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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
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?
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
The rotation is for people with pivoting monitors which can swap between landscape and portait views, I assume.
Mirroring may be reflection, but it could also be mirrored video for multihead setups.
It brings new life to tired, old, porn?
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?
> 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.'
IF your monitor was on it's side it could be pretty handy. Also if you were using a mirror to view you screen it could be useful too.
I'm not saying most people will do this, but most people don't run multiple monitors either.
Life is too short to proofread.
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.
This would be incredibly useful in situations with LCD projectors projecting from behind the screen, so everything has to be mirrored for it to appear correct to people viewing it from the front
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.
...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
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...
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
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?
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
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 :-)
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
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.
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!
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
right?
Wah!
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 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
Or Lycoris, but you X-Server still needs to restart when you do it (until this is implemented).
Cut and paste has been fixed for years. Buttons aren't X's problem. If you have a problem with the button focusing behavior of your desktop, file a bug report.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
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.
erm, I meant www2.fresco.org, not www.fresco.org. Oops.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
> Why would I want my desktop rotated and/or reflected (which I presume to mean "mirrored" or "backwards")?
Leonardo requested it hundreds of years ago.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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
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
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.
XML causes global warming.
Coders everywhere can always use more R&R. This means we won't have to offer additional vacation time.
If you click on "OK" there you are
asked to relogin. So RedHat 8.0 doesn't
have this feature - if that's what you are saying.
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
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.
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).
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.
Most people have apparently simply given into Windows and Macintosh mediocrity: they think that the limitations of those systems are somehow fundamental. But that doesn't mean that they don't want the ability to say "hey, computer, I'd like to continue with this program on the screen in my study".
maybe the X team has finally changed direction to The Right Way
There is no "X team" that enforces a direction for X11. If you don't like what X11 does, you can add your own extension. If others find it useful, they will use it. X11 is the way it is because its users like it that way. That's more than can be said about most other window systems.
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!
However, the most likely cause of those complaints is that, by convention, cut/paste and focus work differently under X11 than under Windows. Furthermore, X11 has support for pasting the selection, something that doesn't exist under Windows or MacOS at all. Maybe you just need to read the documentation.
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.
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
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!
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
Rotation is used, for example, on the iPAQ PDA,
so that you can choose either landscape or
portrait mode. It is also useful on tablets,
some other circumstances.
Keith and I discussed mirroring when we originally
designed RandR, but couldn't come up with a
plausible need.
Then at a conference, someone came up to me and
said they wanted to implement a Heads-UP display
using a Laptop on their dashboard.
I said: "Sold!".
So we implemented it.
- Jim
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.
But that doesn't mean that they don't want the ability to say "hey, computer, I'd like to continue with this program on the screen in my study".
:)
*MOST PEOPLE* don't have a study, or multiple computers in one house. Windows/Mac are more successful because they accomodate the basic needs of the majority of people. Yes, X has nifty features - those are features that won't be needed by the majority of people anywhere in the near future. Do you honestly think MS couldn't add in exported displays somehow if the demand was really there? With more money in the bank than most South American countries combined, they could figure out a way somehow. Note that if they did this, it'd put PCAnywhere and similar products out of business, and everyone would complain about the evil monopoly expanding their empire, but that's another story...
creation science book
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
Sorry about that - right you are.
But who has time to read questions in this hurley
burley fast-paced age?!
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
-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
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.
Now that's funny (and complete bullshit)!
I save you some time looking for that 'admission of guilt' since your entire claim is false. Get a grip on reality, buddy.
It's also possible that people may want to run XMAME and other such emulators on a monitor which has been rotated and placed inside a cabinet (or other display mount). While XMAME and other emulators may allow games to be rotated during emulation (usually one of the game's options), by allowing X to rotate the screen, it wouldn't depend on the emulated game to provide the rotation and it would provide consistancy among game orientations.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
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
Rotation is especially good for PDA's. The (sadly gone) Agenda
PDA ran X and had screen rotation hacked in at some low level.
It was very useful with limited screen resources because some
applications work best in landscape and others best in portrait.
www.sjbaker.org
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."
It brings new life to tired, old, porn?
On my Heads-Up Display?!
moto411.com
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!
