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RandR Support on XFree86 4.3
Gentu writes "Great news from our favorite windowing system: [Hewlett-Packard] engineers committed a new extension to XFree86, called RandR. XFree86 4.3 (to be released in late 2002/early 2003), will have the ability to truly resize (not via the pseudo-resize CNTRL+[+/-] command), rotate, reflect and change the refresh rate of each screen of an X display on the fly. And KDE seems to be the first desktop environment to add support for the RandR extension."
Now this is starting to look good for all Free *nixes! Finally...
--
Now how will I prove my 3733T skillz?
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
cut the crap..
Why not just call it Randy.. that's what ppl will call it when viruses start infecting linux and randomly changing the window aspects on April 1.
The X Window System protocol, Version 11, was deliberately designed to be extensible, to provide for both anticipated and unanticipated needs. The X11 core did not anticipate that the properties of X server screens might need to change dynamically, as occurs frequently with desktops, laptops and hand held computers not envisioned in the 1980's.
The Resize and Rotate extension (RandR) is a very small set of client and server extensions designed to allow clients to modify the size, accelerated visuals and rotation of an X screen. RandR also has provisions for informing clients when screens have been resized or rotated and it allows clients to discover which visuals have hardware acceleration available.
RandR needs to be discussed in concert with recent developments in X server implementation and the new Render extension to understand the implications of the aggregate. In isolation, RandR seems to provide a limited but useful improvement, but together with the Render extension and reimplementation of the X server rendering code, RandR provides part of a key change in X Window System capabilities.
And it will work?
The statement below is true.
The statement above is false.
Hrm, neat. so what though? What does this really mean? Will it make Linux/BSD closer to being "ready for the desktop?" How is this going to affect your average user?
Why would I want my desktop rotated and/or reflected (which I presume to mean "mirrored" or "backwards")?
Keith Packard provided GNOME patches a couple weeks ago.
ChangeLogs:
2002-10-04 Havoc Pennington
* src/display.c (event_callback): do XRRUpdateConfiguration()
if we have RandR extension, else poke in Xlib's screen struct to
update the screen size.
* configure.in: fix a bogus overwrite of cppflags,
add a check for RandR extension
2002-10-07 Mark McLoughlin
Support RandR extension by resizing the toplevel panels
if the screen size has changed. Based on patch from
Keith Packard - #94561. Requires gtk+ HEAD.
* basep-widget.[ch]: (basep_widget_screen_size_changed):
* foobar-widget.[ch]: (foobar_widget_screen_size_changed):
resize the toplevels when the screen size changed.
* multiscreen-stuff.c:
(multiscreen_screen_size_changed): re-initialise and request
a resize on the toplevels.
(multiscreen_support_init): connect to the "size_changed"
signal on all screens.
(multiscreen_reinit): re-initialise the monitor geometries.
I would like to be able to redirect running xwindows applications. Let's say I am running a copy of bzFlag, or some other type of productivity application. Wouldn't it be good to be able to transfer the running application to a different computer if I suddenly have to change terminals?
Is changing bpp on-the-fly also covered by this new (très cool) extension? I skimmed through the announcement but could not find anything about this. Anybody know if color depth switching is planned?
Reminder: find a new sig
X is a lot better than many competing efforts. For starters, it works, is in wide distribution, and has a huge suite of apps. Unlike, say, Berlin, or any of the other "Let's replace X" projects (Berlin, to its credit, at least works. Most alternatives are SourceForgeWare with a few Beavis and Buttheads dissing X withou anything to replace it).
X gives you a base. You can reimplement everything X already does to get the features X doesn't have, or you can implement extensions to X, or rewrite core parts, to correct the faults X has. Guess which is less work?
Now if only I could change the monitor resolution of my linux box without editing a text file....
> Is faults seeem to overshadow its many features.
Well, that sounds like pretty gratuitous judgement to me. Would you please care to enumerate 'Is faults'[sic] ?
X might not be perfect, but it does the job. We can't allways break things so they get better easily.
Propose a better solution, implement it, make an easy migration path, become rich and popular and get all the chicks. (That's the Profit!!! part)
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
What a rip off! Turns out this rotate feature is not a free rotate but fixed 90 degree increments!
Pfff! And I wanted to have my aterm at a weird angle.
graspee
Why do these "when will we replace X" trolls resurface every time there is an X story? And why do people keep modding them up?
So far, we have great 3D acceleration, direct video, anti-aliasing, and now dynamic sizing/resizing in X. And all with excellent performance that is equal to or better than the performance offered by Windows. And we retain the network-centric features and flexible, modular configuration that make X so powerful. And all of this while maintaining backward compatibility over a decade-and-a-half of software.
We'll replace X when it makes sense to do so and not before. Right now, there is no better (or even close to equal) solution.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
user usability issues.
>>>>>>>>>>>
That's like claiming GDI has "user usability" issues!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
How did this comment get to a 5? This person does not understand software development. If you need some more information on why we should not "replace the X windowing system alltogether", read this.
What does Mac OS X use? Something different. Maybe we (the rest of the *nix world) should see HOW MUCH they gained from doing that - it may be that rewriting a lot of apps (or doing some sort of backwards compatibility mode) would be worth it.
My server
This is not true about KDE being the first to add support for this extension. GTK v2.1 has had support for this already.
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
When did "CNTRL" become the accepted way of abbreviating "Control"? Isn't the generally accepted abbreviation "CTRL"?
They (essentially) use Display PDF, an evolution of Display PostScript. There is no X server. What they gain from that is, well, a pretty GUI. One that does not have many of the useful features of X (no remote windowing, which matters when you're seling Xserves). More importantly, it has none of the X software, which means people have had to hack a working X server onto the platform - Apple refuse to - and run them there. If all you want are the pretty effects you can get from Display PDF, you can go contribute to one of the projects adding Display PostScript to X. There's not much that uses it, but you can have it.
Which means Apple may have a Unixish personality of their Mach core, but out of the box, no Unix GUI tools work.
And if you think Apple, who routinely sue people for producing OS X look-a-like themes would stand for you cloning the Quartz API, you can pass me some of whatever you've got.
Finally X is getting the same features that most other operating systems have had for a decade... It may sound small, but these are the things that make systems easier to use for the average joe, and goes a long way in usability.
Sure took someone long enough to even seriously attempt this.
Yeah. And think how long it would have taken if we'd waited for you to try it?
...do they mean automatically, as for those of us with pivoting displays that can be viewed landscape or portrait?
And that's all I have to say about that.
Of course, and I highly suspect it, I may be talking out of my ass. -oqti
...but X, for all its extensibility, is getting long in the tooth. X is the x86 of the software world: we've squeezed it much, much farther than the original design intended, and it still functions servicably--but who really admires it in the abstract? Both are ugly.
In the meantime, I do longingly await Fresco/Berlin. Now that's nice. Now only if it were usable...
Let us now all observe a brief moment of reverent and mournful silence to mourn the NeWS that might have been....
MacOS's window server isn't that great. It's whole purpose is to support fancy transparency effects at the cost of inordinate amounts of memory (hundreds of megs) and massive speed hits. Quartz "Extreme" proves the faults of the design. It's the first major extension to Quartz, and is very half-assed because it uses OpenGL only to accelerate window effects, not actual 2D rendering. Why? Because the design is so tied to DisplayPDF that replacing the render core with an OpenGL accelerated version would be a huge amount of work. Yep, real great architecture, chokes on its first major extension...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
So far, we have great 3D acceleration, direct video, anti-aliasing,
Okay, I'll buy that.
and now dynamic sizing/resizing in X.
Everyone is treating this like it's some super great accomplishment. Windows has allowed this since Windows 95, and the Mac since System 7.x.
And all with excellent performance that is equal to or better than the performance offered by Windows.
Ok, that is where I'm starting to laugh. X11 is S.L.O.W. slow. Windows GDI is lightning fast. I can click the start menu and it draws instantly. I can still see Gnome and KDE menus paint across the screen chunkily -- yes, this is on a P-4 machine with whizzy graphics cards, a gig of RAM, etc. And don't blame it on the graphics card manufacturers for releasing no or shitty drivers for Linux. (I didn't say you did, but that's the usual excuse around here.) Windows can wipe my ass too, but the capability to do that well hasn't been written into it. Yet.
And we retain the network-centric features and flexible, modular configuration that make X so powerful.
True, but when Windows Terminal Server came out, that takes a back seat. Try running an X11 session over a slow network link vs. a Windows terminal server session (especially over Citrix ICA) and let me know how it goes. You may want to stop after the 3-4 minutes it takes to partially transfer all the KDE graphics over the line. X11 needs to really work on this big time. Makes you wonder why all those thin clients that boot Linux + X11 do it not to connect to an X server, but to run Citrix's ICA client for Linux to connect to a Windows 2000 server.
What about those of us that don't use kde/gnome? Will it be implemented as a program? Or will someone have to write an interface for it?
http://phreakinb.com
lol. mod parent up! +5 Funny!
I'll stick with the powerful and easy-to-use Windows XP, thanks. *shrug* Hey, its your choice, and I commend you for it. On that subject, how's that Bugbear-A going for you? :)
You'll note if you read some of the correspondence around this that various members of the GNOME team (and presumably KDE) are adding a control-centre gadget to do exactly that.
When, oh God, when, will people RTFA,
...fuckin' kids these days...
or just the post, for christsakes.
The feature you're asking for is exactly
what this extention allows.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
I think that the long life of X speaks to how well it actually was designed. The modularity of the X core has allowed for over a decade of innovation to occur WITHOUT hindering backwards compatibility. Can you say that about the past 10 years of any MS code base?
This is discussed at length in the article. Their conclusion is that it will require a bit of work at the toolkit level, but their hope is that RandR will make it easier.
1) dialog
2) kcontrolmodule
3) notification
4) popup
Sadly, none of these have anything to do with X windows. You can install OroborOSX (great software) on OS X, which gives you an x client and server, but you still can't acces Mac apps from another X-box.
I love Mac OS X, and a native X windows on it is my fondest wish for the thing. But I don't see Apple doing that any time soon.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
And this is useful because why? It's the first 3 paragraphs on one of the links. Which is still dutifully serving pages. Tool.
