DRI Comes to DirectFB

Pivot writes "To further heat up the discussion about the future of the graphical desktop on open source OSes: Now the DirectFB project works with DRI!. Screenshots are available. I guess what is lacking now is only XAA driver support, or native drivers for your favourite graphic card." We've mentioned DirectFB before.

Comments

Re:Oh, by the way...

[IamTheRealMike]

It's a thin layer on top of the kernel framebuffer driver - provides useful APIs and some other services that you need for a windowing system, like WM support. They were also working on a fast IPC mechanism called Fusion when I last checked up on them. Dunno how far that's got.

The idea is to replace X with something closer to the hardware as far as I know, but today it's mainly useful in embedded scenarios. They have a backwards compatability thing for X clients, which means if you have a supported card you can run your desktop on it and make windows transparent with the capslock key. It's fun for about 2 minutes I should imagine.

As an aside, does anybody know if the girl in that screenshot lives is single? :D

Great 'article' about how to get a nice console

[humming]

It's tailored for gentoo, but most stuff applies to most distributions I guess. Not that I'm using them. ;)

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=49036

Then you can get consoles which look like this:
http://www.alledora.co.uk/images/fb0.jpg
o r
http://www.bootsplash.org/silent-mode.jpg

Files can be recived from
http://www.bootsplash.org/

Re:This will kill X in the long term.

[tjansen]

If you would port Qt to DirectFB... what would manage your windows? How could DCOP work without authentication over X11? What server manages drag&drop and cut&paste?
X11 does far more important stuff than only letting you access the framebuffer.

Beside that, no mainstream system will have a chance to succeed if it only fulfills the needs of 95% of the users. Unless you get 100% it doesnt have a chance. MS understands this, thats why they have put *a*lot* of effort into the Terminal Services and RDP.

Re:NVIDIA not supported

[Anonymous Coward]

3dfx were the first company. They supported Daryll Strauss' production of 3dfx linux drivers for years.

Re:Here we go....

[IamTheRealMike]

That's what they're developing Fusion for - to allow multiple windows to interoperate on the same desktop. It doesn't have to be used for this, but AFAIK that's a long term goal of the project.

Aww bollocks

[IamTheRealMike]

The original post (which was itself quite amusing) is now at -1 Funny, so you won't see it, nor get the parent post.

Rather worryingly, it's at -1 Funny and yet no "Overrated" mods are shown in the box below - considering that overrated moderations are no longer shown and are not meta-moderated, this seems like a wide open hole for people who want to abuse the moderation system. What is the reason for this inconsistancy? Why is overrated/underrated special?

Re:Here we go....

[MartinG]

DirectFB cannot gain network transparency

Not only can it gain network transparency, but it gains everything that X has functionally in the form of XDirectFB, a rootless X server that puts X compatability on a layer _above_ the windowing system. Many people believe this is where network transparency belongs rather than entangled within the windowing system.

Re:Naive Question

[IamTheRealMike]

So here's the stupid question: why didn't (or hasn't) someone build a graphical syb-system that's modular?

Well, X is actually modular. It doesn't use the network subsystem when run locally.

Why can't you have a well-written, clean API (I've heard horror stories from people who've had to write code directly to X)

I've just been doing some Xlib programming (for wine). It's not that bad. Win32 is certainly a LOT harder and less intuitive. But very few people use Xlib directly anyway.

that lets you plugin in modules like 'network-transparency' or 'anti-alisased fonts', or even everyone's favourite 'alpha-blended windows'?

Yes, X provides exactly that, with the exception of alpha blended windows, but that's because more hacking is needed inside the XFree drivers architecture to make it work at acceptable speeds.

Re:This will kill X in the long term.

[Minna Kirai]

Not necessarily. In the default Sharp install, running Java programs (as one example) will create movable windows that partially obscure programs below them. There is a simple kind of "window manager" behavior going on.

Also, it is completely possible to rearrange file permissions so that Qt on the Zaurus can run as non-root. Why Sharp chose not to do this is difficult to imagine.

X memory usage

[Ender Ryan]

The memory usage you see in X is actually the memory of your video card + X, often allocated in different ways causing `top' to display a huge amount of memory incorrectly.

Re: interactivity updates

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get the ck-patches against 2.4.20 if you want the interactivity updates for a stable kernel.