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XFree86 4.3.0 Released
Dunkalis writes "The latest version of XFree86, 4.3.0, has been released! Release notes here, mirrors here. Enhancements include drivers for newer Radeons, better PS/2 protocol detection, the XRandR extension, better font support, and more!" Source tarballs are available, or wait for your distribution to package them...
Grabbed it, compiled it, installed it...
Mozilla's links are suddenly not underlined, and some of the truetype fonts don't render quite right.
Anyone else run into this? I haven't been able to find any information either in Mozilla Bugzilla or in mailing lists.
Curious.
So I just read that the GeForce4 has support. Does this mean true support (i.e. 3D as well)? Or do we still need modules from nVidia?
The nvidia drivers are reported to work just fine under 4.3, even though some people had problems during the RC releases. Must have been some last minute compatibility changes.
I'm probably not alone with this problem, but I've always had problems with trying to get XFree86 3.x or 4.x to work with PS/2 mice with a KVM in between. Either the mouse isn't detected, the mouse cursor reacts erratically or can't get anything behind two buttons to work. As a workaround, I've always had to get another PS/2 (or USB) mouse and plug it directly into the machine rather than go through a KVM.
Has this been resolved in 4.3.0?
This is a sweet release esp. for a radeon user. (glxgears pumps out nearly 50% better frame rate!)
One gripe: Support for the media buttons on the logitech internet keyboard is broken.
Hey anyone know if this version of X fixed the mouse problems for Quake 3? I know it's a long shot, but I have not been able to upgrade X in a long time, because everytime I do I can't play quake 3. The mouse simply binds to the upper left hand corner and doesn't move.
Anyone who upgraded see it fixed? Or know of a fix?
I've got the AIW Radeon working fine under Linux. I used the gatos drivers from gatos.sf.net, which have been ported to the new XFree 4.3 for a while now. Tuning and 3D support both work great, but capture is still an issue for the gatos project. They're working on things though.
"You tried your best and failed miserably. The lesson is...never try. Heh!" -Homer
Can I use the scrollbar button on my Sony VX88 laptop as the middle button?
Your own glowing testimonial is not exactly a balanced review of the real product.
But perhaps people like yourself, who are willing to give the X developers the accolades they so richly deserve, are necessary to counterbalance the people who only see the bad points of X.
There are good and bad things that can be said about X-windows, but I don't think anybody that is paying attention would have anything but praise for the people who have worked so hard to make it as useable as it is.
On the other hand, I can honestly say that Xwindows is the only piece of software that ever caused my monitor to literally catch on fire. Gave me a very strong incentive to RTFM, I must say.
No, you'll still see way better performance with NVidia's drivers than with the ones included in XFree86. You'll just have to wait for NVidia to release new drivers. Maybe then the AGP will work on NForce chipsets...
You'd think NVidia could make their own drivers for their own video card work with their own chipset, but no.
transparent ?terms work by just displaying the background picture appropriately translated.
kde menus work by taking a picture of the desktop, and using that.
Transparent cursors, as far as I know, are 'the real thing'.
As for the transparent cursor over a movie - my guess would be that it depends on how the movie is being drawn. If it is being drawn like every other window, then it should work fine - however xine and mplayer by default don't do this, as this is slow. Instead they more-or-less draw directly to the video card. This probably won't allow the shadowing to work.
Also things like TV cards draw directly to video, so I doubt shadow would work on them either.
Thank you Mandrake!
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
---Usually when there's complaints from a wide amount of people, it's "the people" you trust. Not the few who complain about the complainers. If anything, it has too many features. I believe we insult/harass/jeer at MS for doing the similar thing to Windows/Office. Called something like creeping featurism....... BUT it's different when we're talking about XFree86 cause it's LINUX stuff.
You know having fully featured infrastructure components, which X is, is damn nice when writing applications. Feature creep is bad in a word processor, good in your display system.
X has little to do with Linux. X has been around for a long time.
---Yeah, it IS getting faster...
This goes directly to the network transparency myth. X window systems tend to be a little slower on login because things run in user space. Once things are running however, there is no performance penalty at all. With X you can choose a lot of things that can affect display performance. Seems to me that other display systems don't have this option. Want a blazing fast X system? Choose reasonable window managers. A machine running TWM these days is very fast yet will still do everything needed in a nice clean minimal way.
As a comparison, I have an older SGI IRIX machine running at a blistering 30Mhz. Scrolling text in a window, minimize, raise, lower and resize are all nice and fast. X is clearly not the problem here as it has been proven to be effective for years. That machine was manufactured in 91 and will still display 3D applications in a usable way.
