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XFree86 Fork Gets a Name, Website
Piethein Strengholt writes "Today the Xfree86 fork is a fact. A new project has started and is located at: xouvert.org. Xouvert has been started due to the corporate structure and the slow development of XFree86. They hope to reduce the risk to XFree86 of incorporating new drivers and features."
...how the hell do you pronounce it?
Note that this is not xwin.org... I browsed the xwin website a while ago (Keith Packards project) and people there have been complaining about how that project seems dead, while something should start happening. I applaud the effort of these guys.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Nah, keep the network transparency. I use that quite a bit, as do a lot of people I know. Framebuffer would be nice though.
It seems that this group wants to push the envelope of features in X. Why not just do something like the Linux kernel numbering? e.g. 2.4 -> stable, 2.5 -> testing. Then, people could make a decision as to if they wanted to run the bleeding edge in an attempt to use new features. It'd also save the hassle of building for 2 graphics systems, and merging patches between the two code bases.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
I think XFree has been lacking a lot of things for a long time, like true alpha blending between windows and such. Aside from things like the Render extension, this is a project that really hasn't gone much of anywhere in several years. Getting the features we need into the window system itself would position Linux much more prominently on the desktop.
If they're trying to include useful third party contributions, they could do worse than include NX, a revolutionary new compression and proxying technology that makes it possible to run an X session over a 9600 modem at a useable speed. But I didn't completely understand their policy on licences (the NX infrastructure is GPLed, whereas X is under the MIT licence).
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
"ouvert" means "open" in French.
By doing release early, release often, we hope to reduce the risk to Xfree86 of incorporating new drivers and features.
Translated: By doing release early, release often, we should be able to produce a window system that is buggy enough to rival Windows 95a.
Dropping one of X's best features will not make X obsolete. I use this every day, I will never give it up.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"They hope to reduce the risk to XFree86 of incorporating new drivers and features" ????
Idea dislexia? Are they really trying prevent new drivers and features?
Heh, if that were the case, I suppose they could stop at their name change and say they're done:)
Perhaps it's *YOU* who should 'get it'.
Had you RTFA properly, you'd have seen the next line says
"All code that enters the project is under the standard X11 license, or compatible free license as specified by the Free Software Foundation."
See, that's not so bad, is it?
Seriously, I don't particularly like NDAs, but as long as the source code is 'free', then it's really not a problem IMHO.
David
On the first line of the page, it says: Xouvert is an experimental branch of XFree86.
Looks like you got what you wanted.
Drop the network transparency, make it run framebuffer and XFree is obsolete on desktop.
Why do people not realize, that X-Windows is NOT sucking because of network transparancy! Any possible design of a clean API for a windowing system will more or less be automatically network transparent. The only this which is not network transparent are stupid ugly hacks. That said, we all know how X sucks, but it is has definitively nothing to do with network transparancy.
Cheers
KdenLive/PIAVE - non-linear video editing
... From a marketing standpoint. That's it. It's hard to immediately discern how it's pronounced, it's got seven uneven letters, it's relatively long and it has no obvious immediate meaning or collection of related possible meanings based on the roots of the word.
...
So what if 'ouvert' is 'open' in French. I didn't know that. Lot's of people don't know that. Learning that doesn't make you go "ooooo, that's so cool". It just makes you go, "oh".
Open source projects, especially projects of any magnitude should try, from time to time, for some true open source marketing. Unfortunately, engineers, no matter how smart they may be at one thing, are frequently not as smart as they think they are at many things, and so they drop the ball in some areas. This is a decent example.
Of course, 'Vim' and 'Emacs' aren't exactly stellar examples of naming, either, but on the other hand they haven't had much success outside certain circles, and they're both pretty amazing editors. Someone might say that has more to do with their vertical learning curves compared to, for example, 'Word' but their names certainly didn't help
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
See my previous comment on NX compression. I'm typing this on Galeon running at work, displaying on my home computer over a 56K modem, because it's faster web browsing like this than running the browser locally. NX has to be seen to be believed.
