out with different toolkits. The only real problem is that the client must know about the info of the toolkit primitives.
I can see one major problem and that is the ppl who suggest allowing anything to be downloaded espicially via the web. That idea is the most brain-dead thing that I have heard. At that point, we will be as insecure as where M$ will hopefully be in about 3 years (if they work hard on being secured).

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[leandrod]

Just found this: http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/render/2001-April /000965.html

Quoting Mark Vojkovich:

If the bandwidth issue is a concern we should discuss alternatives
to client-side rasterization, though I'm not sure there's much to
be gained by server-side rasterization. It could probably fit in
pretty well as option for the client to chose. At least I think
it could.


So they're thinking about it...

Open source, closed project

[ElMiguel]

I'm very frustrated at XFree developers.

Between release 3.3.6 and 4.0, some bug was introduced in the mga driver. As a result, 4.0 and later don't work for older Matrox Mystique cards, such as the one I had.

I wrote about ten mails, along half a year, reporting this to the XFree86 developers. I wrote to several of their mailing lists, to their bug report page, I used their bug report tool, I tried to contact them by every mean I could think of. And I never got an answer from them. Not a word. Nothing.

Sure, I am not a Linux guru, but I don't think I'm a complete newbie either. I have been using Linux heavily since four years ago and I've occasionally contacted with the maintainers of several projects, and I've never had a problem, except with XFree86.

I know that developers don't want their time wasted by bad bug reports, so I carefully followed the instructions on their web page. I included in my mails every detail that seemed possibly relevant to me, and told them to please ask anything else they needed to know. I expected that, if my bug reports weren't perfect, at least somebody would tell me what they were missing. But I got NOTHING.

More than a problem of PR, they seem to have a problem of attitude.

Re:Open source, closed project

[mike_sucks]

Hey, what you have to keep in mind is that XFree developers (like all free software developers) are working on it either in their own time, or are getting paid to do so.

In the first case, they're only going to be inclined to work on what appeals to them, or what they need to get working. In the second case, they're only going to work on what their employers want.

So, if no one is interested in getting older Mystique cards working, then all the bug reports and bitching on /. in the world isn't going to get it fixed. You either have to fix it yourself, or if you can't then wait until someone with the appropirate skills is sufficiently motivated to fix it for you.

Mike.

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[be-fan]

While I agree that the toolkits suck, that email is rather irrelevent. If I interpret the email correctly, backing is referring to double-buffering. That's nothing more than a cheap trick used by designs that can't render widgets quickly enough. In a game, double buffering is useful because because any tearing is really annoying. That's not so on a desktop. BeOS, for example, can render widgets fast enough on much more ancient machines and it does't have double-buffering. Same thing for QNX Photon (and hell, Photon is even more flexible than X. It even runs the graphics driver as a seperate process).

What we *really* need is a display config tool

[manic micko]

Out of the top 10 things I can think of that makes it impossible for a normal person to run Linux comfortably, the lack of a display configuration tool is it. I am a programmer, I consider myself pretty knowledgeable regarding UNIX/Linux, I do all my development in vi/vim, etc. But for the life of me, every time I have tried to change how X is set-up (to switch my resolution or colors, even) I could not figure it out or I screwed up my configuration. That tells you something about the X configuration. I have used Xconfigurator with about 75% success, although I always had to quit what I was doing, go back to the shell, and restart X.

I think the solution to this problem is for some senior developers over at KDE, GNOME, and Xfree86 to get together and brainstorm an API for making dynamic changes happen. This could be implemented as a lower-level client-side X library, on top of which can be built tools for any desktop environment to modify the display on the fly. I'm not saying my implementation proposal is perfect, but I think the concept is vital to the success of the Linux/X platform in the mainstream. Windows had this in '95, and regardless of how technically superior X may be in many way, this usability roadblock goes a long way to negate it. When GNOME has a Display applet in the Control Center that can actually change the resolution on the fly, I will consider us a giant leap closer to world domination! :)

--Micko

Re:What we *really* need is a display config tool

[mlsemon2]

Ctrl+Alt+Plus and Ctrl+Alt+Minus (both on the numeric keypad) works great for switching resolution on the fly. It's been around for as long as I've been using X (1996), so I don't know when it got that feature. Color depth seems to be another matter, though, and my knowledge of X utilities isn't what it used to be. For instance, I know that xvidtune is great for pixel-level width and height adjustments on the fly. I just don't know how well it works with XFree86-4.x.

