Slashdot Mirror
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."
It'll help to know how to make it right again... http://www.geocities.com/lilmacumd/escape.html
Where are all the first posters?
I have used Xfree86 for many years now. While I have been impressed with it, and have grown quite fond of it, I am suprised that this feature has not been implemented already. This is a good thing (tm) for the Open Source community because it is a step in the right direction for making UNIX based platforms easier to use. (yea yea yea I know about OSX).
My hat goes off to these companies. Thanks
W00T!
Brent J
Unix... people still use that?
Windows has had this FOREVER!
I'll stick with the powerful and easy-to-use Windows XP, thanks.
this is a little bit sad. MS Windows had this capability in Windows 95 and probably even in Windows 3.x (been so long though I don't remember). This is good bad publicity. I can see it now "Would you 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".
...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....
That mere fact that we had to wait so many years for a feature that has been available to Mac users for, like, 15 years, is the proof that X11 in general and XFree86 in particular, is the most bloated buggy unmaintainnable piece of software ever.
When will somebody free the world of X11 and write a light-weight fast and efficient graphics layer for Linux, one that would be friendly to manufacturers and acceleration modules...
I have great respect for the maintainers of the XFree86 project, considering what they have to deal with, but I strongly believe 2/3 of the functionality of the X11 architecure is just a big waste of time and disk space for 99% of the user base.
DZM
I bet this'll make the Linux fanboys cum their pants.
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?
The source code is all there - write it yourself. Isn't that the standard open source rejoinder to everything? :)
creation science book
There are lots of browser choices, but there is no one reasonable default choice that can be made available to users. And many of the browsers have something wrong with them.
Konqueror is great - but it has had showstopping bugs in the last two major versions. 2.2.2 had a horrible bug which caused it to lock up about 1 in 10 times when selecting any text in any of the input boxes. I set up Red Hat boxes for numerous friends and coworkers, and trying to explain why the primary browser locked up so often was quite difficult. I thought 3.0 would save us, but alas - it has an even worse bug whereby forms submit incorrectly about 1 time in 5, causing most functionality-oriented sites (including the TrustCommerce merchant admin site) to be completely unusable. My other major complaint with Konq is its jerky page updates: clicking a link will cause a big white box to suddenly obscure part of the current page - compare to Mozilla which updates the display very cleanly. 3.0 was significantly better on this front, but it's still enough of a problem to hurt the user experience. Finally, it's still slow when you have a lot of browser windows open. The worst is when you middle-click a link to a large PNG image (say, the screenshots on the GNOME site). I minimize the window while the image is loading, but in the meantime my other browser windows become _very_ unresponsive; trying to scroll is jerky and difficult. Very unpleasant.
Mozilla-based browsers are the best. They render most pages correctly and enjoy the commercial support of being the basis for Netscape. However, Mozilla is not integrated with any desktop environment, making tasks such as printing, accessing the file open or save dialogs, and cut-n-paste unpleasant. Galeon is the best browser currently available, to my mind, but the lack of anti-aliased fonts keeps me going back to Konqueror. Opera is good, but it's commercial, and suffers badly from the default fonts being ugly. (You can fix it to look more like Konq if you spend some time fiddling with the config files.)
Solution? Browser developers need to focus on removing the remaining impediments to user-friendliness. Konq needs to be faster and smoother in its display, and stop shipping with major bugs that make it nearly unusable. Mozilla needs to get better desktop integration (such as being able to specify your mail client, and ditching that lame file dialog for the default GTK dialog) and anti-aliased fonts for rendering. Whichever browser is the first to come to completeness on these points should then be chosen as the default by distributions. It's a tight race, and one that will no doubt be won in the next couple of months. Hopefully it will be a tie - having several 'best' browsers would be awesome!
