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Xr Renamed to Cairo
Charles Goodwin writes "Xr, the vector graphics extension for XFree86 that Keith Packard, Carl Worth, and a few others have been hard at work on, has been renamed and is now officially called Cairo. Keith and Carl recently gave a detailed presentation on Cairo (then known as Xr) which should be a useful read for those wishing to understand it a little better. There is already a useful Gtk+ rendering backend that uses Cairo, as well as an SVG test suite. This, along with Gnome2's subtle adoption of SVG and the inception of Xouvert (which now has goals for both the short term and long term, and an initial plan which includes coexisting with XFree86), spells a bright future for the eye candy of an X desktop."
That's all good and well, so when are we getting alpha-blending in X? It's really annoying having "almost" transparent terminals that copy my background.
but when do we get an ASCII renderer for it?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Wasn't Windows NT codenamed Cairo?
If I wanted eye candy, I'd buy a Mac...
Just give me a good, solid system to do my stuff on!
This is the code name for Windows NT. This is a blantant and illegal DMCA violation, and a dilution and sullying of Windows NT's good name. They will be served.
They are. It's slated for inclusion in 2.4, if I recall correctly.
QT3 has translucent menu items and such. I haven't checked to see if they cheat by reading from the screen, or if they have implimented an alpha layer.
The big issue with an alpha layer is that someone has to have the authority to impliment such a change in the X11 protocol, it can't be done as an extension. Anyone who uses the fucked up protocol won't be able to display their app on a different X server. This breaks compatibility with thin clients.
What I want is complete revamping of the X protocol with backward compatibility maintained (permanently), such that new apps can take advantage of new server-side widgets without breaking compatibility. Wouldn't it be sweet if GTK+ apps could run as well over a 256kb/s line as XAW apps do?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
According to publications they are going to contact as many organisations and support as many standards as possible. That's something that XFree never did.
They even plan to contact Freedesktop.org.
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Why are we posting this when this happened like a month ago?
Anyway where can I donate money to Cairo development?I mean I dont have A PHD in software engineering and cannot help with the actual development, so how about accepting donations people?
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Gnomes SVG support is good, it allows me to run gnome on a 1920x1440 display, unlike kde, which seems to go flaky after 1280x1025.
Whys it dumb? Chi = X, Rho = r. Together they are pronounced Cairo.
Cairo is not for you! someone like you should use the old version of Xfree86 because you dont like cutting edge, you dont like polish, you dont need eye candy.
But please do not hold the rest of us back because you dont want progress.There's the commandline and original Xfree86 for people like you, we also need to attract desktop users, and this requires eyecandy.
They will not switch from Windows if Windows is better.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
We can, should and MUST do better than MacOSX. We must also do better than Microsoft. If we are to compete with these rich billion dollar companies, Linux must simply be better. A person should be able to SEE that Linux is better and not just a clone.
How about some innovation?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Does anybody know if sub-pixel anti-aliasing is planned for this -- or any other vector drawing APIs? Smooth anti-aliased lines look nice, but they look bad in comparison when they're next to sub-pixel anti-aliased text on an LCD screen.
I thought KDE3 didn't cheat despite the 5 people below that disagree. Sure, konsole copies the background image, but when you turn on menu translucency w/ the Keramik theme, it's a real Xrender based transparency (as in you'll see whatever's underneath it - videos, windows, kcalc, whatever). Who are these people yelling cheat? I thought that would be considered legit.
"right future for the eye candy of an X desktop"
;)
This is essentially untrue. Accepting vector graphics as the default in computers may alter our perception of what is eye candy completely. As far as I'm concerned the Fresco/Berlin project was the right way already several years ago. Today, the hardware has caught up and there is nothing to be lost in user space with vector graphics everywhere.
In fact, we have no idea what kind of possibilities may open up here. If we're unlucky, yes, it might be a can of worms...
Wasn't Cairo released in 1996 or something? BTW, I don't think MS wants your money for Cairo anymore. They'd rather have your money for at least Windows 2000, if not XP or Server 2003.
I like the sound of Xr/Cairo, seems pretty cool. But how long is it going to take for this to turn in to something I can actually use? I guess the eventual goal is to have GTK and QT running on top of Cairo (maybe with extensions to do explicitly vector things?), but this strikes me as something that's not going to happen fast. Maybe I'm just being impatient.