One thing omitted in the Release notes...

[Junta]

Unless they royally screwed something up in the past few months, a show stopping XVideo bug with tdfx that was in 4.1.0 was fixed. I've been running CVS for months because of the bug. Basicly, if UYUV or YUY2 colorspace overlays were opened with the tdfx driver, the whole thing would crash out.... Shortly after then it was fixed in CVS, but it takes so long for them to release, I just had to use CVS. So if you use tdfx and certain media programs crash your X (particularly DivX videos are notable...), this is a *very* cool update...

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[be-fan]

Actually, the XDrawLine level is rather low-level. If you take a look at Berlin, you interface at a much higher level and put drawing objects into the server.

P2P (not OT)

[Master Of Ninja]

Hey. I was just thinking since everybody has taken down the servers at the moment, why don't people use P2P to get the software distributed. It could be shown that this would be quite a efficient way of distribution (multiple download "sites") for software rather than a piracy tool. OK, there might be problems verifying if someone had tampered with the software or not, but wouldn't it be a better way of releasing software?

Re:P2P (not OT)

[damiam]

FProxy: apt-get over Freenet

Not a Troll

[drig]

420 is stoner slang. You're supposed to smoke pot at 4:20 AM, 4:20 PM, 4:20 Greenwhich time, 4:20 PST, etc. Basically, it gives you an excuse to get stoned every hour.

I think it originated as a police code for "caught taking bonghits behind the cafeteria" or something.

It has been occasionally confused with the celebration of Adolph Hitler's birthday, causing unoffensive stoners to be labeled violent offenders.

Re:Not a Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw on jc420.com (linked from elsewhere in this thread) that it supposedly signifies "International Tea Time".

Anyway, not being a stoner, I'd never heard of this before, and find it quite fascinating.

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead, I would love to see a system where objects are installed onto the server, maybe even at run-time off the web if an application needs it.

That's a reason MS's ActiveX is sometimes known as "ActiveSecurityHole". I really don't think we want random code off the web automatically installed at application run-time.

Re:Neo nazi asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

How old are you? What degree have you got?

Why I am asking. Just want how educated and old is the average neo nazi of today.

PS. Claiming an fp for a DEAD unsuccessfull emotionally frustrated doctor is a bit strange!

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[Howie]

Isn't this exactly the problem that NeWS and Display Postscript were supposed to solve in the 80's? Between Moore's Law and the advances in VMs driven by Java and C#/CLR, Maybe things are faster enough to give them another shot now...

Re:We dont really need X anymore

[Christopher B. Brown]

And what would we call this directFB which is compatible with X?

Possibly it might get called X?

The misunderstandings of how X works on systems today seem pretty rife...

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[Ozwald]

• I really don't think we want random code off the web automatically installed at application run-time.

You mean like Java?
Ozwald

Hmmmm

[NDPTAL85]

I think what we have here is called a "stalemate"

Yay

[PlaysWithMatches]

They finally fixed that annoying freeze/crasher in DRI when using a Radeon card. Of course, the download sites are slashdotted to hell and back, so I can't try it out yet - but according to the changelog, my biggest gripe with using my Radeon may be gone now. ;)

Re:Fast Free Windows X Server Anywhere ? (Off Topi

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should try Windows XP instead of trying to get them to use nix.

They are obviously gamers and you think they should switch to an OS that is hard to use with little game support with the exception of a token few? These people do not want to learn about their computer and there is nothing wrong with that. They do NOT need to be "educated" by you on why nix is better.

Lastly maybe if you didn't spend all day mucking with X you wouldn't be such a geek yourself. Just a thought.

Sure, the usual "context switch" ignorance

[Christopher B. Brown]

And if I am running multiple processes, each with their own context, that each expect to have access to the screen, how are you proposing that they manage the process of sharing access?

After all, if I'm running:

• Mozilla,
  
• OpenOffice,
  
• A couple terminal sessions,
  
• A clock,
  
• An "applet" that displays weather reports, and
  
• An applet that does some cool animation,
  
  
• A stock ticker,
  
• A list of Slashdot articles,
  
  

how is it that you would think that all of these would concurrently make their relevant updates to what's on the screen...