The interesting thing is, this level of compression is only possible because of the high-level nature of X's network transparency - Citrix / RDP / VNC doesn't run anywhere near as fast.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Frankly, it may be worth jettisoning a lot of the XFree86 baggage and starting anew.
Y, an X Windows replacement, looks extremely well designed and this guy wrote a pretty complete implementation for his thesis.
Why not port the useful bits of X - like the hardware drivers - over to this already-established well-designed base instead of trying to hack XFree86 into something of similar quality?
(Well, the obvious answer, ``to keep the applications`` is fair enough. But a compatibility module wouldn't be too hard, and worth the benefit in the long run.)
So I just checked out the IRC channel, and they emphasized that Xouvert is an experimental branch of X, not a fork.
My biggest worry about this fork was that the developers were going to announce a "practical" approach to drivers, one that would include non-free drivers etc.
From the website:
"All code that enters the project is under the standard X11 license, or compatible free license as specified by the Free Software Foundation"
Public mailing lists should have been the method of communication for the xfree developers right from the start. This is great news. The use of Arch as the version control system is iceing on the cake.
Ciaran O'Riordan
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
I've often said that open source software projects need to do better or at least some marketing. Seemingly little details mean a lot.
For example, most commercially marketed software packages have web sites whose opening page clearly dewscribes the function of the software and then goes on to elaborate on what the software can do for you. Conversly, most open source project homepages start with a change log. Compounded by the fact that most have rediculous names that are not at all intuitive, many do not describe what the software does in a sensible fashion. Then worst of all they go on to compare their incomplete feature set with Windows, gleefully noting "Soon" or "In Progress" next to the missing feature.
You've got to put a marketing spin on your project if you want people to use it. Always highlight and stress its features and strengths. Never advertise its weaknesses. Don't compare the project to better or more feature rich works. If you must offer comparisons, compare the project with known products that are indeed inferior in quality or feature sets and use products that are generally well known ion the comparisons. Finally, and this is perhaps most important, bury the zealotry. DO NOT so much as imply that people should use your project because this other one sucks. If you must post this type of zealotry, save it for the developers page, somewhere that regular users should have NO reason to ever go.
So would it be safe to say they are *overtly* trying to to draw a connection in the public's mind between the xouvert project and the Quebec separatists?
Because that was my first thought, dunno about anyone else...
It doesn't affect it. The people that believe that the X protocol is hampered by network transparency are wholly ignorant of how windowing systems work. Much of the perceived "slowness" of X programs are solely within the domain of the toolkits, themes, and applications that use them. All windowing systems use IPC for communication with the windowing system. Unix domain sockets are not exactly a burden with this regard. However, if one of the ignorant supporters of the removal of network transparency could be bothered to simply implement IPC over a different mechanism (quite possible), they would notice this.
Ok, try to follow this:
They hope to reduce the risk to XFree86...
Looks like they want to make something less risky to XFree86. I wonder what it is?
Ah. They want to make the incorporation of new drivers and features seem less risky to the XFree86 project. As in, "See XF86? We put all these features and drivers into our project. It's not so bad!"
Something that i've seen a hot debate over before..
Many people have mentioned something along the lines of "X-lite"...
Bascially an X server that has been stripped of all the features that the "average" person doesn't use, such as running remote desktops over networks and things.
I hear so much complaints about how "X is so slow, buggy and internally is a total mess", etc. I've never personally had a problem with X, nor have i looked at the code myself, but it would be interesting.
Of course, the full-on XFree86 would still be available to all those who *do* want/need the extra features.
do() || do_not();
If you've ever managed a reasonably large open source project then you know that making everything public from the beginning won't necessarily be a good thing!
You can't just dump some stuff somewhere on the net and then expect people to contribute. You have to prepare a lot of things, so that people can easily contribute without getting lost in the mess!
And I don't know who moderated you up but those moderators certainly didn't read the website. I quote:
"Sat Aug 16 00:59:49 PDT 2003 - You can't download anything yet. We have this website, XWIN is providing Wiki space, and Savannah is providing mailing list and bug tracking services. We are importing the Xfree86 source code into an arch repository right now; the current job is making a script to tag the source files every time a CVS checkout is done. The IRC logging bot still needs to be set up, and code written to archive the logs daily."