Cairo was well before Windows XP.
Microsoft's Cairo was a project of the 90s which started off as an operating system but became a set of technologies. Some of Cairo went into NT 4.0, more into Windows 2000, while some parts like an Object Oriented were never finished. Longhorn (XP's successor) had it's plan of a distributed file system downgraded down to a service running on NTFS.
The three main portions of the technology were: Expanded Directory Services, Object-Based File System, and Expanded integration with DNS.
Stuffed on the finest of herring no doubt!
Great news on the arrival of rasterized graphics output for Xfree86. That should allow for some superb gaming, visual modeling, and graphic apps for Linux.
XrStroke is sure to be a popular command...
maybe that explains the contented look... randy penguin!
If you are lost with these references, you might enjoy "Why a penguin?" and "linux" together as a google search.
~8^]
Will they port twm to it?
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I think you missed the "good" and "solid" part of that sentence.
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I think the whole friggin GUI should be vectors. The Icons should be vectors, and these vectors should be manipulated in realtime via the video card/hardware.
Forget software rendering, we need hardware rendered GUI, using SVG for the interface and icons.
We also need to somehow maybe via OpenGL or some technique, to get the special effects of the video card applied to the GUI.
Then someone can write KDE4 or whatever, and the eyecandy/special effects should be plugins, a person should be able to code an effect via a scripting or programming language, someone should be able to download say, the motion blur or sparkle plugin, and then I click it and suddenly my menus motion blur or sparkle with fairy dust when I move them.
You could break the effects up into groups.
Scaling effects
Trails for cursor
Trails for menu
Icon effects/animations
etc, and when this is done, then people can write themes easily etc and we can innovate.
The key should be a system that allows a newbie who isnt a coding genius to actually manipulate a video card either via scripting, or some high level interface.
What I want is complete revamping of the X protocol with backward compatibility maintained (permanently), such that new apps can take advantage of new server-side widgets without breaking compatibility. Wouldn't it be sweet if GTK+ apps could run as well over a 256kb/s line as XAW apps do?
I dont care so much about backward compatibility and I dont think most desktop users do. Servers sure as hell wont be running this. But if back compatbility is so important that can be handled to.
QT3 has translucent menu items and such. I haven't checked to see if they cheat by reading from the screen, or if they have implimented an alpha layer.
Fake translucency is not what people want, we want alpha channeling. This will only happen when the whole interface changes from pixel based to SVG based and then an OpenGL backend to access the video cards.
I think Evas has the right idea here, now its just time to have X catch up to it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Bad, bad
Gorilla is a start. I think however there should be no more bitmap / pixel based interfaces. This is 2003 and Linux should just go 100 percent SVG. People who want to use pixels can use their 486.
Linux needs to prepare to take on Windows on the Desktop, this is going to require that Linux is cutting edge.
Isn't this a disk space vs CPU tradeoff?
Most people have more free CPU power than diskspace. Most people have 2ghz cpus, and super powered Gforce video cards which just dont get used at all except for a few tasks. Dont you think its time our software catches up to the hardware?
The worse that can happen is make more people buy video cards and upgraes which will give us jobs again.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
We were going to call it 'Trek' or 'Cannondale', but then some IBM dude who knows waaaaay more about choosing names than we do told us to call it 'Cairo'.
Probably true enough that OpenGL is the way for a while.
Now that there is a set of instructions, perhaps they will be widely adopted and drive some sort of hardware accelerated video card with Cairo support. Not very easy for me to predict. Probably not likely.
Still glad to see Xr / Cairo... And that penguin is very happy.
btw-I love OpenGL, and think of it as legos for my monitor. I am very glad developers and video card manufacturers have done what they have with OpenGL. I dual boot my Radeon 9700 equipped PC - XP for games or 2.4.20-8 for most everthing else for that very reason.
~8^]
So when will this library be used to add SVG to Mozilla on linux?
Unfortunately the problem with this will be getting hardware manufacturers to produce suitable drivers. Getting them to produce linux drivers for OpenGL was bad enough, and is still a mess (thanks, nVidia!). If designed well enough, perhaps Cairo itself can sit on top of GLX, but we'll see...
Actually, Cairo is Windows XP.
The XP is a greek pun that the MS engineers thought up. X is actually the greek letter Chi and P is the greek letter Ro, so Windows XP == Windows Chi-Ro (Sound it out).