2. Prompting for a filesystem scan. /dev/rd/c0d0p2", possibly answer a bunch of cryptic questions like "Deleted inode 327. Fix? <y>", and then reboot. Does anyone enjoy going through this process? Does anyone find themselves wanting to answer "no" to the question of whether to fix inode 327? I doubt it. The system should just fix the filesystem, even if it means losing a few recently-written inodes, and get on with booting, without asking the user anything.
If you accidentally cut the power to your desktop at the wrong moment, here's what happens. The system boots, tries to scan the filesystem, can't recover the journal, and panics. You are prompted to enter the root password, and then you're expected to type some cryptic commands like "fsck
Think it's better server-side? No: it's much, much worse. Now when a machine hardlocks (say, due to hardware that is overheating due to heavy load - a common scenario if you're using standard PC hardware and your webserver gets slashdoted), and you call the colocation facility to ask them to reboot the box, the thing doesn't come back online. Now you've got to ask the person in the facility to wheel a monitor over and plug it in, give them your root password (aggh!), and tell them to type the aforementioned cryptic command. This SUCKS, bad. (Apparently it sucks so much my grammar is starting to suffer!)
To their credit, Mandrake's Aurora boot system asks the user if they want to go ahead and repair the filesystem anyway when this happens. It's only a single, easily-answerable question: quite reasonable for the desktop, but still pretty lame in the server scenario.
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure. /etc/printcap; I never could seem to get it to work quite right, especially for sharing printers on the network. I found it easier to write device drivers for the Linux kernel than to set up a stupid printer! (I have written a total of three device drivers for the kernel, but I have yet to construct a working printcap file.) Today things are better: GUI programs such as Red Hat's printconf-gui and Mandrakes PrinterDrake make it possible for mere mortals to set up a printer. But still they remain too difficult. For example, Red Hat does not install the printer on startup: the user needs to know to type "su" and then "printconf-gui" at the command prompt. Both have the problem of prompting you for which driver you would like to use for certain printer types. For example, I have a basic HP Deskjet at home. Mandrake gave me two choices for the driver, while Red Hat give me a whopping five! Asking the user questions they are likely to find irrelevant is very bad UI design. The user doesn't care what driver they use, they just want to be able to print at the maximum speed and quality possible. If you want to hide this choice in an "advanced" tab somewhere, that's fine: but don't force them to make the choice!
For years I struggled with
Ideally printer install should work like this. You run the printer install program, and it gives you two choices: "Set up a printer attached to my computer", and "Set up a printer from the network." The first choice looks in /proc/sys/dev/parport/parport?/autoprobe and determines the type of printer that is connected and choses a driver for it. It displays the type of printer detected, then asks you one last question: "Do you want to share this printer with people on your local network?" After answering this question, it sets up the printer, and you're done. Snap. Click. Sorted.
4. Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things.
Most Linux distributions come with a ton of applications, development tools, and support for all sorts of fancy devices. But none of this is very obvious when you boot into KDE or GNOME for the first time. The menu contains a few apps but they are scattered about and don't have names that reveal what they do. The vast majority of tools on the system aren't even in the menus. We need to make it easy for a new user to find out how to do stuff with their shiny new OS, without having to do a web search to find out.
This is, IMO, Linux's top strength on the desktop. Windows comes with an email client, a web browser, and Freecell. MacOS has the same, but iTunes in place of Freecell. You really can't do much with a default install of either OS. On the other hand, Linux comes with a wealth of applications and toys that could keep the user busy for years without ever downloading or purchasing any additional software. Let's make this obvious! Here's how.
There should be an "I want to..." dialog (though this can be turned off if you're an advanced user). It should be a large icon on the desktop which is very obvious to any user. Clicking it will open the dialog. At the top is written the text, "I want to..." and below are a long list of things that you can do with your system. These might need to be grouped by expandable categories, as the list could get very long. Here are a few things I suggest:
- Browse the web
- Read email
- Chat (IRC / AOL / Yahoo / Jabber /
...)
