Slashdot Mirror
Fresco M1 Released
rajan r writes "The first release after 18 months, Fresco, previously known as Berlin, released M1 or Milestone 1. The release notes here, screenshots here. The original 'press release' follows: 'I'm proud to announce that milestone 1 of Fresco (formerly known as Berlin) has (at long last) been released. A lot has changed since the last release, but this isn't that surprising, since the last release was more then 18 months ago; most of the real work for the past few months has been behind the scenes (changing hosts, a new web site infrastructure, improved build system, an issue tracker (hooray!), better documentation (and more to come), etc.). Source (no packages at the moment, but debs will be available soon, and the tree contains .spec files for building your own rpms) The name change. Enjoy! -- Nathaniel '"
If you're like me and have no idea what Fresco does, check out the intro, an FAQ and FrescoVsX. I was reading about this project last night, and since Slashdot doesn't really explain what everything is, these provide some answers.
,
faeryman
Debian packages are available from http://non-us.debian.org/~waldi/ . Note that the fresco packages require the omniorb4 packages.
Really, half a sentence of what this Fresco is about would have been helpful in the introduction - e.g. "Fresco is a windowing system derived from a powerful structured graphics toolkit" (from the page). This would save readers not familiar with the project from having to click on the article to find out whether it interests them, and it would reduce the slashdot effect a bit.
I know, it's a novel concept, an introduction actually introducing the readers to the subject...
Stupidity is mis-underestimated.
Some comments on other comments that are bound to pop up:
/. experiences I know that these misunderstandingfs/questions are bound to crop up.
*) Yes Fresco uses CORBA and it is a good thing. It gives network transparency and language transparency for free. Yes, we know it is slower then using raw sockets, but CORBA is the only thing available powerful enough for our needs. It's not bloat if you need the features;-)
*) Fresco is not X: Yes, we do not extend X. X is good, we do think so too, but it has certain shortcommings we do want to adress. Improving X is not an option: We'd need to carry along tons of code we do not need and blow the code size out of proportion (example: xlib, networking code).
*) Fresco is not x compatible now. Support for that can and will be added later. Options for that are manigfold, See our FAQ for more infos on this topic. Again: we do not see that extending X is a good idea: Extending X will result in apps using that extension not being able to run on the unextended X. Fresco apps don't do so either. Both, an extended X and a Fresco with compatibility layer can run X apps. NO, there is no compatibility layer yet.
*) We do not write drivers. We can use whichever drivers are supported by our rendering backends. That's a surprising lot. You can run Fresco in a window in X, using your XFree-driver too.
*) Fresco is device independent. So changing the screen resolution will not make windows smaller and you can print everything you can display on screen. That's a good thing (if you want your windows to become smaller you adjust their zoom factor).
*) No, Fresco is not about rotating windows. We can rotate windows, we do so in our screenshots. That's basically because making windows not rotateable would require us to write code to prevent it! And it's an eye catcher.
*) No, this is in no way ready for the end user. Developers are welcome.
That's the basic things I want to get straight early on. From earlier
Regards,
Tobias
Regards, Tobias
I have watched the Berlin project for several years, remembering the initial idea to create a graphical system written in Assembler, a change of project leaders and the decision to use CORBA.
I don't think that Fresco will replace X anytime soon, if ever, but it's an interesting technology demo that will surely influence other projects. Playing around with the Quartz technology in MacOS X has convinced me that better and more interesting ways of doing graphics are possible - the Fresco project, by using device independent rendering (OpenGL / Postscript) and an ORB merges some of the advantages of X and DPS / Display PDF.
Fresco consists of a number of interlocking projects, each named after an city (Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Babylon). The "Berlin" program was the window server, as well as the entire project. To avoid confusion, the project name was changed to "Fresco". The window server is still called "Berlin".
"There's also that big "X"-symbol at the side which might give you a hint..."
Just a couple of points:
1.) I have the images and stuff turned off. I'm sure other people do too. X doesn't show up on that preference.
2.) Not everybody knows what that X icon means either. It looks to me like the Xerox logo, heh.
"Derp de derp."
When you're developing software, having "transparent spinny" thingies is part of testing what you're trying to accomplish. But you probably wouldn't realize that.
The point of Fresco is very similar to the point of Quartz on MacOS X. It's a composited windowing system that doesn't "fake" sophisticated rendering like X currently does. Translucent windows now work by taking a "screenshot" of the area occluded by the window, then adding the color values together. This is a hack. A composited render draws things from back to front, taking into account a Z axis position and the alpha bits in a color block (RGBA) (this is fairly layman, but gets my point across).
I don't know why you're considered insightful for this, but rest-assured, we need a project like Fresco to develop a better windowing system. In the future, computer displays aren't going to be treated as fixed-pixel dimentions with static elements. A computer screen will be like a piece of paper. Elements will be drawn by real-world measurements (x centimeters versus x pixels) such that the number of "dots" will become arbitrary. Things will have to rotate freely. Alpha-blending will be absolutely necessary for proper hinting. And so on and so forth.
X11 is great, but very arcaic. It must go away in the future. Apple's got a good lead -- and pretty soon Microsoft will duplicate their efforts. We've got to be in that game too.
Why bother.