WITHOUT A WHOLE WHACK OF CONTEXT SWITCHES?!?!?!?!

The notion that context switches are some inherent evil that must be expunged seems typically to be an evidence that the writer needs to get severely thrashed with several clue sticks.

Having too many context switches would obviously be a Bad Thing. But the notion that the separation of client and server is synonymous with "too many context switches" is just silly.

Consider the oft-commended alternative, NeXTStep, with its Display Postscript. In its architecture, applications use a client library to connect to a server process that runs the Postscript interpreter that they call the NX agent. The classic criticism of the NeXT architecture is that the PS implementation is typically single-threaded, thus meaning that you can get a pile of extra latency when other processes might be trying to get a context switch in edge-wise, but are BLOCKED.

It's one thing to make informed criticism of X, but to claim that things are bad about it that would be just as true of alternative architectures just demonstrates ignorance.

Anyone who doesn't believe this, feel free to go off and run GNUMail , the GNUStep mail application. Watch what processes it connects to. If X was replaced by a "direct DPS atop framebuffer," the client/server connections would NOT GO AWAY.

Re:Fast Free Windows X Server Anywhere ? (Off Topi

[Anonymous Coward]

There's been various efforts to port XFree to run "native" on Windows, but they haven't gotten anywhere. It's a place to start -- can't be too hard because an OS/2 version is running.

Right now most corporations that want X compatibility on Windows just cough up for Hummingbird Exceed. Maybe you can get a cheap student version or something.

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[johnnyb]

Separate Server and graphics drivers. Why the frick is ATI Raedon changes in the X11 change log? They should be driver changes, not server changes.

***

They have done this already. They are still the same project, but the driver is just loaded in as a separate .so file.

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[pthisis]

While I agree that the toolkits suck, that email is rather irrelevent. If I interpret the email correctly, backing is referring to double-buffering.

No, it's referring to duplicate work being done by the toolkit. e.g. X sends notices saying "the lower-left needs a redraw", "the mid-left needs a redraw", and "the top-left needs a redraw. A properly written app would coalesce those into a single call to redraw the left side (ie clear the event queue of all exposure events before repainting), rather than repaint several times. gtk 2 takes some steps toward this.

Even as it is, cards with good driver support don't show the flicker problem. But well-written toolkit code would do the coalesce and work fine even on your old Cirrus Logic without flicker (or the new whiz-bang card with crappy unaccelerated drivers).

and hell, Photon is even more flexible than X. It even runs the graphics driver as a seperate process

How does this make it more flexible than X? X keeps the driver as a loadable object file, and puts the high-level GUI code (from Xlib on up) into a seperate address space from the X server. If you like, you can run a framebuffer video driver and fb X server, putting the low-level hardware support in a seperate address space. None of these really impacts the flexibility in any great way, though, the X extension mechanism is way more crucial to flexibility than which address space various components happen to run in.

QNX does rock, though. Between it and L4, I'm almost tempted to forget the travesty that is Mach. How's the swapper doing? :-O

Sumner

I know it's free software

[ElMiguel]

Hmpf. I know how free software projects work. I'm not saying that they had to fix the driver for me. I tried to make clear in my comment that what got me frustrated was that they thoroughly ignored me. That's just rude.

They, like most free software projects, encourage bug reports. I took the time to read their bug report guidelines, collect detailed information and write the best bug report I could... and not one of them could spend a few seconds to let me know somebody had read my mail.

If they didn't want to fix their driver, they could have told me. If they thought I was a stupid moron for bothering them with older cards, they could have told me. Instead, they let me write ten mails before I gave up.

(By the way, I did try to fix the driver myself, with no success. Fortunately I have updated my computer and now I own a GeForce).

Re:I know it's free software

[mike_sucks]

Okay, the igorning of emails bit may have been a bit harsh of them, but the *other* thing which I forgot to mention is that whilst bug reports are good, there's only a finite amount of resources available to deal with them.

There could be many, many reasons for your reports to go ignored. The developer may be pressed for cycles, may have gone awol or whatever. People may be not responding to you because they know the someone else should be doing so. Given I get paid to write software, and I've also contributed to a few free software projects, I know what it is like in the trenches, so give please give them a break. The day has too few hours as it is.

