Slashdot Mirror
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.
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).
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
Here's a nicely formatted list of mirrors for you lazy bastards ;) :)6
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/XFree8
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
There are people working on adding a new rendering model that does antialiasing and sub-pixel addressing. "People" being mostly Keith Packard.
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...
That is the hard part. In part because backwards compatibility works against you.
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 :-)
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"
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.
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
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Its really easy to fix: webfonts-1-3.noarch.rpm
Make sure to read the MS Eula included.
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!
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....)
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)
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
rage, rage against the dying of the light
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
(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 Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
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" ?
Can you hear me, Major Tom? I'm not the man they think I am at home...