The problem I had was with RH 7.2 as well. Possible correlation?
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...
Yes, for cut-and-paste, as well as for focus. The whole world does not work like Windows, nor should it.
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.
Many people, however, probably have a computer at work and at home, and might want to use applications from an Internet Cafe or a friend's house or their PDA. In the days of $200 desktops and $500 laptops, most homes are soon going to have multiple computers, just like most homes now have multiple television sets.
Do you honestly think MS couldn't add in exported displays somehow if the demand was really there? With more money in the bank than most South American countries combined, they could figure out a way somehow.
I can't think of a single instance where Microsoft has responded to "demand"; usually, they respond to threats from competitors. So, lack of this feature in Windows doesn't mean that there is no demand, it just means that their one major competitor, Apple hasn't figured out how to do this either.
Besides, it is foolish to think that large amounts of money can buy working, high-quality software implementations; Microsoft's track record itself suggests otherwise.
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
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."
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!!!
Not mention displaying on a projector used in either rear or front projection but without the ability to mirror in the projector (admittedly, most digital projectors can mirror, but not all and you know that murphy's law would probably apply here).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Any such person would've long since adjusted his perception to compensate- probably without even having been aware of the "problem". (Assuming for speculative purposes that the condition didn't bring with it any other problems, such as overall bluriness. Which is unlikely)
Even if he hadn't been born like that, he still could've adapted without much difficulty. In fact, perceptual scientists often demonstrate that people can quickly become perfectly acclimated to having a transformation (like rotation or mirroring) applied to their vision.
For rotation this is accomplished by prisms in goggles (I don't know the optics behind mirroring your view, or if that's even possible without a digital-camera-headset rig).
The hilarious part is that test subjects go through the same acclimation time after the goggles are removed- they've temporarily forgotten how the real world is suppose to look.
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
I do, and I'm looking forward to the day when I can migrate XChat from my study desktop to my laptop in the living room, move my KGhostview e-book off my laptop onto my PDA in my bedroom, or chuck the MPEG I just downloaded off the study desktop onto the big TV screen in my lounge.
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
Nonsense. X11 has the features that its user community need. Changing resolutions on the fly was not important until recently (and actually still isn't outside the home market). Running applications remotely, however is.
Whatever nifty stuff X11 has, it was pretty much left for dead (commercially) a long time ago, and thus has lots of catching up to do now that Unix might not really be dead on the desktop.
X11 was never "left for dead"--it is very widely used in many enterprises, as well as in scientific and engineering environments.
Of course, if all you have ever seen is PCs, well, then you wouldn't know.
It's core feature of exported displays isn't even all that competitive with Citrix WinFrame,
Oh, but it is: X11 is more efficient over LANs (the usual setting) and supports seamless integration of applications running on different hosts. Citrix doesn't even come close. And, of course, Citrix is a proprietary, single vendor, single-platform solution.
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.
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?
> 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)!
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!
Look at the setxkbmap program. Many desktop environments (Gnome, etc) include utilities (often embedded in the taskbar) to change this. Usually called "International keyboard settings", and featuring icons of national flags to tell you the current configuration.
(Does dvorak have a flag? It's a breakaway Soviet republic, right?)
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?
Under KDE, you can switch Kexboard layouts on the fly: ControlCenter->Connected Devices->Keyboard->Layout. Activate the layouts you want (dvorak is among them), and an icon appears in Kicker that lets you change the layout with a click (okay, two clicks).
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.
It probably does, but that's the wrong tradeoff for usage over LANs.
(which of course could be fixed by adding an extention, if anyone gave a shit that is.)
Low bandwidth X extensions have been around for about a decade.
"X11 has the features that its user community need" You sound like an inverse version of Steve Ballmer. Give it a rest.
It may sound like that, but it's different. X11 has the features the user community needs because the user community decides what features it has. Windows has the features its user community "needs" because Ballmer says so.
You seriously think X has been under any form of active development for the last decade? Ha.
Yes. But, of course, you wouldn't know.
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?
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:
Does this answer that question?
dynamically updated ChangeLog for Xfree.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
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.
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.
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.
Then how do you explain that 120 fps when playing games? If X is slow, then where does that 120 fps come from? Well?
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...
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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?
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