Now this is the kind of interaction I like to see between RedHat and KDE. Redhat (and SuSe and Compaq) develop an X extension, KDE immediately adds support for it. That's it. Come on guys, it's all software libre, let's all be friends. There are enough unfriendly people (your favorite MonopoliStic link here) out there :-)
I'd be happy if they fixed cut & paste in Linux/X-Windows, and button focusing behaviour. User input is not treated with enough "respect" at the moment, such that it is often lost and has to be repeated. Not good.
This is fine work, I'm sure this will be useful.
Personally I like the X *feature* that make the display resolution change but not the size of the desktop. I find it invaluable as a global zoom feature, when developing GUIs or watching movies on systems without hardware zoom built in the display card (Xv extension).
I wish windows could do the same, but no. If you try to zoom in windows the desktop gets messed up. I wonder if windows users will ever get that feature?
Well, with Quartz you get a lot more than a pretty gui. You get a very fast, path based graphics, with free anti-aliasing to boot. This is not there just for looks! It has real uses.
Sure, people complain how slow Quartz can be and I admit that it is very slow when resizing windows, but XFree86 is actually slower on hardware with similar speeds, Don't believe me? Run the newest KDE with all the effects on (like animations) and AA fonts on a 500MHz machine, then play with OS X on a 500MHz iMac, You'll find Quartz to not only be faster, but better looking to boot.
Don't diss Quartz, it can do awesome stuff (microsoft's GDI+ doesn't stack up to it either.)
Using Quartz, you can actually draw things at theSUB-pixel level, it does this by varying the intensity of what you draw and can be very useable in real world appliations. Imagine software for planning projects and suchusing timelines. With Quartz, you could zoom in and out of the timeline in real-time AND be able to actually READ and see the diagrams even at 10% of their normal size!
To sum it up, Quartz is good sh*t!.
I won't speak to raw performance issues here, but the network load of the X protocol can be greatly alleviated by dxpc or better yet MLview dxpc, which claims to be around the speed of Citrix ICA.
I can still see Gnome and KDE menus paint across the screen chunkily -- yes, this is on a P-4 machine with whizzy graphics cards, a gig of RAM, etc.
Perhaps your setup is faulty. On my system (Athlon 900 with 1GB of RAM - granted I have a GeForce 4...) the KDE menu pops in, with no redraw at all. And this is in 1600x1200, 24bpp.
Honestly, XFree86 has never seemed slow to me. It does seem to be the weak link as far as system stability is concerned, though: X has been involved in nearly every one of the (few) system hangs I've experienced.
Reminder: find a new sig
Isn't it time that they redo the whole thing?
Quartz is based off a technology that was originally designed to be an extension to X. Mind you apple didn't implement it that way, but Xdps is in the works which will allow X apps to define a display postscript visual (which is actually more capable than display pdf, apple used the pdf subset of postscript so as not to pay royalties to adobe) and have all the compositing, path based, and vector capabilites of OSX, along with the extensibility of postscript, encapsulated in an X window that has all the features of X.
Or you could use X render which allows all of this to be easily implemented very efficiently in client side libraries. Basically the X framework is powerfull enough to give you choice and see which method works best.
what does deaths in europe have to do with a recession in the US?
That's why /. links to articles in the stories.
I can get how it might be useful to rotate the screen for a presentation on a projector. But why does everyone bitch about changing the resolution on the fly and makeing it easy to do??? Personally, i set my resolution and color depth *ONE TIME* no matter what OS i am using, and that is it! How often do you people need to change your display properties???
I have used some computers before where the video drivers actually support the concept of a "virtual desktop", virtually identical to the one in X11. It tends to be on ATI drivers, I think.
If your physical resolution is less than your virtual resolution, then moving the mouse to the edge of the screen scrolls the screen in that direction.
Not a standard part of Windows though, true. And I have not seen it under Windows 2000/XP - a Win9x hack?
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Berlin no longer exists; it is now Fresco. And it works, although not terribly well. You can't use it for day to day stuff, but it has a lot of stuff that would be difficult to add in X. My only problem with Fresco is that it forces you to use their one toolkit (uniformity or something). Maybe one day it will replace X, but for now X is better (just like GNU/Linux is better than pure GNU using the Hurd).
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
So, instead of hitting ctrl+-/+ and zooming in/out of the original screen's resolution, RandR will actually resize your desktop so all your window manager decorations (icons, panels, etc.) fit on the screen?
I then reclicked it, and there is no perceptable painting whatsoever. It's either there or it isn't. I can click over and over on it, and it pops back and forth (if I do it quick enough, I get a flicker effect and I think I can see where it is painting, but I'm not sure if it's just a optical effect of flipping back and forth).
KDE caches it's menu, and does a rebuild when you click it after n seconds of activity (the value is in a Properties panel somewhere, iirc). My guess is that the "repainting" is actually KDE rebuilding its menu after a period of inactivity.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
You obviously don't know what you're doing, have misconfigured, etc.
I have a set of boring-ass old PII/400 workstations with 128MB memory here running original GeForce256 cards using the NVidia driver. Everything in KDE -- window decorations, menus, anti-aliased text, scrolling content -- draws instantly, just as it does in Windows. There is none of the 'paint across the screen chunkily' problem you describe. Maybe it actually is the drivers. Did you ever think of that?
And on this same network, there are two headless Slackware 8 servers on which I often log in to KDE remotely. This is only a 10 megabit network and yet the KDE desktop works wonderfully; there are no real slowdowns whatsoever compared to the Citrix clients I've used elsewhere on the campus network.
Something is clearly broken on your setup.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
You mean like X11?
I don't think you understand X.
right?
Wah!
Don't tell anyone, but I found a list of sitez that host the XFree86 source code! Hopefully you can get it before they shut them all down! That ought to give you a head start!
You've got some problems with your machine. I'm running KDE 3 with Mosfet's Liquid with the effects cracked up. There is no chinkiness here. Everything draws instantaneously. Frankly, your opinion is no different than that of the usual "X sucks" troll that we generally see. You just don't know it because your box isn't set up right, then you insist on dissing it.
So yes, it is probably shitty drivers that are causing your problems.
And how? Will it be bundled with it, available as an upgrade, what?
at least it's not a goatse redir
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
The answer to your question is here.
Do not read this
"and now dynamic sizing/resizing in X."
Everyone is treating this like it's some super great accomplishment. Windows has allowed this since Windows 95, and the Mac since System 7.x.
Well, not exactly... What we're saying is that all the faults in useability/functionality that you may have been able to say X had are slowly and surely being whacked out. That they happen without disruption at all in compatability is a sign that there is no fundamental reason for these flaws, they are simply there because they haven't been done yet.
True, but when Windows Terminal Server came out, that takes a back seat. Try running an X11 session over a slow network link vs. a Windows terminal server session (especially over Citrix ICA) and let me know how it goes.
Depends... are we running it through ssh, telnet, or vnc? Vnc sessions are about as snappy as TS (minus the unfortunate remotely-rendered mouse of vnc). Of course Vnc suffers from the same advantage as TS, which is that it can render everything locally and compress and transmit the results.
But certainly X could use improvement in this area. That doesn't mean it won't come, or that we need to -start over-. It could be as simple as another extension.
The enemies of Democracy are
But the documentation leaves much to be desired, hw support is STILL behind (I don't have 3D support on my laptop w/ ATI chip (yes I know write it myself)), and (I could be wrong) it always seems slow.
badhack
For example, you should be able to tell an application running on your handheld computer to use a nearby desktop display, keyboard and mouse, or a projector on the wall. This should not require stopping and starting the application. You should be able to go home, and decide to import applications you left running at work. There are obviously security, authentication and authorization problems left to work out, but these are generally independent of the base window system.
Holly network is the computer, Batman! I gotta think about that one, but I'm sure it will not be comming to platforms that are still trying to extort per seat licensing and worry about more than one person running a word processor at one time. How's that for "ready" for the desktop"?
MMM, don't like frame buffer, it's been slow. The article talks about this frame buffer being faster than other frame buffers, but that does not make it as good as non frame fuffered servers, no?
Thinking over. Your turn.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Who are the master cock-mongers who keep modding these whores up? These are the same guys you see in COPS: Vice Squad saying into the hidden mic "Thank you, street whore, for peddling your wares. Here are $20 dollars in gratitude."
Do you understand me? I'm saying that you, the moderators, fuck whores. If you mod me down, I'll know it's because you are offended at being accused of whoring, and thus are too stupid to tell when someone is whoring and when you are paying for it!
erm, I meant www2.fresco.org, not www.fresco.org. Oops.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
Yeah, yeah, so gnome is cool... Now go fix it so you can change the effing gnome menu without having to be root and edit text files.
when will the ati mobility 3d LR work? all i get with X 4.2 is my screen slowly turning white. it is cool and all... but i'd rather be able to use accelerated (not vesa) X.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
And on this same network, there are two headless Slackware 8 servers on which I often log in to KDE remotely. This is only a 10 megabit network and yet the KDE desktop works wonderfully;
You either didn't read my message, or you consider a 10 Mb network as a "slow network link" -- something that I don't. I thinking more along the lines of DSL.
Actually, I think it just shows that up till now, it's not really been that much of a required feature...
But now that we have more and more normal desktop users at least considering Linux, it's become more pressing.
I think you'll find that from deciding to do the work, to actually finishing did not take very long at all, in the scheme of things....
Advanced users are users too!
Just to throw in a data point from a personal experience.
:)
I once ran mozilla from a dual PIII645 remotely from a NY hosting facility through my cable modem access in boston. It ran just as fast as my native mozilla on my k6II550. I thought it was interesting.
I believe some of the slowness you're seeing has to do with Gnome itself. I haven't used gnome2 yet but I hear it's snappier. and of course, there has been speed improvements in Xfree from v3 to v4 (from what I've noticed). I have not noticed the issue you have mentioned on my machine.