---Yeah right. 3-D on linux/Xfree SUCK ASS. Want compairsons? Go play X game (with port to linux) on windows and then play it on Linux. You get shit for framerates, and dont tell me you're different.
I don't think so. OpenGl based games run just as well if not better than they do under windows. My current 3D machine used to be a windows machine and I ran the game in both environments. latency was a lot lower in the X environment than it was in the win32. Lots of people see this so you can forget your one guy argument. Running programs like Maya or Pro Engineer work very nicely as well. This used to be the case, but is not anymore. So, 3D, check.
------Do you see a pattern here? X is versatile. X is extensible. X is the industry standard -- all Unix GUI programs use it.
---Yeah, and all good games are out for Windows. Windows games are the industry standard. (sound dumb? same way you sound with X)
Yeah this does sound dumb. The X window environment has been setting the bar for display systems for years. Just think, they got it right long before win32 environments were even stable. X is the industry standard in many areas. Games are a niche. An important one, mind you, for the overall consumer market, but this does not make an industry standard all by itself. High end scientific applications, Mechanical CAD, Visualization are just a few of the true industry standard applications that have all ran under X for years. Ask users of any applications in any of these areas what the transition was like when moving to the win32 platform. It took a long time for things to work as well as they did under X. Very few things are really better.
Games? Direct X? These both sound dumb to me if they are to be considered the way of the future. Games will eventually end up on whatever platform has both power and marketshare to sell copies. Linux + X can do games very well right now, but marketshare is smaller. As that changes, you will see the games same as you did for win32.
I think it says something when the best graphics guy around continues to invest in OpenGL. Direct X is a capable, but clearly dead end API. Hardly competitive at all really. Got your killer application running under Direct X, but want to run it on higher end graphics systems? Sorry, win32 only. Maybe the next revision, that they make damn sure you keep paying for, will have what you need. Using OpenGL avoids this problem nicely.
If you want do discuss other aspects of the interface, you might equate OpenGL to X in that they have the same core design ethics. OpenGL has also set the bar in its way for years before Direct X was even a consideration. To get Direct X where it needed to be Microsoft had to thrash and almost kill SGI through their Faherienhit (sometimes spelling sucks --sue me) project.
Finally, if you want to again consider industry standards, consider this:
Every last high end scientific and engineering application that actually matters uses OpenGL for its display engine. Why? Because it is accurate, stable, scaleable and just works well. Microsoft would love for this to change, but creators of these applications know all to well the dead end nature of the Direct X API.
---And you're 1 out of how many??? You need screen on another computer, use TightVNC. Uses a bunch of less bandwidth too.
I will agree with you about the bandwidth issue, though this can be mitigated with ssh and compression. However you totally miss all the points here while showing that you really have no idea why people, who know what X does, use it this way.
X is a big part of why UNIX systems are true multi-user systems and the network transparancy is the key feature making this a reality today.
Any X window user can basically run any application from any machine they want from the machine they are on. Lots of people do this. It is called multi-user computing. Most people not doing this really just don't know it is an option.
This feature has some interesting ramifications when it comes to systems design and implementation. Not having it eliminates many choices that could reduce administration and costs.
Example:
Company uses high-end MCAD product; namely, EDS I-DEAS. This is complex and powerful software with included data managment.
If you are running win32, then you have only one choice. You load that software onto every machine that will ever use it. Outfit every machine that will ever use it with high end CPU, video, disk and RAM. To administer, you must deal with each and every machine all the time. Service packs, driver changes and other things like applications that change core system shared library code hose things up on a regular basis. Heavy users as well as light duty users must possess all necessary resources on their local machine.
Upgrades to software must be deployed locally on each machine. Complex scripting is needed to really get things done in a reasonable manner. Upgrades to hardware get quite expensive over time as each user gets new hardware which means new OS which means new display and drivers along with the reloading and rebooting that comes with that.
Now consider your options when you are running a real multi-user OS and the X Window display system.
You configure one multi-cpu server and remote display on just about any 3D capable PC. Machines can be new or old just as long as they have a good network interface and graphics engine. Almost any recent vintage machine made in the last 3 years or so will perform this task nicely. Because the application is running directly on the server, many data intensive applications that used to bottleneck on the network now run smoothly. Cost per user is low because the OS is multi-user. Properly sized shared resources make for a good computing experience for all the users. For the occasional power user, go ahead and give them local compute if you need to. The choice is yours with X, you don't even get to consider it with anything else.
Now upgrade time. Add CPU or RAM to the server, all users benefit. Want to change software revisions? Great, it will take a fraction of the time because of shared code and configuration data. This leaves plenty of time to deal with those power users computing locally. Users local machine gets hosed up, what do you do? Give them a replacement one with the standard applications loaded and fix theirs as you have time without impacting their workflow at all. Since their critical data is in a shared stable environment, they will hardly notice.
