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
Now this is starting to look good for all Free *nixes! Finally...
--
God is watching
Where are all the first posters?
Now how will I prove my 3733T skillz?
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
That's wonderful, I'm glad to see it's taken this long for a basic function like that to exist. Way to go! Now, if they could just make Xfree86 NOT be a bloated piece of glued together bullshit, then, this would really be news worthy!
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.
War Deaths in Europe
by decade
1900-1910: 5,000
1911-1920: 20,000,000
1921-1930: 3,000,000
1931-Sept.1939: 500,000
1940-1949: 49,000,000
1951-1960: 100,000
1961-1970: 2,000
1971-1980: 2,500
1981-1990: 3,000
1991-2000: 260,000
What's wrong with
right-click on the desktop
choose properties
switch to the 'settings tab'
change the size and refresh rate.
press ok.
The cool thing now is to get Last Post. Loser.
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?
+1 Informative
When will we just give up and replace the X windowing system alltogether? Is faults seeem to overshadow its many features. Needless to say, most of X's "faults" are user usability issues.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Why would I want my desktop rotated and/or reflected (which I presume to mean "mirrored" or "backwards")?
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
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?
You got it!
Just copy and paste verbatim from any source, and you got that sheep semen, I mean sweet karma!
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
Sure took someone long enough to even seriously attempt this.
Unix... people still use that?
Windows has had this FOREVER!
I'll stick with the powerful and easy-to-use Windows XP, thanks.
Now if only I could change the monitor resolution of my linux box without editing a text file....
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
1 entry found for debian.
debian
<operating system>
Debian was begun in August 1993 by Ian Murdock, and was sponsored by the Free Software Foundation from November 1994 to November 1995. The name Debian is a contraction of DEB(ra) and IAN Murdock.
Debian's packaging system (dpkg) is similar to other popular packaging systems like RPM. There are over 2200 packages of precompiled software available in the main (free) section of the Debian 2.1 distribution alone -- this is what sets Debian apart from many other Linux distributions. The high quality and huge number of official packages (most Debian systems'
Another unique aspect to the Debian project is the open development; pre-releases are made available from Day 1 and if anyone wishes to become a Debian developer, all that is needed is proof of identification and a signed PGP or GPG key. There are over 400 Debian developers all around the world -- many developers have never met face-to-face, and most development talks take place on the many mailing lists and the IRC network.
Home (http://www.debian.org/).
Debian Linux archives (ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian).
(1999-02-23)
So urce: The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © 1993-2001 Denis Howe
when, oh god when, will it be possible to just open up a little window and change your refresh rate, display adaptor settings, etc, in linux, right from the start? I mean, c'mon, *windows* has it...
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
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".
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"?
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.
...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....
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
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
And this is useful because why? It's the first 3 paragraphs on one of the links. Which is still dutifully serving pages. Tool.
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
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?
Isn't it time that they redo the whole thing?
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
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?
GNOME > KDE ... KDE people are rejected visiual basic programmers.
I bet this'll make the Linux fanboys cum their pants.
right?
Wah!
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.
Like stink on shit: adj. (adv.) So near as to be one with; Intrinsically familiar
"One peek at me silked to the bone and the hoochies be on my ass like stink on shit!"
"Man, one whiff of you and they think you IS shit!"
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 $20 dollars in gratitude."
Do you understand me? I'm saying that you, the moderators, fuck whores. If you mod me down, I'll know it's because you are offended at being accused of whoring, and thus are too stupid to tell when someone is whoring and when you are paying for it!
erm, I meant www2.fresco.org, not www.fresco.org. Oops.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
Yeah, yeah, so gnome is cool... Now go fix it so you can change the effing gnome menu without having to be root and edit text files.
when will the ati mobility 3d LR work? all i get with X 4.2 is my screen slowly turning white. it is cool and all... but i'd rather be able to use accelerated (not vesa) X.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
most people don't need those features
most people do need the ability to change resolution and color depth on their desktops easily
maybe the X team has finally changed direction to The Right Way (ie, what most people need instead of a handfull of computer scientists)
Mirroring support... I can imagine the pranks already...
Unsuspecting boss: Eeeeek! My computer just got a virus! Fix it!
Me: Sure... [types a command]... all fixed.
Boss: That was amazing! What would I ever do without you?
Me: About that raise I was asking about...
Would that 99% of the user base be the ones that will never need more than 640k RAM, Bill?
Friends don't help friends install M$ 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
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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";
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.
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 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 :)
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
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 ?
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
if the new e libraries will support the r and r extention? Does anyone know...
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
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.
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."
The parent was written by Jim Gettys, who wrote the bleedin' thing.
Steve
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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".
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
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!
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"
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?
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.
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
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.
When are you going to implement hostname cloaking in your IRC network? It is done nicely in slashnet and badly in Assspussy's ftso.org.
- Marco
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.
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?
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."
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...