A lot of the X issues people mention (or don't name at all) are actually from the tookits and applications and desktops themselves. I mean look at the amout of memory needed to run the latest linux/unix desktops. I miss how fast windomaker used to get started
If anything X is a work in development as this latest extension shows. And we're stuck with it for the time being.
narbey
-- "The evil stops here" -Petr
Dude, you've got it all wrong. People often say that Quartz is almost like Display Postscript, but it's not at all. Display Postscript involved creating actual postscript code and sending it to a postscript intepretor for display on the screen. Quartz does not do that. However, it does share almost the same exact API as Display Postscript did, so I can understand the confusion.
Anyhow, Display Postscript was not intended to be an extension to X11, that came AFTER it was implemented on NeXT. Remember OpenStep on Sun and HP, thise systems only had Xwindows, so a XDPS system was needed for them only.
Another point, XRender works very similarly to how Quartz does. That is, clients draw in a pixmap and ask the Server to draw it (vs. asking the Server to just draw it). The WindowServer in OS X is kinda like a XRender only X11. Drawing commands are not sent to the WindowServer, only the client's pixmap of what their windows should contain is "sent" (shared really) to the Server. Hence, a lightwieght Window Manager.
just for your information, X works fine if the damn DE programmers would just use the proper functions to access the hardware faster and allow minimal communication between server and client. the X hacker for BlueEyeOS has discovered this and plans to implement there OSs DE correctly.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
But how does having remote windowing/etc help an "average user"? (I personally like having it, but I don't think it would bug me if a system like MS Terminal Services had to be used instead)
My server
I'm talking XDM. Using something like Exceed to render the desktop on a Windows box.
Also, one thing that I'd like to see improvement in the X area is the refresh rate settings. Up till now, I have had quite a time getting a decent refresh rate that didn't produce a wack image on an old machine/monitor that I have. Windows 2000 will display a normal image, but X has trouble with this.
> Ok, that is where I'm starting to laugh. X11 is S.L.O.W. slow. Windows GDI is lightning fast. I can click the start menu and it draws instantly. I can still see Gnome and KDE menus paint across the screen chunkily -- yes, this is on a P-4 machine with whizzy graphics cards, a gig of RAM, etc. And don't blame it on the graphics card manufacturers for releasing no or shitty drivers for Linux. (I didn't say you did, but that's the usual excuse around here.) Windows can wipe my ass too, but the capability to do that well hasn't been written into it. Yet.
That doesn't make sense. I can play modern games like rtcw, quake3, and ut2k3 in both Linux and Windows. KDE 3.1beta2 and WinXP are about the same speed on my box too (athlonXP 2200+, 512mb ram). Either you are lying or have some misconfiguration problems.
most people don't need those features
most people do need the ability to change resolution and color depth on their desktops easily
maybe the X team has finally changed direction to The Right Way (ie, what most people need instead of a handfull of computer scientists)
Mirroring support... I can imagine the pranks already...
Unsuspecting boss: Eeeeek! My computer just got a virus! Fix it!
Me: Sure... [types a command]... all fixed.
Boss: That was amazing! What would I ever do without you?
Me: About that raise I was asking about...
Quartz may be very cool, but clockspeeds on x86 and PowerPC are *vastly* different.
Would that 99% of the user base be the ones that will never need more than 640k RAM, Bill?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'd really love to run XaoS in 8-bit mode and use colour cycling while still having a 32-bit visual
for everything else. Is this good enough for that?
-- Tom Rathborne
I find it amazing to be reading posts from people whose memory of computers start at 95B. The original 95 required a reboot after a screen change, slick...just like every version of Windows before it.
I can see why this kind of feature would be important for Windows users. Afterall, if you had to reboot every time you changed your resolution you'd never get anything done.
Hmm. Well then, you believe wrong.
Anyone who comes directly to Linux and assumes that XF86 is a reasonable implementation of X11 seems to fall into this trap.
The fact is that X11 is a lovely and elegant platfrom-neutral graphical layer. XF86 is a botched implementation of it. Linux itself isn't particularly well suited to a clean implementation of X11, and the managers that run on top of XF86 in Linux are horrid bits of bloatware (albeit, nifty ones).
Go find an old SunOS system, and discover just how effect the X11 architecture is. Look at how well it runs on something comparable to a 80286. THEN come back to XF86 and wonder why they messed it up so horribly.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
This is KDE2, and misconfiguration is possible (not my machine, lab machines we're talking about here). But I'm not making this shit up.
I haven't seen KDE3, so I can't talk about that, sorry.
Cut and paste faults are BUGS in individual applications or toolkits. The XFree86 maintainers cannot fix these bugs by changing X, because X already does the right thing.
/really/ care.
In every serious X app you should be able to do both of the following:
1) Cut, Copy and Paste things through the system clipboard using menu options, keyboard shortcuts etc. as appropriate. e.g. Ctrl-X for cut in most GNOME, KDE apps. This works almost exactly like Windows.
2) Quick copy using the middle mouse button, select text in any application, then press the middle mouse button to paste that text in any other application.
If they don't work in your favourite apps, check for a new version. If that doesn't work either, file a bug, post to the mailing list, write to your democratic representative or complain ABOUT THE SPECIFIC APP on Slashdot. If you aren't specific no-one can help you.
Caveats:
Old KDE (pre 3.0) and Qt (ditto) apps (e.g. Opera and many installs of KOffice) don't work because Trolltech screwed up. Upgrade
Venerable old xterm doesn't have Cut/Copy/Paste menu items (most users don't even know it has a menu) so you can't use the clipboard only the fast copy feature. Use one of the many other modern terminal apps if you
Earlier (e.g. few months old) stable releases of Gnumeric make the same mistake as Qt2.x. Upgrade to the latest release.
GNU Emacs (but not XEmacs) has totally bizarre clipboard behaviour unrelated to any standard, principle or sense of reason. Use XEmacs or complain to your favourite Emacs maintainer.
Coders everywhere can always use more R&R. This means we won't have to offer additional vacation time.
Yeah, but ATI doesn't support their windows cards either.
I had an AIW Pro that NEVER worked right under any of the drivers ATI realeased. It would crash within 5 minutes of the first use of 3d accerelation.
- Apple should never have changed the code base of Mac to what is now OS X
- Microsoft should never have made the move from the 9x kernel to the NT kernel
- Gecko should never have happened
And the architecture of X should never be reconsidered.I just wanna say: me too.
I don't think windows comes anywhere close to having the level of flexibility that X does.
I'm suprised we don't have any "X is dying" trolls.
Did you ever consider the fact that it may not have been a high priority and that's why it "took so long" to implement? The desktop is still not the main use for *nux you know.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
I think I'll hook electrodes to luminescent bugs and submit a driver to CVS.
badhack
It's only a feature if the ability to change true resolution/desktop size is also implemented. Otherwise, it's a bug, or a design flaw.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Which means Apple may have a Unixish personality of their Mach core, but out of the box, no Unix GUI tools work.
Good point. The Mac has no GUI tools and Unix's GUI tools are world-renowned. Mac users are clamoring to use those Unix GUI tools. or was that vice versa?
cpeterso
This extension, together with other X11 features, has a much grander vision: letting applications move seamlessly across displays and devices. This requires defining standard protocols by which different implementations can interoperate and communicate. It also means coming up with standards that work across a wide range of devices.
I frankly don't know when, or even whether, X11 will be able to deliver on this vision--it's hard and there is still a lot of work left. But I do know that few other systems are even trying, and that functionally, X11 is already far ahead of the alternatives. For all their visual glitz, Windows and MacOS, for example, are just minor variations on the "applications running on my desktop" theme.
Actually windows 95 did not offer the dynamic resize/colour depth on all video cards, only some. ATI (I believe) was the exception for a long time, it worked. Colour depth was the worst.
3D window skew. Yeah, that's a lightweight, fast, and efficient feature that everyone needs.
I thought display pdf was also actualy sending pdf code to the window server, and pdf code just happened to be a lighter weight subset of postscript (pretty much postscript minus the programability). And I admit, messed up, Xdps wasn't until openstep but the point still stands that it's an existing system that proven workable that gives you the best of both worlds.
Also, I may be mistaken but I was pretty sure the quartxz windowserver got vector commands in some sort of protocal form (like pdf). Apps would send commands like "create an spline with these coordinates and assign it object name blah" and then allow the app to do resolution independant displays and deformations of that object just referencing it by name. Mind you I've never programmed for quartz so I may be talking out of my ass. Render on the other hand only does deformation and displays of pixmaps like you said, (or static color areas, which is where its power to composite objects out of these color areas comes in).
Anyways, the point was originally that with not too much more effort X can do all this without giving up the remote display, backward compatibility, extensibility and platform independance that we all love (or at least I do....I know there are X haters out there).
Win32.
I've got a LCD display that can rotate 90 degrees so it ends up with a resolution of 768x1024. I like the 3:4 profile better than the 4:3 (maybe because I liked my blit)
The problem is that the speed of the thing in the rotate mode is so slow. Modern graphics hardware seems to prefer loading things at the upper left and working towards the right and then down. The rotated drivers I've seen so far seems to do the same thing on a pixel level and its so slow...
Once this takes off, then I'll need to find a display I can rotate that has 1024 pixels accross. 768 just isn't enough for way too many web pages.
And a cat does not have my fucking tongue, Slashdot. Isn't brevity a positive thing?
Terminal Services emulates hardware so that the server OS does all the work. That also means that it sends bitmaps and rects while X sends EXVERYTHING over the line. I think over the line, compression / encription would be great extensions to have, but I don't think they decided to make the channel configurable, so unless someone writes a wrapper for it, X over low speed will never be ideal.
As for on-platform performance, same problem in a different way. The channel can be majorly shortcutted if both server and client are on the same computer if someone wrote a faster channel between xlib and the server, like IPC's. Unless it is 100% implemented, aka not an extention like DGA or DRI.
Bye!
I use Gnome, as I think its usability surpasses that of KDE. KDE 2 has trouble doing the simplest of things -- like storing my font configuration correctly. For some reason, it decides to set all my system fonts to a cursive calligraphy font one day after I changed the fonts to helvetica. Some are stuck like that, like the fonts in the control menus. That when I had it up to here with KDE.