It's typical in free software projects for someone random to come in, make some (usually misdirected) noise, and expect people to jump for them. The best approach you can take is lurk around related mailing lists or usenet groups. Get a feel for the community, who does what, get to know the general social dynanic. Once you've done that and you know how the community works, you'll know where to ask, who to talk to and how to get them to give your case a hand.

It isn't a very simple approach, but it is the best way to get results from developer communitites like XFree's.

Mike.

Re:I know it's free software

[ElMiguel]

Please remember I wrote ten emails. Ok, so maybe my first email was ignored because the developer was busy. Maybe my second email was accidentally mistaken for spam (although I'm sure I didn't mention enlarging anything) and deleted. Perhaps my third email went unanswered because all who read it were expecting that anybody else would answer. But when they ignored my ten bug reports (and I sent them during an interval of about half a year), I don't think it can be a matter of chance. It must be a matter of policy: if what you say doesn't interest us, we won't spare a minute letting you know. With that attitude, any attempt at improving their PR is in vain.

What you say about getting to know their community reveals me that you've never approached Xfree, so you think they're like any other generic large free software project, like the Linux kernel for example. You are wrong. Unless they've changed since last year, they do most of their internal email traffic in private, closed lists that you can't read, much less write to, unless you are a member of the project. So what you are suggesting is not possible. Read here for details.

I'll repeat it: I'm not a newbie. I know your advice is good intentioned, but everything you said, I already considered before I sent them my first bug report. I think if I couldn't get a word from them, the average experienced free software developer won't get it either. To me, they now appear not very differently of a gratis (no cost) proprietary software project, even if they're volunteers.

And I'm worried about that, because the XFree project is capital to free software; that's why I'm "bitching", as you called it.

Re:I know it's free software

[Anonymous Coward]

LinuxPR.com has pursuaded people that PR stands for Press Releases but in reality it stands for Public Relations.

PR is all about persuading people that you are really intellegent people who are easy to work with and care about putting out a great product. Answering emails is good PR.

You knew that of course, but it's worth pointing out none the less.

VNC

[Jimithing DMB]

Yeah, run however many copies of the VNC server on your Linux machine and have them use the VNC viewer.

It's a hell of a lot faster than X as well

If you feel really creative, do something with the vnc inetd patch but allow people to actually reconnect to an existing session.

If not just assign each of them a display number and all will be well.

Re:VNC

[Anonymous Coward]

ummm, who said he was running Linux? He's running FreeBSD! so, yeah, use VNC on your BSD box.

make world

[yerricde]

A release usually included binaries, and the 4.2.0 ones are where?

As other fellows have commented, the binaries are created on your hard disk after you 'make world'. Compilation has become much easier since the 3.x series.

Re:make world

[Anonymous Coward]

doing a make world is beyond stupid. Besides which, Xfree from previus experience takes a long time to compile and is often problematic.

More documentation and easier configuration.

[netsharc]

What I find really lacking in Xfree86 is a complete documentation of what build time options are available and what they do. It would be nice if the whole thing comes with a configurator like what the kernel has, so we can build really optimized Xfree servers. The last time I tried to build X, I found out I was building DRI servers, and most annoyingly, make install was failing because of some strange problem compiling SiS drivers (I don't know why that's being done in make install, but that's what it was trying to do).

Maybe I should do it myself and try to document the build options, but where do I start?

X11 solves the messy, low-level problems

[markj02]

I don't see what the point of moving away from X11 would be. X11 now supports antialiasing and transparency efficiently. You can build whatever GUI you want on top of that. And building a Mac OSX-like GUI doesn't get any easier if you throw out X11 first and start from scratch implementing low-level graphics routines.

X11 solves the nitty-gritty, uninteresting parts of writing a GUI, like drawing, acceleration, event handling and dispatch, clipping, input methods, remote access, security, window management protocols, and others. X11 extensions provide a host of other functionaliy, like 3D rendering, direct rendering, audio, printing, image processing, decompression, and embedding, clearly specified and all remotely and transparently accessible. You don't have to solve these problems again. And I think X11 solves these problems better than Windows or OSX.