When Open Office gets just a bit better, this will be possible for more mundane applications as well. The savings and advantages are obvious --if you know you have the option.
BTW, Apple is now beginning to ship an Aqua supported X server. Wonder why that is? Could it be because X has some advantages? Maybe they are interested in high-end applications being ported to the Mac. Not sure of the reason, but I am sure they would not do it if X really was as you say...
Schools all across the country are all working on implementations of the Linux Terminal server project. This project depends on X and its features. Administration will be remoted and centralized to save costs and improve response time.
At home here, I run win32, Linux and SGI irix. Each of the machines have applications I am interested in running. All the UNIX applications are avaliable on every machine with just two clicks and can be used by anyone at any time. My wife is currently watching a DVD as I type this. That same machine is providing Evolution e-mail to the win32 machine via X at the same time. Why bother running more than one mail client. With X, I can choose any client I want and use it anywhere I want.
It is easier than you think and very well worth it.
Finally, Tight VNC is pretty cool for what it is, but it is not multi-user. Sure, it will save you a trip to a machine, but will not allow any sort of multi-user action of any kind. Limited and totally non-competitive compared to X.
Network transparancy is *huge* and most of the industry is blind to it because Microsoft and Apple do not provide it. Their loss really.
---How about modularizing the obsolete crap (like the XT module in the linux kernel) or pulling the garbage out altogether? MSWindows 98 is snappy, even on quite old hardware. Now take that nice dual cpu motherboard and slap linux on that with a well-supported XFree video card. XFree runs like shit. It feels klunky and laggy. And no, I'm not using KDE to use as a test. I'm using TWM. The smallest gui manager out there.
I will give you points here. A lot of OSS software has been gaining in functionality in trade for speed. I wrote an article about this a while back titled "Where Is the New Linux Experience?" When I wrote that, I had the same experience you did.
Things are changing now. The feature growth is needed to capture users interest and get things done. Truth is, hardware fast enough to run most things is very cheap now so this is becoming less of a problem. Development is now starting to address speed issues and it is showing results. Compare KDE 3 to KDE 2 and you will notice the difference.
Given the cost savings of OSS over software you pay for, and you do pay for all that win32 or Mac software don't you? The price of a newer machine is easily justified.
The parent post is dead on. Every time X gets mentioned, people like you, who really have little grasp of the bigger picture, bitch and moan about how X doesn't do exactly what their older and inferior system does.
Get over it, X kicks ass and the rest just don't.
Blogging because I can...
Will Apple update X11 for Mac OS X to this new XFree86 release anytime soon?
And what about Red Hat Linux 8.1, will it ship with the new version?
Thanks!
[Five minutes later, waiting for dialup to download the shot]
Ugh.. that's an awful default. What's with that almost undetectable 99% solid 1% see-through red? Go full red, stop the bollocks. The shadow being so far away makes me think of the ATMs that use recesed CRTs so when they display arrows to buttons they're always out of sync; with an arrow floating that high above that page I'm kinda thinking that I'm not looking top down on the arrow and the shadow is the real location.
But yeah - an awful default.
For some reason, switching from virtual consoles and x server is a lot slower in this version.
It was already pretty slow with 4.2, now with 4.3 it takes like 5 seconds to switch from a Virtual Terminal back to X Server.
Any way i can boost up the speed?
OK, so multi-head is mentioned seperate (though just above) xinerama. I've been a long time xinerama user.. very pleased with it. At work however, I have wanted to to do multi-user setups in the lads (2 seperate X instances for 2 seperate users on their own monitor, keyboard, mouse). This would be a great cost and administrative savings for labs and some of the places I work with internationally.
Has any progress been made with this new release that would allow for the this multiuser type of system to be done?
Well, it did work insofar as the video was shown. It did not work because the video overlay caused artifacts all over the screen! Little chunks of the video image were drawn at random locations horizontally from the overlay window, which - needless to say - sucked. And I used config files from the same driver versions' utility, and yes, I did read the README.
I had this behaviour in every version. I reportet it to ATI in every version. I did never even get a reply. So to all those who cry "support DRI" and stuff: I'm right behind you in that matter. But those folks can't do shit about Via sitting on patents for S3TC/DXTC, and I don't have the time or knowledge to work around this myself. I've since given up on getting any commercial game to run too desperately. If it doesn't work after a sane amount of time, I just play it in Windows and the current DRI drivers at least allow me to do some basic GL hacking with some basic extensions.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.