I've turned off all the graphical toys in GNOME like font antialiasing, file previewing, and anything else that I could think of, but Nautilus + Sawfish is still as slow as poop through molasses compared to Windows.
The half-assed monitor at 1280x1024(rated for 800x600) from 3 feet away does this without ANY performance hit.
I don't have kde3 on my iBook or my server yet, but my iBook is noticeably 'smoother' in kde(local) than in OS X.
X11's best feature IMHO is its network support. While booted to OS X I can startup an X server, ssh to my server, and run any of my Linux software. My iBook's ram(only 128mb) isn't a limiting factor because I can use my server's 1.75gb.
As for Winshit XP, X11 has a faster refresh rate over 10mb/s slow ethernet!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
It sounds like your system has some problems. I've used XFree86 with KDE 3.0, Gnome 2.0 and Enlightenment with no speed/performance issues. This is a Pentium III with 256 Megs of RAM. Works just as fast as Windows NT/2K. (I haven't tried XP on this machine) The other point you make about X over slow links shows ignorance on your part. I used X over my 128K VPN connection to work with lbxproxy (The Low Bandwidth Extensions for X included as a part of X) the other day and the performance was on par with a VNC session. Yeah, that's not as snappy as Citrix, but it's more than usable. I use X every day at work on a 10 Mbit network and it's just like the apps are running on the system I'm sitting down at.
One thing you can't do with Citrix ICA/RDP that you can with X is run multiple apps on one desktop that are on different application servers. This allows for cut and paste between the apps. Try that with RDP/ICA. Can't do it...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Please be more sensible. This comment is rather insightful.
Understanding is a three-edged sword. -- Kosh Naranek
Try "startx" right away, without running xconfigurator, or xf86config. See what you get. Save it as XF86Config_working, then go ahead and run xf86config and try and get something better. If you get X to run, at least you won't overwrite a good configuration while you try and get one running;-) (This is my tip of the day, works on Grey Cat Linux.)
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
uh the hears 2002 ... seven years later and your just now catching up?
But, I think its impact is being overblown, at the cost of ignoring features which have existed in Xfree86 (and X11 in general) for some time.
Of course, changing the display resolution itself has always been possible using control-alt-+/-, but without resizing the desktop.
Full screen games can run at any resolution and color depth supported by the hardware, and included in the XF86Config file, regardless of the desktop resolution, on almost any recent card, if the program itself supports the existing DGA extensions.
Real-time mode line (ie, refresh rate, dot clock, etc.) tweaking has always been possible with xvidtune and other utilities (the very nice PowerDesk tool with Matrox cards, for instance, which is GPL'd).
What this does is allow resizing (and less significantly, rotation, reflection, and other similar permutations) of the desktop itself without restarting the X11 server.
Moreover, this does not automatically mean that an easy to use Windows-style control applet will exist--this is a separate task, as it should be in the Unix tradition, but one which these extensions will make closer to possibility (notwithstanding, I can't see why some tool like this hasn't been developed already by one of the large commercial distributions using functionality already present--see the PowerDesk applet I mentioned above for an example of how this should work).
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
FP for the next story. It's been 3 hours.
It would help the "average user", if the "average user" would run X11. Of course, if all the "average user" does is run programs locally, there won't be many reasons to change. But here are some I like: work home with stuff at the workplace, work at work with stuff on some server in some other country, work with expensive programs on other peoples computers, ... etc...
Personally, I use X11's remote features all the time, and would generally wish it was even more network aware, rather than faster...
Server. I've used both and they work fine for me (although don't change resolutions running VNC).
OS X 10.2 is everything I could expect from an OS and more. Linux distro's should take notice. I use OS X, Windows and Linux. I have moved from Linux to OS X for my desktop needs and run all Linux (from Windows) on the Server side (JSP) with the exception of DB Server running Solaris on SPARC.
As soon as Oracle is out of Dev versions for 10.2 Server I'm debating on testing versus my SPARC (IIi) to gauge speed and usability. The OS X Server tools look great!
This guy doesn't appear to be trolling, it's not flaimbait, (s)he's just completely wrong and ignorant of what (s)he's talking about.
Go play somewhere else, moron.
10 Mps is a slow link.
DSL and cable are pitifully slow. (At least to those of us who spend most of our time on university networks.)
Taking a look at Hamish's work on the project (available at http://yoyo.its.monash.edu.au/~meddie/patches/scre enshots/) shows that the display dialog for resizing windows will also include the dimensions in milimeteres! Who cares? It's another point of confusion that a) no one cares about (when was the last time you took a ruler to determine the dimensions of your horizonal and vertical screen space in mm?) and b) another point for Linux that it's too 'complicated' for a regular user to get aquainted to. It's redundant and is simply another point of confusion.
Seriously, I'm a gamer, programmer and developer and I don't see any situation where I would require this information...so why are we intent on including it in this situation?
Additionally, viewing screenshot #4 displays the fact users can flip the monitor display upside down using a QuickRes-like implementation. This is fantastic for the Vampire population out there, but for the rest of the world it's useless. Sure, include support in XFree86 itself, but to provide this feature in a very prodominent area where users can routinely access is ridiculous. I can see it now - tech support getting thousands of calls from people who think their computer is 'broken' because the image is flipped 270 degrees. Does this really benefit anyone? I don't see any use for this readily-available feature.
Just because we have the *ability* to do it (note: I'm not against XFree86 implementing this feature, just where KDE is going to be placing the options to use it) doesn't mean we *have* to do it.
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
The Mac solved a much simpler problem: given a proprietary GUI toolkit running on a single machine, let people rotate the screen. You can do that with a quick hack.
X11 is a protocol, not an implementation. People can't just go in, hack the XFree86 implementation, and be done with it. If you add something to X11, it needs to be defined, discussed, and then implemented. People need to think about lots of different kinds of possible hardware and scenarios. That takes time.
When will somebody free the world of X11 and write a light-weight fast and efficient graphics layer for Linux,
Have you done a "ps" on your Mac lately? Have you done any kind of graphics benchmarks? X11 runs rings around the Macintosh display system, both in terms of performance and in terms of memory footprint.
but I strongly believe 2/3 of the functionality of the X11 architecure is just a big waste of time and disk space
Oh, and what functionality would that be? Please tell us.
Besides, do you think that putting a PDF or Postscript interpreter into the display server is the epitomy of efficient design?
I can see where it's useful (including Xfree on a Sharp Zaurus), but it still dependent on some screen definitions if your screen isn't quite standard.
I mean, my laptop gets 800x600x8 bit, because it has 1 meg of vid-RAM. I can't go 16-bit... unless I shrink it down to 800x592.
Not standard, yes?
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
and now dynamic sizing/resizing in X.
Everyone is treating this like it's some super great accomplishment. Windows has allowed this since Windows 95, and the Mac since System 7.x.
Windows has never had -- and still doesn't -- rotation, which the XRandR also provides. Cool, now I can tilt my monitor on its side and view things in portrait mode.
The Mac supported this with certain display hardware (the Radius Pivot comes to mind), but most Mac hardware (of System 7 vintage, anyway) didn't support any resizing, dynamic or otherwise.
I can click the [Windows] start menu and it draws instantly. I can still see Gnome and KDE menus paint across the screen chunkily -- yes, this is on a P-4 machine with whizzy graphics cards, a gig of RAM, etc.
Then something is seriously fucked up with your Linux/X server configuration. I'm typing this on a P-III 550 with 512 MB RAM and a Matrox 200 graphics card, and "instant" is the word I'd use for the graphics. On a P-166 with 64MB and cheap S3 ViRGE graphics, it's a little slower to start drawing a menu, but once it does start the menu appears quickly, none of this "chunkily" stuff.
Makes you wonder why all those thin clients that boot Linux + X11 do it not to connect to an X server, but to run Citrix's ICA client for Linux to connect to a Windows 2000 server.
Umm, maybe because Windows 2000 server doesn't speak X Windows? (So, how do I set the DISPLAY variable in Win2K?)
-- Alastair
The source code is all there - write it yourself. Isn't that the standard open source rejoinder to everything? :)
creation science book
He actually worked (or works?) for Microsoft. (I'm not kidding.) He's got 900+ posts, and I couldn't dig it up in 5 seconds w/ Google, but he's admitted to it in the past.
:)
:)
So, I suspect he's trolling or spreading FUD in this case. Don't feed the trolls.
(Whoever digs up his admission of guilt gets a free cookie.
so all I'm concerned about, will this allow me to have different resolutions on different virtual desktops? I'd like that.
-
I see, it is somewhat confusing because most people have never used a lightweight window manager. OS X has a 20K process called "Window Manager", all it knows how to do is keep track of where windows are, where the mouse is, keystrokes, etc. It is the clients responsibility to actually draw stuff. The client asks the Window Manager for a shared piece of memory to draw to. When the client is done it tells the server and the server then blits this pixmap and keeps it in memory for later use (double buffering). This is basically what Xrender does. Note that it is the client which also draws the window frame, decorations, etc, there is no "Window Manager" like there is on X11.
Now, the clients do have access to PDF intepreters, but they run in the client only. no "code" is sent to the server. This is the fastest way to do this. ala XRender stuff. Of course, this type of graphics system does not work with remote connections.
I thought XRender prevented remote display functionality?
X11 is ok, but something like quartz does it so much smaller, simpler, and faster.
Win32 has only been around for half as long as X.
how much is the "average user"'s opinion worth in this scenario? X is not used by the same audience as windows. you should not steal features from the experienced users to satisfy windows morons.
Well if he's like me or anyone I know, he never got it or any other virus, thanks for asking.
Funny how as Linux becomes more and more popular, more and more worms and viruses appear for it, eventhough it is supposed to be almost infinitely more secure than Windows. How's the Slapper worm doing, BTW?
I also havn't noticed the 'massive speed hits' you mention. Even when viewing a DVD with 3 layers of semi-transparent windows displaying AA text over it. Huh. Doesn't seem to be choking.
I would also argue that useing OpenGL to render to screen is a good option. Most video cards today have a lot of proccessing power devoted to 3D rendering, and pure 2D isn't much of a priority. Don't expect anyone to bring out 128 bit floating point color anytime soon in a 2D incarnation.