I think it would be great if people started thinking again about implementing a high-quality GUI on top of X11, something that takes full advantage of X11's functionality. Sadly, all the popular toolkits right now (Gtk+, Qt, Mozilla, GNUStep, FLTK, wxWindows, Swing, etc.) take more of a Windows-like approach to building toolkits, and that just doesn't mesh well with X11. Since most of those toolkits want to be cross-platform, they take a lowest-common-denominator approach. As a result, they have to cope with all the complexities of X11 without deriving much benefit from it.

So, please do think about designing a great toolkit and a great user interface--we need more of those. But don't waste your time on reimplementing the low-level stuff--X11 already does that probably better and more efficiently than anything else out there. Concentrate on what you want to do and take full advantage of X11 functionality--if you really do have a good idea for how to build a better UI, you'll be done much faster than if you start from scratch.

only poorly written applications are affected

[markj02]

X11 batches requests, so the overhead of context switches compared to the overhead of drawing stuff is negligible. In fact, X11 is better off than, say, Windows GDI, which incurs similar context switches but hasn't been designed from the ground up with context switching in mind.

Now, about latency. If you compare local access to X11 with local access to, say, Windows or OSX, I don't think you'll see practically significant differences. (Well-written applications will use shared memory for any kind of bulk data transfer.)

About the graphics model. The X11 graphics model is complex. It really does expose a lot about the underlying graphics hardware to you and it gives you pixel accurate rendering. That was crucially important in the 1980's and has served X11 extremely well for nearly two decades. Today, it's less important, since you don't get a lot of low-depth screens anymore. I would expect that in the future, the RENDER extension will become the predominant graphics API and the core X11 graphics APIs will receive less attention. Implementing the core X11 graphics doesn't need to be a lot of code, and you don't have to worry about all the oddball bitmap formats if you don't want your applications to run with oddball display devices. But in some markets, that kind of control is important, and X11 provides it in a portable and network transparent manner.

Overall, X11 is an old system and has accumulated some cruft. It's also a complex system because it does some really nifty things that neither Windows nor MacOSX have really tackled well. On balance, I think it's still a very modern network transparent windowing system, and if you were to design something with similar functionality today, it wouldn't look all that different or be all that much simpler. So, I vote for keeping X11, not because it's widely used, but because it's actually quite good. And I hope people will spend the time to understand X11 better. The people who designed it were very good; give them the benefit of the doubt.

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[stripes]

I'm not for destroying extensibility. Instead, I would love to see a system where objects are installed onto the server, maybe even at run-time off the web if an application needs it. Even better, a system where a developer can extend an existing control to add new functionality or build a new control off of generic objects.

The downside is installing code that would normally be in the toolkit into X11 makes X11 itself less stable rather then the toolkit using program. Also because the X server runs as root on many platforms (to get direct access to the hardware) you can have some real security issues. It might be possible to work around those though.

I would rather have an application be unstable then the X server. If one is testing a new version of the GTK toolkit it would be nice to be able to debug using a nice GUI debugger without getting a second machine to do it from. More importantly if a toolkit is a little flaky I would rather it bring down one application then the whole session, that would make Unix systems seem seriously unstable for desktop use.

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[markj02]

There are VERY obvious performance differences between any version of Windows and as new of version of X as you want. X Windows programs flicker like mad when moving or resizing, objects aren't responsive, the mouse frame rate is low,

Those are problems with the toolkits. None of the modern toolkits (Gtk+, Qt, wxWindows, FLTK, Mozilla, etc.) use X11 very efficiently. The redraw logic in Gtk+, Qt, and Mozilla is, in fact, in violation of X11 guidelines. The reason is that these toolkits are mostly written with a Windows GDI mindset, either because that's what their authors are familiar with, or because they want to achieve cross-platform compatibility and it's easier to treat X11 as a second-class citizen.

applications all have inconsistent look and feel,

X11 is not a user interface or desktop, it's a network transparent windowing system. If your user interface is inconsistent, you only have yourself to blame for it: don't run X11 applications written for different toolkits or desktops. You get similar inconsistencies if you start running Motif or FLTK or wxWindows or Mozilla applications on Windows or MacOS.

And if you say that I need to tweek it to get it as fast as MS, then MS wins.