- Burn a CD
- Install a printer
- Set up a modem
- Set up a DSL or cable modem
- Make my computer server web pages
- Share my files with others on my local network (NFS)
- Access someone else's shared files (NFS)
- Download pictures from my digital camera (GPhoto)
- Paint a picture or touch up a photograph (Gimp)
ELX is the one distro I have seen that tries something like this, but it suffers from the same problem as the KDE & GNOME menus: it gives you a list of programs you can run, instead of tasks that you can do. People use computers to do things, not to run programs.5. Cleaner redraws.
This has long been a complaint of mine in almost every OS and desktop environment: slow or flickery window updates. I have only ever seen one OS do it right, and that's Mac OS X. This isn't a speed issue, really; it's a how-you-update-the-screen issue. Mac OS X pops a window onto the screen all at once. Presumably it does any drawing that it needs to do on a back buffer and then blits it to the screen when it's all done, just like a video game. Even on a slower system, it still appears very "clean" - the window just takes a little while to appear. But you don't see any ugly drawing artifacts in the meantime. Mac OS X is great.
The latest version of Windows is not bad; mostly I think this is due to the fast speed of modern hardware coupled with the minimal eye candy that the OS offers. Things like the file explorer still don't update all at once, but it's a minor point; they've mostly got it right.
KDE, on the other hand, continues to flicker and pop. Here's a key example: click on the "home" icon in your menu bar. The window pops onscreen, but many of the drawing elements (the files themselves, but many widgets) are temporarily drawn as large white or grey boxes. A split second later the full images appear. Even on a high-end system it looks a little funny; on a slow system it looks terrible.
This is not a functionality issue, so in many ways its not that important. But it is a "user experience" issue; people coming from Mac OS X or even Windows will find their experience a little less pleasant, and that makes them less likely to come back.
6. Die stray processes, die!
In Linux when a process messes up you can exit X, drop to a console, and start running "killall kdeinit", "killall mozilla", etc, but this is lame and for non-technical users it boils down to the same thing. Possible solution: when in X, WM should keep track of processes and the windows they are attached to. When an app has no windows concat(or the main window is not open), the WM should attempt to kill them (first normally, then with -9). This functionality could be configured for debugging whereby instead of killing them, it attaches gdb to the process so that developers could figure out why there are stray processes.
7. Easy way of sharing files.
Ideally a right-click on a directory and chose "share this directory". Be able to pull up a list of all folders you are sharing and change permissions or remove the sharing.
8. Sound support.
OSS was great a few years ago and continues to offer support for modern cards (including professional quality ones such as the Midiman Delta 1010, which is what I have) but it is commercial and it is showing its age. ALSA is a superior solution and has been rolled into the dev kernel. Once it makes its way into the stable kernel and distros start using it uniformly (Mandrake, SuSE, and a few others have offered it for some time now) along with a good configuration tool, audio on Linux will rock.
9. No common editor which supports "soft wrapping."
By which I mean displaying things wordwrapped, even when it's one long line. This means you can go back and edit the line and the rest of the paragraph will reformat itself automatically. Evolution's message editor does this, but that doesn't help me for composing text files (like this one!). Others I've tried - Kate, GEdit, and even vi - only support "hard wrapping", where it inserts a newline when you get to the end of the line. Then when you insert more words into the paragraph later, the formatting gets all screwy.
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly.
This varies by distribution, but I the resolution issue is a common one. (The only distro I have seen that does it right was Corel 1.0. You could change your resolution from the KDE control panel. However, I believe this is because they were using the commercial X server Metro-X.) It boggles my mind that, after all these years, the best way to configure X is to run Xconfigurator from the console! This is, I believe, the longest running embarrassment of the free software desktop.
Hold on, one thing at a time. I heard a rumor they are starting on a project that when finished will implement in Linux a "cut and paste" that actually works across all applications!
Cut and paste:
Mac:1984
Windows:1993
Linux: 2005 ?
It's been 7 years after it was intoduced in Win95. Five more years and we'll get some working plug&play monitor support.
*