Well, judging from your nick, you're a BeOS fan. I don't know tons about BeOS, but I hear that they know multimedia. Os X looks pretty damn good to me, though.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
> I would like to be able to redirect running xwindows applications.
That would be nice, Tee'ing the remote display as a multicast sort of thing would be cool too.
But what I would really like to see is for them to fix backing store and re-enable it as the default. Backing store worked great in XFree 3.3.x and it doesn't use that many resources and most programs don't use it. For some reason it was disabled as the default when 4.0.x arrived. What happened?
E.g. the Matrox QuickDesk app (for Matrox G200) under windows can do exactly this - zoom-in to lower resolution without rearranging desktop. It can be bound to any key. Very convenient, and I thought I would be missing it when I was migrating from win98 to linux... but guess what? XFree86 has this too, right out of the box :)
For starters, Win32 has not been around for 10 years yet...
OK, maybe there is something wrong with me, but all I can think of with rotate and resize is the following:
:-)
Rotate screen to view centerfold...
Resize pants.
I'm a bad bad person.
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
eff.org guerrilla.net debian.org gentoo.org
I think nautilus has been notorious for being slow. Apparently there have been some speedups due to development post-Eazel.
But yeah. I have turned nautilus off. The old gmc is much faster, if not as featurefull.
Given all that. I love running emacs remotely from the dev server.
narbey
-- "The evil stops here" -Petr
Win32 was introduced with NT 3.51, and the first non NT windows to have it was 3.11 (November 1993)
As far as speed, I"m running on an AMD 1.53ghz and GeForce 4 w/ NVIDIA linux drivers and at 1920x1440x24, I don't have to wait for re-renders unless I've got something else in the background taking up CPU cycles, (which is much more common on my windows box than on my linux).
I do security
You'd have a point if one thing wasn't true. The world is becoming more networked. Be it intranet (home based) or internet (world based). The single user single computer single task paradigm passed away years ago. Computers multitask were they use to be one tasked. Computers started with multi-user then went to single user, now there back to multi-user. Now networking equipment is so cheap that one can easily build a home-network. With the popularity of the internet. The idea is greatly expanded. X and it's networking capability fits in perfectly in this world. You say that the common man doesn't need such a feature. Well the common man didn't "need" all the other stuff, until it became cheap and common (windows and macs offering such). X offers it's capability both cheap and common (every unix offers it, free or otherwise). You may just hear about people using such more and more, just like you heard more and more people multi-tasking and multiple user using a computer.
See, this article gets rid of number 10. Guess you'll need something new to troll with now, eh?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
-1 Redundant
+1 Well Deserved
Do you have a habit of smoking somethign when you use X?
I'm typing this on a Dell Inspiron 7000. Pentium 333, 190 MB ram, 4 MB ATI video card. Both Windows and X take a second to read the menus and render them the first time, but that time is nearly equivilant. Afterwards, X renders instantly.
However, I don't notice a load-time on my other machine (XP 2000+, 768 MB DDR, MSI GeForce4 Ti 4400).
Are you running an old version of Nautilus? I don't think even that would do it, but that's all I can think of.
Sure, like everything, X has it's problems, but I prefer flexibility and configurability over the simplistic, inflexible crap from Microsoft that passes as a desktop.
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
A very good article, but there are a couple of points I would like to make:
Free software development has a different set of standards to work by than commercial software. What this article says is probably true for commercial software, but there the motivation is to make it work and sell it. Free software is different in that selling isn't a factor. Usage is nice, but the most skilled open source programmers are artists. And it shows! We may not have produced a full MSOffice clone, but I'm writting this from a Linux box in Galeon, using Mozilla. I don't have Windows on my machine, and don't want it - Linux is an excellent system. Mozilla is a tremendous piece of work - in my estimation, the rewrite has done a lot of good. Yes we had to wait, but in the end it produced results.
Maybe the results are not so good for Netscape the company, but Netscape the browser is a lot better off. In free software, the program means more than the company, which is a very foreign mindframe to corporate types. Understandable.
But that's why people are interested in a total redesign of X - we don't have to care whether or not it takes five years or ten, whether we will have enough market share to pay costs. It's developed as a hobby by people who love doing it. We aren't sweating timelines or market share. Berlin is very slow, and may or may not ever replace X, but so what? They like developing it, it undoubtedly has advantages and flexibility, and may someday change the world of free software. Same with GNU Hurd or EROS. Totally cool ideas, total rewrites of everything, not fully developed but really neat and potentially very useful.
So while it wouldn't make sense IN A COMMERCIAL SETTING to replace X, in the artistic world of free software it does. And since both X and whatever replaces it can be maintained and work together (Both DirectFB and Quartz can handle X running alongside them, for example, and if Berlin can't yet it will surely be able to) we can be backwards compatible and functional while reaching for the stars feature and style wise.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
obviously you didn't even read the fucking link.
scraping entire projects in favor of a new one is counter-productive. fix the old code. there is already a base of something like a hundred megs of source for X. X is complicated. Dumping that hundred megs and starting over completely doesnt help anyone.
oh, and for gecko: look what happened to netscape navigator when netscape decided to simply start over. blame it all on microsoft if you want, but the fact that netscape didnt release a major revision to navigator between 98 and 2001 says a lot. maybe they should have (gasp!) fixed the old code, and released, oh, say, two or three revisions in that time period.
Your point also hinges on the premise that X has competition ala (netscape/microsoft) that might overtake it if it were to be rewritten. The only reason why I wouldnt want to see X redone is that we'd be throwing out just about every gui toolkit and window manager with it. Granted these things could be recoded or backwards compatibility kept but that would marginally defeat the purpose of a rewrite. I think there comes a point at which eventually you just have to chuck it all and start over, that being said, I dont think we've reached that point.
I can see why this kind of feature would be important for Windows users. Afterall, if you had to reboot every time you changed your resolution you'd never get anything done.
Actually, You can change the Resolution & Color Depth without restarting windows.
The Reason you had to reset windows 3.xx was due to the fact that a Video Card had to have a device driver for each screen mode it supported.
Who in thier right mind uses network gui over something as slow as dsl/isdn/56k? Thats what the command line terminal is for.
if the new e libraries will support the r and r extention? Does anyone know...
I use Gnome, as I think its usability surpasses that of KDE. KDE 2 has trouble doing the simplest of things -- like storing my font configuration correctly. For some reason, it decides to set all my system fonts to a cursive calligraphy font one day after I changed the fonts to helvetica. Some are stuck like that, like the fonts in the control menus. That when I had it up to here with KDE.
I had the same problem with Redhat 7.2. Thats the reason I switched to gnome. I've never even wanted to go back, even though KDE can look pretty nice. Gnome may not look as nice by default, but at least it works.
What's worrying about this is the repeated references to the
system dropping out of hardware accelleration.
It's not a problem for simple 2D renderings - browsers, Xterms,
etc - but if you are running 3D applications like games and it
kicks you out of hardware accel, you're dead.
Not only that, but OpenGL programs will have registered a "rendering
context" which will define what extensions to the OpenGL API are
available to it. Once the program is using those extensions,
you can't just take them away and drop down to a software rendering
context. The program will crash for sure.
It's all very well to say "Well - don't do that then" - but naive
users will assume that all of this will work smoothly (as it should)
and that having programs crash when you resize the screen is a BUG.
Dunno - maybe they've thought through all the implications - but it
doesn't look like it from a quick read of the RandR page.
www.sjbaker.org
It's been 7 years after it was intoduced in Win95. Five more years and we'll get some working plug&play monitor support.
*
EvilCabbage is a fraud! The product he sells is a rip-off. I bought ChairME from him 2 years ago, but the chair just flipped over and my butt smacked the floor hard, which is where I'm typing this article from now....
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
The project is called Fresco now. There is not 'berlin'.
Anyway it was the boss's birthday and the night before he carefully locked his office and set traps in the door so he could tell if anyone had been in .... the next morning he comes in, everything seems OK, he checks the door, his chair, his desk, doesn't find anything ... sits down to work with his computer .... nolthing happens .... about 1/2 an hour later he realises his screen is slowly getting greener and greener ... aha he thinks looks in his system folder, removes a couple of suspicious INITs and reboots, it comes right ..... about 1/2 and hour later kit starts going green again .... he pulls some more stuff, reboots again, but no luck .... he's just about to reformat his disk and reload the OS when lunch came around and we explained ....
Of course reloading everything wouldn't have done him any good ... we'd burned him a custom ROM for his graphics card
Now we'll be able to use elgooG easily!
so now...after 5 years, we can do nearly (save the colour depth change) what Windows did in 1998...
:)
Complaints aside... r0x0r
The problem I had was with RH 7.2 as well. Possible correlation?
A system is only as secure as the person looking after it.
I just made the assumption from "powerful" and "XP" in the same sentence, this guy wasnt too concerned with security.
My bad?
KDE > GNOME ... GNOME people are rejected visual basic programmers.
and I actually spelled "visual" right!
kate 3.1 does #9
Hmmmmm. On my G4 top shows the window manager taking 15 meg registered pages and 81megs virtual, which we all know don't count.
>>>>>>>>>
'top' is unreliable on Linux, so why should it be any more reliable on OS X? Install QuartzDebug from the Developer Tools and see just how much memory you're windows take up.
I also havn't noticed the 'massive speed hits' you mention. Even when viewing a DVD with 3 layers of semi-transparent windows displaying AA text over it. Huh. Doesn't seem to be choking.
>>>>>>>
I've used OS X on 800MHz Macs. My KDE 3.x desktop blows it away.
I would also argue that useing OpenGL to render to screen is a good option. Most video cards today have a lot of proccessing power devoted to 3D rendering, and pure 2D isn't much of a priority. Don't expect anyone to bring out 128 bit floating point color anytime soon in a 2D incarnation.
>>>>>>>
That's the whole point. There is huge amounts of power in 3D cards, so why not draw the desktop as a 3D scene. Look at one of the main graphics primitives in Quartz, the Bezier curve. The traditional method of rendering a closed bezier curve is to break it down into polygons. It's almost begging to be hardware accelerated via OpenGL. Quartz is a vector GUI, OpenGL accelerates vector (which is what 3D really is) graphics. It's almost a no-brainer.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
>What does Mac OS X use? Something different. Maybe we (the rest of the
>*nix world) should see HOW MUCH they gained from doing that - it may
>be that rewriting a lot of apps (or doing some sort of backwards
>compatibility mode) would be worth it.