I'm posting this from Galeon running on a vanilla Debian installation on a 200MHz Pentium with 64M of RAM and a 5 year old graphics card. Windows wouldn't even boot on this configuration without excessive paging, and IE is a dog. In the past, all the graphics benchmarks I have done ran faster on good X11 implementations than on Windows. So, I challenge your implicit the claim that Linux+X11 is less efficient than Windows. But even if that were the case, on 1GHz machines with 512M of RAM, any such differences are academic.

However, the Gnome and KDE desktops are comparatively slow and resource intensive, probably similar to recent versions of Windows. I couldn't run them very well on this machine (although they do run). That is something you will have to take up with the authors of those desktops. But they, too, are designed for modern machines, where it really doesn't matter.

The biggest problem with X

[ilovekimmy]

The biggest problem with X is what it doesn't do. In other words, the biggest problem with the moderm X11 based UNIX/Linux/etc desktop is the desktop environments and toolkits, not X itself. One of things everyone seems to like about the X replacements is they tend to intagrate a toolkit of some sort, that forces a command user interface.

So what i think it needs is a standard for how the toolkits act. Really this is a small layer between the toolkits and X, but it can be thought of as part of X so that all tk's comform to it, instead of having dozens of these.

It could start as something as simple as a common toolkit theme and build from there. Not everything would have to honor the setting but it would be strongely encouraged when it makes sense.

Debian does it right

[roystgnr]

According to the FHS, /usr is supposed to be mountable as a shared (among computers of the same OS & architecture) read-only filesystem. Needless to say, putting per-computer configuration files in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 would make that impossible. However, making /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 a symlink (or leaving symlinks of individual files there like Red Hat does) solves backwards compatibility for programs that expect to see such a misdesigned configuration.

I have no idea where slackware's coming from. Once you're shuffling around configuration files, why not shuffle them into the directory (/etc) intended for their storage?

Vi is *for* dumb terminals

[fm6]

This is the worst kind of offtopic nitpick, but I have to point out that Vi does run on a dumb terminal. There's still an entry in /etc/termcap for the LSI ADM3. In fact, "Dumb Terminal" was originally an LSI trademark for the ADM series.

Of course, even on a fast connection, it's painful to run vi on a terminal that lacks cursor addressing. But there's a slightly improved version of the ADM3 (the ADM3a) that has this feature. And it just so happens that the ADM3a was the standard terminal at UCB when Bill Joy was there. Which is why the first version of Vi only ran on the ADM3a. And Vi still has minor ADM3a-specific features, such as using the h, j, k, and l keys for cursor control (the ADM3a had little arrows painted on these keys).

Come to think of it, here we find the whole origin of the Vi/EMACS divide. Twenty years ago, UCB was a state institution with cheap "dumb" terminals, and MIT was a private institution with expensive "smart" terminals. Each institute produced a corresponding text editor.

Re:Vi is *for* dumb terminals

[pthisis]

This is the worst kind of offtopic nitpick, but I have to point out that Vi does run on a dumb terminal.

Y'know, I originally had written "you can't even run vi on a true dump terminal except in open mode", but I figured people would quibble over what a dumb terminal was and so changed to the glass tty aside. Should've left the open mode comment in too, I guess. :-)

Sumner

Them nVidia binaries

[Anonymous Coward]

Has the free nv driver finally caught with the nVidia binary-only drivers? The nVidia binary has the nasty of tainting the kernel. I want to keep X and the kernel separate. But the kernel part of the nVidia binaries has to be recompiled every time I upgrade my kernel, and all I want is to watch full-motion, full-screen videos on my 'puter.

Re:Them nVidia binaries

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is that a nasty? The nvidia kernel piece does some necessary hardware setup and is responsible for essentially programming registers on the card and whatnot to get it to work properly. Doing that in userspace constantly is inefficient and may even be impossible for some things.

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Configuration is not tweaking, but most GNU/Linux distributions suck, and there aren't yet good autoconfigurators for dump people like you.

Welcome to Linux. Take your fucking seat, asshole.

Now that's what I call "community support." It's a great thing, isn't it?

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, so Gtk and Qt and Motif don't play nice with X-Windows. Hell that's only 99% of the X11 applications out there. If none of the major toolkits are compatible, what does that say about the infrastructure?

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[stripes]

If I interpret the email correctly, backing is referring to double-buffering.