The website has only been up since yesterday! Accusing them for "keeping it secret" and shoot down their image is just stupid, when they've just started recently.
All right ... so you don't seem to understand that if nVidia would give permission to some group associated with this project the right to take apart the detonators to make Xouvert work better with nVidia cards they'd probably want an NDA. Fact of the matter is that when working on anything open-source NDA's are looked down upon, but if you want to work WITH big business to get something usefull done, they're probably gonna insist for legal reasons.
Kleedrac
Sure we wang, can.
I applaud this initiative. Might be what X needs to get back to life. A bit of competition always sounds like a good thing.
But if they are really serious at encouraging developpers to join this project, the first sensible thing to do would probably be to forget about the IMake crazyness that has been used for years by XFree86 and switch to something else for building the whole project.
Replacing it by the autoconf/automake mix would make the source tree much more appealing to potential developpers. And just to back up my claim, someone else also made the same comment on the xfree-xpert mailing list a few months ago:
(...)
[ I also hope that somebody with more drive than I have will some day decide that the X Makefiles are such a mess that they'd be willing to get rid of all that horribly broken imake crap and just fix them. What a broken build system! ]
Linus
(...)
Just my 0x02 cents...
I think his point is that X *is* the protocol. XFree86 is an implementation of that. Without the X11 protocol, you might as well call it pork chops.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It doesn't matter whether the name "sucks" or not. Does it matter to users? No: they don't actually care! Heck, they shouldn't even have to care. All they should know is that it works.
Does it matter to distributors? No: if Xouvert is good, Linux distributions will include it, no matter whether the name "sucks" or not.
Does it matter to developers? I don't think they, they care more about the code and the openness of the projects.
So, where is the problem?
"Of course, 'Vim' and 'Emacs' aren't exactly stellar examples of naming"
Vi and Emacs are not popular outside the Unix commandline community because they're console apps, not because of their names! You can rename Emacs to "PowerEdit 2000" but it's marketshare won't change!
The name is certainly not the most important thing. Many people say that Ogg Vorbis will fail just because of it's name. And what do we see? More and more MP3 player manufactures are adopting Ogg Vorbis. And again: users don't care. If they can use the technology easily, they will, no matter the name.
What is a "GUI refresh rate?"
It's related to the lag between dragging the mouse pointer down a menu and having the items highlight. It's related to dragging the scroll bar and having the view move smoothly. It's related to dragging a window and having both it and what's under it react smoothly.
3) Your driver does not support hardware acceleration
This is one of the major problems. Hardware vendors tend to expose too many of their trade secrets at the register level, and then they use this as an excuse not to release information to driver developers in Free window system implementation projects.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's a terrible name but you don't even give a single reason for your opinion? I think you'd better start on yourself with that cluestick.
"Worse yet, naming a project after an obscure occult reference is likely to be offensive to those of various religions."
LOL.. ok.. either you're dimwitted cause you didn't get the joke or you're just trolling... anyways... the fact you got modded insightful speaks volumes about the karma system these days.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
3d games don't use Xwindows. They use OpenGL usually, which is also network transparent. GL obviously proves that network transparency doesn't slow you down, but it also dosn't prove that X isn't slow.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The actual reason for X's poor performance, AFAICT, is that it doesn't expose all the hardware acceleration. Most recent video cards (including cheap ones like i810) have things like textures and gradients available at the hardware level. Xlib doesn't have such things though, it's full of primitives like "draw an arc", which comes up a whole lot less in modern GUI programming. So when GTK wants to create a shaded background, it passes it to X pixel by pixel (well, line-by-line) and X passes it to the card that way. A faster system would make the card do the work.
This is difficult because not all cards have the same acceleration, and widget systems are going to need to support both this and the original X. Even so, we do it for 3d with opengl, so why not here?
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
Anything that wants to have a snowball's chance in hell to replace X is going to have to be network transparent, too.