>
>
They gained absolutely nothing from it, except a bunch of losers from the Amiga and BE userbase who having pretty much run their respective platform around, are now flocking towards Mac OS X. If the Apple users were smart, they would do what the Linux and BSD users have done and chase these idiots off with pichforks and burning torches.
3D window skew. Yeah, that's a lightweight, fast, and efficient feature that everyone needs.
You seem to be under the impression that this is an extra feature added solely to look cool in screenshots. Fact is, the ability to skew, rotate and scale fall directly out of the fact that all of the transformation are stored as simple matricies. That's efficient.
Fresco also works in real-world units such as centimeters instead of arbitrary pixels, making things like the choice of screen resolution obvious; always pick the highest. Things don't get smaller when you up the res. This is why Fresco is the future.
There are a lot of people whining about X (myself included). Most people say X is (take your pick) bloated, slow, obsolete, inefficient, or hopeless. Now some of these individual claims may have some truth to them, but the fact is that X despite its knarliness, works, and it works today. There isn't any real alternative, and it can continue to be extended for a long time.
But people who say such things about X are missing the point. X is ugly, in the same way that x86 is ugly. I think the analogy is a very apt one. Both are rather old designs, both are the most prevalent, both have had to be extended numerous times (and successfully), and both work, and work quite well. But neither one will get any design awards: the only thing we're doing at this point with either of these is leveraging the existing code base (i.e., the millions of x86 binaries on the one hand and X applications on the other) and avoiding duplication of past work by building something from scratch. And frankly, I think both are beginning to reach the end of the line: the further we go, the more effort we need to expend for an increasingly marginal return.
For the x86 example, Intel perceives this, and wants to jump ship now, even though its replacement is not as robust, fast, or powerful as its last top of the line. Once again, people who point this fact out are missing the point: Intel is laying down a roadmap, to service a broader goal of an architecture it can grow with for the next decade or more.
Why can't we do the same with X? It's going to get harder and harder to grow with X, so lets lay some groundwork now for a window system we can grow with for the next decade or more.
I am shocked and amazed that more comments are not mentioning Berlin, that is, Fresco. Do people not know about this? This is the only project I've found that has half a chance of being a suitable replacement for X. There's a framework there, a coherent vision, and even a basic running system. This isn't vapor, folks, or are these people a bunch of anti-X whiners with no code to back up their pointless bitching. They're not FUD-mongers; at least listen to their well-balanced (I think) justification as to why they're working on this project. It's quite easy to see that they're not at all motivated by hatred of X, but by a desire to design an elegant and network-transparent window system.
Why don't we have more of that nowadays? Half the OSS movement seems to be driven by hatred of Microsoft (or simply closed-source software), rather than love of elegant, useful, robust code born of honest work. At some point someone is going to have to worry about more than simply getting things done as quickly as possible, be-damned-how-it-works, and think more about design and the way things should be. The former type of attitude breeds stuff like MS Windows. Is that really what you want your windowing system to become? If something isn't done before long, X is going to be just like Windows: pasted and taped together and building on a merely serviceable codebase. This, I think, would be a great injustice to X. Let it die a peaceful and honorable death now, rather than a violent and hate-filled one later when it becomes so horrible, so monstrous, that the issue of replacing it is forced upon us and we throw its head on the guillotine.
Remember that at its inception X itself was merely a design framework by people who wanted to do a windowing system the right way. That X has served so well for so long is a testament to that foresight. But please, let us have the foresight to know when to design something new on that same basis, learning from what we have done. A rejection of the code does not mean a rejection of the vision or of the talent that bore that code.
Local mouse rendering has been implmented in version s of VNC for a few months now at least.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
The same time people stop capitalizing god.
Who cares who did it first.
What's important is that both KDE and Gnome will be able to support this feature in the next 0.x version, which is great!
This isn't a friggen pissing contest...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
What about directfb?
There is a very good reason to rewrite code yourself. Anytime you use someone else's code they own a piece of you and a piece of your "action".
I would rather reinvent the wheel 1000 times and have 1000 wheels, than have someone else own the wheels on my car.
Lets say I wrote a superior X replacement and it became more popular than X. I would profit immensly (as some have) because I would be the supreme authority on the new system and could do seminars, books, tours. If I just wrote a book about X, no publisher would return a phone call.
Maybe you don't understand software development. It can make MONEY for things like bread and little Timmy's operation. If you think everyone should join the "collective", well I better be getting my GNU/bread and GNU/cash in the mail soon.
The parent was written by Jim Gettys, who wrote the bleedin' thing.
Steve
Well, there ya go then. :)
:)
I only use it at work, and they don't necessarily upgrade that often.
The enemies of Democracy are
I have Red Hat 8.0 right now on my computer and when I switch to a game that runs at a different resolution depth then my current one it switches to it. Though, it may be if it is running at a resolution lower than my current one (1152x864), but it defeintly will got to full screen for 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768. Does this have to do with that emulated thing they were talking about on the story? Just curious.
This page was generated by a Barrel of Circus Midgets, and that is the way I like it!!!
Really dude, that was useless. You don't even mirror. Retard.
You didn't actually have to reboot the original 95, it just defaulted to an option that forced you to reboot. Unnecessary with most hardware and easily disabled.
Windows NT could resize the screen no problem in 1993.
Will this new XFree extension allow Cadence, which requires a 8 bit psedo-color visual, to be remotely displayed on a 16,24,32 bit screen? This limitation has prevented me from running Linux instead of Solaris at work. Matrox cards that support overlay are too expensive.
" Who in thier right mind uses network gui over something as slow as dsl/isdn/56k?"
Someone using Windows Terminal Server or Citrix Metaframe, both of which great work over slow links. X is old obsolete shit that possibly could be patched up to modern standards.
Just curious but have you tried 2.4.19? It has accelerated ATI support. I'm using it right now on my ThinkPad (Radeon Mobility 7500) and it works fine. I even play the occasional game of tuxracer. You could also check out gatos.
Why not fork?
You could do every single one of the things you mentioned with DGA in XFree86 4.0 already.
Of course, you can't run in a windowed mode, but if you're running a game, it's a fair bet that you aren't running windowed.
May we never see th
badhack
Bzzt. Win3.11 had Win32s available. Note the "s" for Subset. Win95 was the first real release of Win32 that saw any kind of real world deployments.
Democrat delenda est
I believe that is accelrated under .19. Have you tried that kernel yet? Your device section in the config file should be "ati"
Why not fork?
Linux commercials during the world series? It happened.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
This X extension might be the right place to correct a problem that plagues many LCD screens, namely a gradient in color intensity from top to bottom of screen when the color intensity should be constant
It appears that the problem is due to the fact that when one scales a given hue from full intensity to zero intensity (i.e. black), the latter is reached quicker on the top of the screen than on the bottom of the screen, i.e. any given mid-range hue will appear darker on the top of the screen than on the bottom.
What is interesting is that full intensity hues (say pure red, blue or green) show an acceptably constant intensity over the length of the screen. Hence in the process of lowering the intensity, both the top and bottom of the screen are starting from the same level. The issue is really how quickly the top of the screen becomes darker as the intensity is lowered relative to the bottom.
This problem might remind one of the so-called "gamma" that CRT's exhibit, although of course it is not the same issue. I believe that the problem which I have described could be completely corrected in software by viewing the middle of the screen as normal, and "bending" the intensity values as one approaches the top of the screen toward lighter values, and vice versa as one heads to the bottom of the screen.
Anyway, just a thought. I have always wanted to try to tackle this problem but have not been able to find the time. I kind of hope that maybe someone who has the expertise to work on RandR would be able to provide a solution to this problem quite easily.
I run KDE/Gnome on a P 120Mhz box and UI elements respond faster than my P1.2Ghz box running WinXP. Obviously anybody that has a studly box and still finds X slow must either have a configuration problem or be trying to run at an insane resolution.
Try picking a slimmer window manager, getting rid of unneeded crap on your desktop, changing the res and color depth, etc. There must be something causing whatever slow down is causing you to be slow.
Also, I haven't had an X crash in over a year. Partially this is because I switched from Netscape to Mozilla (and started running Netscape with memory and process limits) but I think X has gotten quite a bit more stable especially on older hardware.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Because its logical, simple, accessible and easy to pick up. Therefore Linux weenies wouldnt be able to make up for there lack of self-esteem and dignity by showing how they can amazingly configure the computer equivalent of the Lada.
My understanding of this is that X /can/ handle cutting and pasting more than just text. The problem is, it requires negotiation between both sides of the transaction in order to find a format that they can handle. Text is handled by everything, because it's easy; the general case /isn't/ easy, so it tends not to be handled.
/is/ something that's been fixed in the major toolkits. They don't use X's system, but the current versions support their own interoperable cutting and pasting and drag and drop and so forth.
In any case, this
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
Morph3ous.net
----
Morph3ous.net: A synergy of art, technology and innovation.
However, centuries passed (of computer time, which is rapider than the Julian calendar) before this fundamental capability appeared. Microsoft Windows(tm) has done this since 1996 (or earlier?). Apple surely did it long before. The fact that it took so long led me to doubt the soundness of the X11 system design- either no one else noticed those obvious deficienies (unlikely!), or the vast complexity of the protocol prohibited the creation of new functionality without the developer first learning each little secret of the large xfree86 codebase.
We now see that the latter interpretation was somewhat correct, as this paper explains that the creation of RandR was possible only due to new software (TinyX, etc) that isolated the RandR guys from needing to deal with all of the complexities of X itself. Of course, the relentless increase in processing speed (fruit of Moore's Observation) helped too.