Similar, but different. Backing is when the windowing system stores the image elsewhere when another window overlaps it. X11 uses it to speed redraw on window move/resize/delete. Other windowing systems do as well (Mac OS X does it for all windows while X lets apps request it, and may or may not do it...OSX also uses it for implementing transparency).

People do tend to use the terms interchangeably though...

That's nothing more than a cheap trick used by designs that can't render widgets quickly enough. In a game, double buffering is useful because because any tearing is really annoying. That's not so on a desktop

Sure it is. It isn't a huge problem, but it is a problem. I made a small custom widget for w3juke's play bar, and it rendered quickly enough. The real problem was the flashing and tearing. It renders slower with the double buffering, but it looks much better.

That's not so on a desktop. BeOS, for example, can render widgets fast enough on much more ancient machines and it does't have double-buffering

If it doesn't buffer, and it avoids flashing and tearing it may only run rendering requests during VBI (well that avoids tearing, not always flashing). Many old video games did that, but that does waste a lot of time on drawing bound apps.

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[stripes]

The X model is to provide high-level graphics primitives to the application, which then submits them to the server which can turn them into whichever low-level calls are most efficient on the hardware in question.

Er, high-level X isn't. It directly exposes the framebuffers color model for example. PostScript and OpenGL are high level, X11 is pretty much just a framebuffer. That's not to say it didn't get some things right. It also was invented on way way way slower machines, ones where Display PostScript would have sucked huge...in other words machines slower then today's Palm Pilot...

Re:We dont really need X anymore

[Wesley Felter]

DirectFB already has font support and window management. Gtk+ already runs on it. I think it won't be long before DirectFB is a credible competitor to X11.

Re:oh yeah! I have been waiting for this.

[Kewlhand`tek]

). It was never finished, though (I think we all can guess why).
goatse.cx guy?

Re:Can ANYBODY beat Duke?

[Anonymous Coward]

A bunch of 2 year olds could beat Duke. They suck

uhh this can get interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

4.2.0 - congradulations xfree86 has been just downloaded by every pot smoker on the planet.

PCI Radeon SDR support

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to see support for the PCI Radeon SDR. As it stands now, the support is *somewhat* there via a series of hocus-pocus patches available from the DRI's sourceforge site, but performance is hideous. I've been compiling the ati.2 driver available from the Linuxvideo project in conjunction with the aforementioned patches, and although my card's feature set is close to being fully supported, none of the more advanced features work even close to properly. It's sad, really. I get 229fps max in the glxgears demo!

SiS Driver on LCD (Re:More documentation..)

[f00bar23]

hi there i can tell you that the use of the 4.2.0 sis driver greatly improves your gfx speed on lcd. thats because the sis driver 4.2.0 was broken on lcd (strange flamelike effect). now at least on my notebook a have a 1024x768x16 Xv-Accelerated display... roxx =) my notebook is a samsung vm8000 series, with a sis integrated chipset (sis630 is the graphic engine, seems to be wide spread in "middle end models"). i run 2.4.17 X -configure brings a nearly perfect configuration, except VertRefresh/HorizSync Modes and a DefaultDept. I use the vesa framebuffer at boottime, modprobe the sis framebuffer module and startx The sisfb module yells at me because it cant reserve frame buffer mem, but thats seems to be okay. Ahh.. before i forget it... use the latest BIOS updateif you've got SIS in a notebook. My XFree 4.x crashes without if i quit. if someone wants my XF86Config, PM me.

I will!! Improved Radeon support deserves it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully, this version of XFree86 will jive w/ Counter-Strike through WineX.

I seem to get low FPS compared to Windows (we're talking 20 FPS as opposed to 90 FPS) ....

If it improves anything, YES, I will smoke a bowl to that.

Re:Neo nazi asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

I can hardly believe that you re an 68 yo granpa and reading Slashdot...

btw, in which dept were you at Princeton (where you probably never set foot, but anyway)? Neo nazi bullshit for frustrated little morons.

I dont understand how people like you can believe in the things they are saying. Do you know what the fuck you re talking about? Ever visited Aushwitz? Ever saw the photos there? And dont fucking dare replying me that there was no holocaust!

It makes me feel sick knowing that people like you really exist!