All of the major UNIX vendors at one time or another have looked at implementing a shared memory transport for X messages on the theory that it would reduce overehead. In benchmarking, however, it was routinely found that Unix domain sockets imposed very little or in some cases less measurable overhead than shared memory. Net effect: no speedups to justify implementation. And in case you weren't aware, we do now have DRI and XV for 3D and video, which do dump network transparency in favor of speed in these extreme high-bandwidth cases. In fact, Linux+X outperforms Windows in terms of raw frame rate in many games on the same hardware (i.e. Quake+Nvidia).
But that kind of raw data pumpking is not very useful for normal applications, which don't need heavy bandwidth at all! You seem to think that your AGP bus is a fat-pipe framebuffer and that given a simple enough toolkit, it would somehow be a speedup to blast 32-bit screen dumps onto it at full speed. But even if this were the case, the content of those dumps would have to come from somewhere. In the API of every modern windowing system (including MS Windows) you'll find heavy reliance on some sort of message passing interface to make the nuts and bolts of the user interface; in short, every windowing system is "network transparent", it's just that most of them are only flexible enough to use one transport method, unlike X, which lets you choose the transport method. And I challenge you to find me any non-motion-video non-3D desktop application that is bandwidth or latency limited even on 100Mb ethernet, much less gigabit ethernet or local transport (get netperf on your own PC and check out the unix domain bandwidth!) Most any kind of local transport is going to have negiligible overhead compared to the overhead imposed by data inefficiencies in toolkits themselves (message redundancy, uneeded refreshes, etc.), and neither of these runs up against any kind of bandwidth or latency ceiling on a modern PC either. Both KDE and GNOME have major architectural inefficiencies outside of the widget rendering path. Search google.
And as far as burden of proof goes, you're the one proposing to throw away one of the most important features of the Unix desktop. I often hear complainers say that "90% of Unix users never need network transparency!"
I don't buy that number. You're getting the Windows market confused with the Unix market mate, I'd guess that 70-80% of regular Unix users do make use of network transparency becaue the vast bulk of regular Unix/X users are doing so in an administrative capacity. I'd love to see a Slashdot poll on this point.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
At home it's great. I can keep one computer hooked up to the stereo and run XMMS from any computer in the house. I can do my work related crap on my laptop, plug it into the LAN and pick up on my desktop exactly where I left off. No need to copy files or anything. I can run mplayer on the local TV out of my laptop, and run any apps I might need on the laptop on my desktop without interfering with playback. If anything X is not transparent enough. We need a good way to switch apps from server to server, or even just detatch them completely. Something like screen. God I love screen.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Every time the discussion about replacing X comes up, somebody mentions Fresco (formerly named "Berlin"). However, I haven't heard anything for a long time about that project, and the last news is from March. Anybody know what happened? Our are they just hacking away so hard that they don't have time to update the webpage...
It's already taken?
I suggest a re-name, but with an open naming contest this time.
In what system do we force project names on independent developers who didn't ask for an opinion? If Xouvert is a mistake, it's theirs to make. The code will survive if the project doesn't.
Yes it's compatible. X11 is a protocol, not an implementation. XFree86 is an implementation. Xouvert will be another implementation of the same protocol.
let me be the first to give this project a usable name:
XO (pronounced: ex-oh).
ouvert is french for 'open'. ignore the prank the website is trying to play on you. i don't intend to add the french inflection 'zoovair' every fucking time i say it (much like i like my croissants to be crassandwiches). besides, the name XOPEN is already taken. so there you have it, folks. say it with: me XO is not Xfree86
I agree completely that a common deficiency in open source projects is that the software is not described adequately for those who are shopping around for a solution. But the description of a piece of open source software ought to be as informative as possible. That means giving as objective as possible information about the strengths and weaknesses of the software. If softwareA is better at taskFoo, then the descriotion should say so. Perhaps it should also indicate whether the developers plan to rectify that weakness in the near future.
Come now, they're joking, of course. A joke that, after reading many posts here, seems to have fallen flat. To confirm, Google for goddesses--there is no xouvert on any list. But mainly, the tip off is the word ouvert itself.
So, failed joke aside, they did pick a "nice, friendly, high-concept name", as you define it. It's just not in English.