I hope that changes like this have "lowered the hackivation energy" enough so that XFree86 can quickly get some other useful improvements added- within a short time, it might be possible to regain a little Wow Factor over the Microsoft and Apple GUI interfaces. I'll list some improvements I'd like to see. The RandR writeup mentioned some of these, hopefully the same team is already planning work on them) Others of these things can be done already, but with awkward, unstable configurations, or through VNC. We need these capabilities in popular linux distributions, and without VNC's least-common-denominator slowness.
- Migrate a program from one Xserver to another We should be able to use a utility program or a window-manager icon to select a window to send elsewhere. This should be possible from a remote command line login as well (so that if I wander into another person's office I can show him either a single program I'm running, or my whole desktop). It should be your option whether or not the program permantently relocates to the new server (or returns when the window is dismissed). This brings up another feature,
- Run the same program on multiple X displays aka xfork. Operator's choice as to whether the remote display is read-only, or also accepts input. The default should be read-only, unless the toolkit has coded support for this feature, in which case it should default to allowing the remote to provided logically read-only input only (scroll around in the window, but not change the document).
- Lock your desktop without locking the Xserver When I run xlock, it shouldn't only allow MY password to reactivate the display- other persons should be able to walk over and login as well. I can either wait for her turn to be up, or find another Xserver and use the above features to migrate my display to my new desk. This is a natural match for X11's capabilities, but one that Microsoft got last year. *nix has to catch up quick!
- Dynamically reassign input devices Now that a user can change his resolution without restarting X, he should be able to do the same with his input devices. Boot your computer without having any mice installed, get to X, run mozilla to see a web-page on how to configure your Wacom table, and get that working, without needing to restart. (Linux does this to some extent with things like symlinks in
/dev and the /dev/input/mice devices, but it could be better).
- Resurrect the multi-headed display In ancient times, one computer would run 16 interactive sessions on terminals attached to its serial ports. Those capabilities were lost as displays became more complicated and PCs and fat clients emerged. But now, with the rise of USB peripherals and multiple active PCI video cards, commidity hardware could again support this functionality. On an Athlon 1500, I should be able to install a 2nd video card, 2 usb mice, and one usb keyboard, and get a fully independent GUI desktop. (Yes, this usage is a geek stunt- its real-life utility will be bounded by the length of a VGA cable)
- Support joysticks in X This should be an easy one, right guys?
- And many more Any ideas?
An interesting consequence of some changes like this is that users might tend to leave X11 programs running for weeks at a time, with virtual memory becoming like a form of application serialization/persistence. That could have negative implications for efficiency and design. ("Oh, I don't need to put XMMS in my startup folder, I just left it running from last year")(I've heard Microsoft's Netmeeting software does something like this. Probably just a screen scraper, but still a workable feature.)
Can't the extension be backported to 4.1?
Yes I know I can compile 4.3 from source, but yesterday I installed 4.2.1 from source, and all kinds of weird stuff happen. XVideo shows flickering green boxes, and all GTK+ 1 and QT apps segfault at startup (even after a recompile).
Windows NT, 1992. And for what are hopefully obvious reasons Win32 must have been defined and around for some time before that.
What happens is that instead of the application painting the the screen when X requests it, the app uploads a description of the GUI it wants using some kind of XML schema, perhaps a modified XUL, to an ui server (a la display postscript). That XML is then transformed into SVG and rendered using the spiffy 2D acceleration primitives that the XFree team are working on (Xr and Xc or something???). This ui server manages the windows for an app, and if the app requires direct painting they they use XEmbed to make that happen.
This has a number of advantages, namely that being purely vector based it's resolution independant, when an application is working hard the GUI doesn't slow down, by boosting the priority of the ui server you can make the GUI feel much more responsive under load, if an app freezes the GUI does get "damaged" and you could achieve more bandwidth-friendly network transparency.
All this could be done without any modifications to X at all. You'd need to develop some kind of remote DOM synchro technology first, one that could marshal XML Events, but once that was done the rest would be fairly easy.
What do people think about that?
Hey! That's one of the should-be-standard utilities: xmove. Google for it. It is described as "pseudoserver to move windows between X servers".
> Everyone is treating this like it's some super
> great accomplishment. Windows has allowed this
> since Windows 95, and the Mac since System 7.x.
Something similar can already be done: using XVidMode or pressing Ctrl+Alt+Minus. But people scream all the time about how X must be replaced just because it can't change the size of the root window. Well, now you can.
And who cares who's the first to implement a feature? The important thing is that it's there!
Tab completion in Windows XP? Bash had that... like... almost forever? Antialiasing in Windows XP? The Apple II back in the '80s had that too!
> Ok, that is where I'm starting to laugh. X11 is
> S.L.O.W. slow. Windows GDI is lightning fast.
> I can click the start menu and it draws
> instantly. I can still see Gnome and KDE menus
> paint across the screen chunkily
X is fast. FAST! What you see is the slowness of GNOME and KDE!!!
Your claim already contradicts itself. Ever tried playing a video? I can see each and every frame of it on my monitor! Ever played a 60 fps 2D game? The animation is incredibly smooth!
Pulling down the GNOME and KDE menu obviously doesn't require 60 fps graphics. Ever used WindowMaker? Or FVWM? Tried to popup their menus? It's FAST! Tadaa - the proof that X is not the problem!
The *real* cause is because the GNOME and KDE panel read data from disk - the harddisk is S.L.O.W.! They have to read each and every desktop item and PNG file. That takes a lot of memory.
If you click on the menu a second time, it pops up very quickly, just as quick as Windows 95's start menu. And after not using the menu for a while, it gets swapped out.
Don't blame X, blame GNOME and KDE!
What do you call slow? Modem/ISDN/Cable/ADSL? Hello, NOTHING runs fast over those connections! Not VNC, not Windows(tm) Desktop Sharing(r) XP, not Windows(tm) Terminal(c) Services(r)!
I've recently switched to the dvorak keyboard layout by editing the XF86Config file to include this line:
Option "XkbLayout" "dvorak"
but when my girlfriend wants to use the qwerty layout, I boot into windows
this would be a desirable on-the-fly feature for me
Yeah and it's already showing it's design flaws. Ever looked at the Win32 API? HORRIBLE! 30 lines just to create a window and a main loop? What?
Does Windows 95 support network transparency? Antialiasing? I don't think so.
And the Apple II had antialiasing in the '80s. And now, almost 2 decades later, Windows XP finally supports antialiasing.
Right, as if anyone cares who was the first! The important thing is that it's here NOW!
I can count the number of viruses for Linux that are released this year with my fingers. I can't count the number of viruses for Windows released in 1 week!
Could that be the first step towards infinite stability? If the X server crashes (still happen a lot less than Windows ME), will it be possible to launch a new X session and move all the old clients to the new server, and continue as if nothing happened?
All I have to say is "Its about Time"
Perhaps your setup is faulty.
To tell the truth, pretty much everyone's X setup is faulty. They compare X (as it's distributed with Redhat and mandrake etc) with Windows and OSX.
But that's not a fair comparison. X runs at the same priority as every other application on a unix box. While both OSX and Windows run their GUI's at a higher priority.
renice -10 XFree86 and then talk to me about X being slow.
I just wish Redhat and mandrake etc defaulted to running X at -5 or -10 for workstation installs.. the difference is night and day.
So, how do I set the DISPLAY variable in Win2K?
:)
set DISPLAY 0:0
Yeah all right, that was pedantic
X is fast. FAST! What you see is the slowness of GNOME and KDE!!!
Yeah! I only run xinit, and you should see how fast it is! I can move my XTerms around like...well, I can't move them at all because I'm not running any of those slow Window Manager thingies. Or any toolkits. But WOW! its so fast!
I have a high resolution, something I cannot do without, the sad thing however is, with this high resolution I don't have enough memory for DRI (Direct Rendering Interface). What I'm curious about is that if/when I start using RandR and decrease my resolution on the fly, will it re-initiate things like DRI that where disbled on start due to low memory or will it just change my resolution?
So like the man said
- Apple should never have changed the code base of Mac to what is now OS X
- Microsoft should never have made the move from the 9x kernel to the NT kernel
- Gecko should never have happened
All of these are examples of where the original code base has been scrapped and replaced with something else. Do you maintain that the developers were wrong to do this?He'd need the latest version of XFree86, along with the DRI code. I /think/ the Radeon mobility is only properly supported in the CVS code, but it may have (incomplete) hardware acceleration in the base XFree86 4.2 . . .
The DRM modules in the kernel are useless without an X server and mesa libraries to support it, so it's not quite as simple as recompiling your kernel, unless you're using the right distro.
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
xmove could do some of what you want, moving clients between X servers. I haven't used it in 3 or 4 years, so I don't know if it still works.
From the man pages:
My Amiga was doing this in 1985. I don't see anyone doing pull-down screens and resolution mixing to this day.
Put straight Netscape had to bit the bullet and rewrite. The result was a year or too of pain, but the fruits are beginning to show for it.
IMHO X is even worse. It is arcane, it is backwards, the main reason for still using it are not even relevant on a growing number of Linux desktops. While it is great to be able to run apps remotely there is one hell of a price to pay for it - primitive APIs, poor performance, lack of multimedia support, dreadful font support, terrible drag and drop and clipboard support, lack of hardware support, lack of 'frills' that other UIs have enjoyed for years such as being able to change screen resolution.
There is an extremely strong case for dumping X altogether. So the pain will be short term (though of course people could still be using X so it would be minimal), but in the long term it would pay off in spades. A display engine akin to Aqua would be a real boon, especially for getting into DTP, graphics and other arenas. And what about the people who still need X? Why they can't do what I do when I want to run an X app on Mac OS X & Win32 - run a rootless X session on top of the underlying system.
And what about screen-like features, like detaching , reattaching and "multi display mode"?
Am I the only one who /likes/ lower-resolution games to be displayed in a tiny box? I mean, sometimes. I dont like having my resolution changed for a game that doesnt deserve it. ,, what?
Sorry guys, but Princess Maker 2 works great in DOSEMU in a small box, and I dont want it any other way.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
>Funny how as Linux becomes more and more popular, more and more worms
>and viruses appear for it, eventhough it is supposed to be almost
>infinitely more secure than Windows. How's the Slapper worm doing,
>BTW?
>
>
It's dead,Jim.