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[be-fan]

By running the graphics driver as a seperate process, you (potentially, I don't know if Photon does it) can start and stop graphics drivers at will, switch graphics drivers on the fly, protect the server from the driver, etc.

Re:Backing store vs Double buffering

[spitzak]

No, backing store is different than double buffering. Both have an off-screen image that corresponds to a part of an on-screen window.

Backing store (as used by X) copies the part of the screen that is being hidden by a new window to an off-screen area. It can then copy parts of it back when that obscuring window is moved or removed.

Double buffering lets the program draw into the offscreen area, and then it copies that offscreen area to the screen (either automatically or on a program command).

Backing store sounded like a good idea when most overlapping windows were assummed to be pop-up menus. It does not work if the underlying window changes (which almost all modern toolkits do, due to them copying Windows's highlighting of menu titles, or due to the focus moving to the window). If the underlying area is drawn to, X is supposed to forget the backing store, but XFree86 seems to not do this, this indicates how little backing store is used that nobody bothers to fix this.

Double buffering is much more useful, though it uses a lot more memory. If the entire image of the window is stored then transparency of the windows is possible without having to draw them all from back to front. For this reason all X and Windows hacks that produce transparency of all windows use double-buffering, also OSX uses it. NeXT used it too. It is also possible and useful to double-buffer only the visible portion of the window, this is what OpenGL and probably DirectX and all other 3D systems do because the offscreen area is the same size as the screen, but you lose the ability to move or composite transparent windows without redrawing.

Re:Backing store vs Double buffering

[stripes]

No, backing store is different than double buffering.

That's what I just said, plus I said people frequently use the two terms interchangabley. I did mean to imply that it is wrong but common.

Backing store sounded like a good idea when most overlapping windows were assummed to be pop-up menus.

I don't think that was ever assumed, and save-unders can be used for pop-ups anyway.

If the underlying area is drawn to, X is supposed to forget the backing store,

It can forget it, or it can render into the backing store (I don't think any X servers do that, but they could). It can also choose to put back the unchanged version, but it does have to send an expose event.

It is also possible and useful to double-buffer only the visible portion of the window, this is what OpenGL and probably DirectX and all other 3D systems do because the offscreen area is the same size as the screen, but you lose the ability to move or composite transparent windows without redrawing.

You also have to support redrawing the exposed areas (I don't recall transparency on the NeXT, but it double buffered to save apps the trouble of implmenting redraws).

Not only...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm mostly appaled by the quantity this guy has...

I mean, among 2-3 friends, ok, but for this to be rolled up it'll need to be SlashRolled. 8)

Because they have upgraded...

[da5idnetlimit.com]

...to the latest kernel 8)

Ok ok, easy one 8)

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[Shadowlion]

You mean like Java?

Java is, at least, sandboxed. COM, being the aforementioned "random code" (at least in the context of this discussion), is not sandboxed and therefore has the potential of being a security nightmare.

Re:Backing store vs Double buffering

[spitzak]

It can forget it, or it can render into the backing store (I don't think any X servers do that, but they could). It can also choose to put back the unchanged version, but it does have to send an expose event.

As far as I can tell XFree86 is putting back the unchanged version but failing to send the expose event. Either that or when my software responds to the expose event the area is still obscured by the overlapping window so the update is thrown away, or some other bug causes it to draw the saved buffer a second time after I update. I gave up using save behind because of this but I could experiment some more to find out what is going on...

I don't recall transparency on the NeXT, but it double buffered to save apps the trouble of implmenting redraws

You are right the NeXT did not do transparency compositing of the windows. It was strictly used to avoid redraws, and to speed up the dragging of windows.

Re:Backing store vs Double buffering

[stripes]

As far as I can tell XFree86 is putting back the unchanged version but failing to send the expose event. Either that or when my software responds to the expose event the area is still obscured by the overlapping window so the update is thrown away, or some other bug causes it to draw the saved buffer a second time after I update. I gave up using save behind because of this but I could experiment some more to find out what is going on...

Do you have a small sample program? I don't recall seeing that on XFree86 at work, or on VNC at home (the VNC server is a modifyed XFree86 server). It may just be nothing used the save unders, or the problem might be specific to your display driver...

(or you could try running your program under VNC and seeing if you have the same trouble).