(my, i can't believe i'm defending the name of an open source project--derivative oss naming is a particular bete noir (er, sorry) of mine.)
Sorry, but the GNU autobuild tools suck. They start with a broken idea (Hey, let's give everybody a *different* makefile, so that you can't debug makefile problems! Hey, let's build the Makefile itself from a file which is automatically created, so you can't tell which of the four levels has the build problem!) and break things from there.
As usual, djb's got the innovative ideas. Google for djb and redo.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Yes, or that it sucks.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
I'm with you, while X isn't the simplest thing one could think of, it really does perform amazingly well. The frame buffer as a 'performance solution' is a total dead-end as writing a stream of pixels to a buffer is a LOT slower than using X to draw complete objects.
I do think X is a bit creaky though, maybe it is time to start a new one, one where major (and even compatability-breaking) changes can happen. Some things on my wishlist:
*A single, standard, simple font system.
*Integration of a more modern toolkit and WM, even if it has to borrow heavily from GTK+ or another project. This would be inclusive, it wouldn't prevent you from using other toolkits and WMs (think WindowMaker instead of TWM in the base set).
*Ability to run like Quartz Extreme (as an OpenGL-based system). Also, not as a requirement, just as an option.
*There's no excuse for not vectorizing this from the bottom-up, and we'll be thankful when the commercial OSs get this done and we've already got it. Think about running your monitor at 1600X1200 and telling the system it's 200 DPI so it zooms everything accordingly. Apple has this up their sleeve now, and Longhorn might unleash it on Windows.
*Transparency, which personally doesn't get me hot and bothered, but I guess people think it's cool.
*Ability to act as the 'console' layer for the OS, no more framebuffer-for-console, X for graphical. Have the thing run a full-screen native terminal, and have the OS work with it.
*extensive database of video cards and monitors for easier configuration, this should be integral to the graphics system. It took me a LONG time to find the specs on some of my monitors and I'd rather not do it ever again.
*Generally simpler/more elegant design. I'm pretty sure that a lot of what's in XFree86 today is there just to prop itself up, while a newer system might have a better chance of coming out with a clean design.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Xi graphics can't even get info from Nvidia to make drivers for their server, and I'm sure they'd be willing to sign a NDA. I don't even see how it'd be possible for an open source project to sign an NDA anyway, since they'd be giving the code away.
---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
Due to the "french" nature of the name (ouvert means open in french) some Americans have decided to call the new X fork, Xfreedom.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
It's not an "obscure occult reference," it's French for "open." Let me guess: you're American. It's a perfectly acceptable name: the Internet is global, and there are other languages apart from English.
This problem has nothing to do with "Free" operating systems. It's about vendor support. You'd have just as much trouble (if not more) getting your card to work with OS/2, Be, a Mac, or whatever if the vendor doesn't support the system.
I used OS/2 for a while, but my sound card didn't work because the vendor only made Windows drivers, yet it worked in Linux because some guy (or a few guys) had soundcards with the same chipset, so they figured it out and wrote a driver. In a closed system, if you don't have vendor support, then you're sunk. In an open system, at least you'll have a chance.
In fact, if the drivers were open sourced ior the vendor supplied interface specs, they'd probably work better and have more support. The vendors are selling hardware, not the drivers, so there isn't a reason to keep this information secret. They say competitors would steal their designs, but I don't believe it. The hardest part is the internals of the chips--you don't get that from drivers and interface specs.
Yeah, sure companies cloned the SoundBlaster design, but a sound card is just a fancy D/A and A/D converter. Not much to it, and they were just cloning the interface because in DOS, there is no such thing as a driver. Eventually there would have been some sort of standard because only stupid people will pay megabucks for a sound card when a $20 card will fill all their needs. This won't work with a 3D video card. They are too complex. Sure, there are discount 3d card manufacturers, but interface specs won't help them at all.
keithp will surely be involved in this project, just as the other ones, XFree86 (look at the open discussion mailing lists) and Cairo (his nice vector/PDF-project). Keith Packard has done much good for X, testing it, trying to make a good rendering-system and much more, but it doesn't mean that he can't play along on more horses at the time.
(yes this can be compared with sex)