> trust Linux with its X Window environments that just got the ability
>to change resolutions or would you rather pick us, MS. We accomplished
>this task 10 years ago".
>
>
No you didn't. Linux's ability to change resolutions implements features that Windows doesn't and most likely never will support.
No. He's saying:
1. Apple should never have *migrated* their code to OS X over several versions. They did this to an certain extent. They continued support for the old OS 9 and added a backwards compatibility layer to OS X.
2. Microsoft should have (and did) migrate their 9x kernel and NT kernels in the same direction. Windows 2000 was the first attempt at a final merger.
3. Gecko should have been based on the 4.7 engine and then refined until it works the way it does now. It would have taken *less* time since it would always have a stable code base. Take a look at Extreme Programming for an example of how it's done.
So the only real mistake came from the Netscape group which wasted years and lost and market share was squandered.
I believe things like QNX, the dearly departed BeOS, and OS/X have a layer that allows X applications to run on their alternative window system.
A fully functional, efficient compatability system would greatly facilitate evolving to a better underlying system until all the apps migrate.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
The article you refer mentions rewriting Netscape as a bad idea. However, the present situation kinda indicates the opposite view - Mozilla is better than ever, and the modular architecture is bearing fruit. Of course that doesn't apply to X, X isn't all that messy (ppl just tend to think it's trendy to bash it).
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
The thing that gets me is people who moan about the GPL AND moan about having to reinvent the wheel. I've no beef with the guys who are happy to reinvent the wheel - But if they want to use my GPL code instead, they'd better either (a) contact me to discuss alternate licensing terms or (b) GPL their code.
For this reason, I think GPL is the best license for government-produced software: The People have paid - with their taxes - once for the software, why should M$ be able to take it and charge the public for it over and over again like they do with BSD code? M$ doesn't pay a penny in taxes.
people have had to hack a working X server onto the platform
So what's stopping the open source community from building an open source desktop rendering system like Quartz, and then implementing an X layer overtop of it?
Nothing.
Turn on opaque resize + move, open a few Mozilla/Opera/Konqueror windows, and drag one around over the others. Watch XFree86 totally forget it's running on a card with 128MB of video memory, and proceed to invalidate the windows, smearing the remnants of the top one all over the screen. Rather than cache the entire window as a surface in video memory (which the video card can then blit from VRAM->VRAM quickly), X sends little serialized expose events down a socket. Even locally.
So, it is a faulty setup - it's a GUI that is completely incapable of basic 2D acceleration. Try to deploy XFree86 to non-technical users, especially on machines more than a couple months old, and watch as they wonder 'what's wrong' when they move a window. I've done it. It was a waste of everyone's time.
It's really a bug. It will be fixed by XFree 4.4 and we can all go back to the glory days of pushing ctrl+alt[+/-] to change our display settings. You can expect version 4.4 will hit the virtual shelves mid 2003. I can't wait!
That is indeed one of the goals.
redhat 8.0 runs X at nice -10 out of the box.
As somebody who has been working with X for years, I just want to say thanx. It gets a bit old seeing some of the slams aginst it.
g.r.r.
you directFB/Berlin trolls will be clamouring for network transparency when bluetooth tablet PCs are walkinga round the house. of couse you will probably just boot into XP for that.
Then how do you explain that 120 fps when playing games? If X is slow, then where does that 120 fps come from? Well?
From what I hear, definate correlation. I'm hearing now that there is a workaround for 7.2 that fixes this. But even so, I still like Gnome.
Is this being tested in GTK only, or is it also being applied to X overall? There is nothing worse than moving to a new terminal, shutting off the current, and then finding out that the KDE,OpenOffice, Mozilla, and a few other apps did not move.
An application would define a property, WM_MENU, on any window that needs a menu. The property would be a list of menu items, each similar to the structs used in just about every windowing system, and allowing recursive definitions of other menus by pointing to other window properties. Applications wouldn't have to respond to the menu events, only to the final selection. The advantages would be many.
- Applications could be smaller, since they won't have to manage the menus.
- Applications, especially those running remotely from the display server, would seem more responsive to the user because the menu would be handled locally.
- Best of all, window managers could offer more choice in menu bars.
Right now, every X11-based system has to use Microsoft's look-and-feel for application menus. If the WM handled menus, the WM could offer choices, such as putting the menu bar along the top of the display. Or by changing one preference, you could implement pie-menus in all of your applications. Or someone could come up with something even better!Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Indeed, my X runs at nice -10 (default setup on Mandrake 9.0). That may be why it's so snappy and responsive...
Reminder: find a new sig
Again, I just did what you suggested (with opaque resize and move, Konqueror, KDE 3.04, 1600x1200 in 24bpp; hardware: Athlon 900, 1024 GB RAM, GeForce 4 TI 4400).
I had five Konq windows open (did I mention I can't wait for tabbed browsing?) and dragged the top one over the others like crazy. I did get a little bit of redraw, but we're talking nothing that lasts more than a quarter of a second, here. Hardly worth ranting about. Seriously, I think you're being too much of a perfectionist; the very slight redraw I get is not even on the "annoying" level. Perhaps, as someone else has mentioned, X wasn't running with a high enough priority on the machines you were managing?
Reminder: find a new sig
Which brings me to another complaint with XFree86: It doesn't do a frickin' thing gracefully. It dies, it locks, but never an "oh you don't have 3D support".
For the record, I am running 2.4.19-rc1 (the first version to support my ISP without OOPSing).
badhack
...
It does seem to be the weak link as far as system stability is concerned, though: X has been involved in nearly every one of the (few) system hangs I've experienced.
I had a similar problem, but my system hasn't crashed since I stopped using Nvidia's video drivers six months ago. On the down side, I can't use 3D acceleration any more.
::shrug:: It works for me, but I guess YMMV.
Why not fork?
That guy's problem is that he's running a P4. I have one at work, running Windows, and it is deathly slow. It pauses for 5+ seconds on context switches, and is generally a dog. This 1.8GHz P4 is worse than a 900MHz P3.
See what I've been reading.
Hi clitoris chopper, october_30th supports clitoris carving. You are Islamic, and of course are a fucking animal. I hate you you pull-start camel jockey lover. Towelheads, Camel Jockies, Sand Niggers, Ackmids, Abeebs, Carpet Flyers, Dune Coons, Rag Heads, Sand Scratchers, Habeebs, Abba-Dabbas, Camel-Humpers, Demi-niggers, Fig-Gobblers, Hucka-luckas (hucka hlacka ghalcka ghugh), Lefties (If you steal, you lose the right hand so, since they are thieves...) Ocnods, Pull-Start-ables (imagine pull starting Ossama's dirty rag like a Briggs and Stratton), Roach-Ranchers (habibs cant kill roaches by a tenant of Is-slum), Sand Moolies.
Shut up all you dirty fucking Islamic pigfucking swinehundts and the pigs, the communist fuckin Islamic terrorist supporter.
Take your fucking Koran and cram it up your ass. The sooner the earth sees Islam leave it, the better off it will be. Your Koran is Goat Piss.
I hope if there is a God and a Hell, you have to drink the liquidy shit from a Pig's ass, and Jewish Rabbis defecate on you.
I hate the stupid ISLAM fucks who read into the trash they come up with. Saddam Hussein [who needs to take a dirt nap] is higher on my sanity list than fucking Muslim "clerics." In fact, I like Saddam more than most of the other Arab leaders because he is secular. We should fucking nuke the Saudis and Mecca and Medina and turn it into rubble, then tell Saddam to remove the heads of all the buttfucking "royalty" in the area.
I want to wipe my ass with Mohammad's shroud. I want to grind his body up into bone meal and fertilize my garden with it.
Our tortured dead scream out in HORROR, asking for vengeance:
Nuke their countries to hell.
Nuke them again.
Death to Islam.
I piss on Mecca. I wipe my ass with the Koran. I shit upon Mohammed. I wipe the cum for a freshly fucked pussy with Mohammed's shroud then throw it in the pig sty so it can mire in pig shit as it decomposes.
And the pussy bitch that defends Islam needs to die. And the Nation of Nigger Is-SLUM, where those sub creatures live, in the SLUMS of their own creation, is a piece of racist shit. So I give it back. You hate me, I hate you back 10 fold. Death to All Non-Secular Islam and Nigger Nation of Islam. Death.
DEATH. JIHAD against the JIHAD. I want to harvest organs from Islamic peoples who take their stupid shit religion seriously so they can be useful. Then I want Jewish Rabbis to piss and shit in the hole I left cutting your organs out, then I want to feed your Islamic bodies to pigs, let them shit you out in your final resting place, the pig sty.
What about pasting over a selection? Maybe I've done it wrong, but whenever I try to select something which I wish to *replace* with something I've previously copied, most X/KDE/GNOME apps simply replace the clipboard with what I've selected. That isn't very user friendly, IMHO.
Sorry, your definition of a bug or design flaw is "whatever I don't like"?.
Compared to not being able to change the display resolution at all (eg: if you display at 1280x1024 that's it, if you want to change the resolution you need to re-configure and restart the server), which is the case on __absolutely *all* the commercial Unix distribution I know: Solaris, Tru64, Irix, etc__, the XFree86 zoom is 100% of a feature.
A feature is something that was purposely built into a piece of software. A bug is something that creeps in unintended, usually with bad effects, see the difference?
I also fail to see the design flaw here. A design flaw is something that prevents the user to accomplish a pre-determined task. Nothing of the sort here: your desktop is 100% usable without zoom or resize. Both are nice extras that can be handy sometimes, certainly not showstoppers if they aren't available.
At the worst the lack of desktop resize is a missing feature. No contest here. Desktop resize might be nice/useful but I can understand why it's not a high priority. Nothing is broken with the current situation. More hardware support would be good.
There was a college student trying to earn some pocket money by
going from house to house offering to do odd jobs. He explained this to
a man who answered one door.
"How much will you charge to paint my porch?" asked the man.
"Forty dollars."
"Fine" said the man, and gave the student the paint and brushes.
Three hours later the paint-splattered lad knocked on the door again.
"All done!", he says, and collects his money. "By the way," the student says,
"That's not a Porsche, it's a Ferrari."
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