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?

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?

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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[leandrod]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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).

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!

[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!

[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: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:Replace X with what?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[ideut]

I think you're thinking about xvidtune

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 :-)

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: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

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

[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.

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: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

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

[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!

[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

[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

[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.

(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: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

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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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?

[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?

[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: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

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

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.

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 ;)

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: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: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...

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

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.

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: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...

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: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

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.

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.

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

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: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).

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).