Just load it up in XGGI, like so, silly!
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> heh, there's even a funny post in xsvg archives
>
> [xsvg] Viagra and Diet Pills prescribed online!
This is actually on topic for XSVG. Viagra is supposed to help men "scale" up while "Diet Pills" are for people to "scale down".
Has anyone here tried any of those three themes they list? (cairo-simple, cairo-industrial, and cairo-nuvola.) I'm curious to see what they look like, but (like a typical unfriendly project page) they don't have any screenshots of what they've created.
It was slated for inclusion for gtk 1.2, then gtk 2.0, then 2.2, now 2.4? Try gtk 5.6.
Whatever happened to descriptive naming? Who would instinctively associate "Cairo" with "vector graphics for XFree86"? Why not name it something sensible, like "XVector" (if that's not already taken)?
In all seriousness, I think that poor name choices hurt the adoption of free software. Think about "Photoshop" vs. "The GIMP," or "Internet Explorer" vs. "Mozilla." Rather than something simple, descriptive, and catchy, we usually opt for indecipherable codenames, stupid recursive acronyms, or lame in-jokes that few people but the developers themselves will get.
Poor naming limits the spread of the software meme to those who are already in the know, especially when the names are designed to enforce an only-the-anointed-get-it, us-vs-them mentality.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Over the next few years, desktop graphical environments will move increasingly towards vector graphics and away from bitmaps. The Mac is already there. Windows and Linux are both in the development stage (Longhorn and Cairo respectively) and it will be interesting to see who gets there first. Desktops will finally scale properly to different sized monitors and there will be no excuse for apps that do not scale properly.
Once every operating system supports vectors natively, SVG will become a no-brainer. Why would we use vectors for everything on the desktop and then dumb it down to bitmaps for transmission over comparitively thin network pipes to devices of arbitrary size and shape? It would make no sense whatsoever. So SVG will replace a huge number of the GIFs and PNGs on the Web, to say nothing of Flash files.
A wonderful side effect of this will be that people will finally be able to have richly rendered text on the Web without resorting to binary formats like GIF and Flash. Imagine being able to cut and paste text even when it is embedded in highly stylized corporate graphics (as is becoming more and more common!).
There are really so many follow-on effects that we could have a long thread discussing them. Congratulations to the Cairo and X teams for taking a few more steps down the path!
That leaves only one question... will there be a port of the athena widgets, there are so many apps relying of that that the port simply cannot be ignored.
And also this thing needs network transparency just in case X is not under it dragging it down speedwise, people cannot live without network transparency even if they don't need it!!!
Why was it named Xr in the first place?
>
Calling it eye candy? Sorry - I'll go without. Linux desktops are drab
and unprofessional looking. They only appeal to the ultra cheap mfs
who think they're entitled to something for nothing. I hate people
like that. They don't do our world any good at all.
>
>
You're right. It's "professional" MF's like you who are responsible for the spread of email viruses and other crap. Before assholes like *YOU* appeared on the scene, people spoke the truth when they said it was *IMPOSSIBLE* to contract a virus via email.
Great job, *ASSHOLE*
But...who knows. Maybe this Cairo won't be a wasted excursion in the desert...
...to be moved. The Xouvert project team, instead of being a "hot head" and planning to just develop something terribly different, fast, slow and maybe also very unstable or even NOT planning at all, decided that the first step has to be taken on april 2004. Gee... when I saw the very first page of Xouvert I was excited about this fork. Just a little later I found out that it's not a fork but a "development branch" therefore no question about license change (would't have been great to have it GPL finally?), that the development speed is surely nothing like I am used to (KDE, linux, mozilla...) and that the final result would be nothing more and nothing less than the same XFree we are using since a long ago. Yes, there have been improvements, surely many in the last two years, but I think many were/are waiting for something "different", even if unstable at the beginning (I had KDE crashing 10 times aday until january). A question: why is it so difficult to create a REAL fork from XFree? Making it GPL also would maybe make more developers decide to contribute. XFree could not get the changes and improvements back? Is it that bad when such a new software would be used by everyone instead of XFree? If it doesn't work out they might switch to X11/MIT license back and recontribute the (little) changes back to XFree.
Better be careful--unless this stuff is getting developed in Egypt, the WTO might sue to force them to change the name.
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The greek letters that look like XP, Chi and Rho, would be pronounced Cairo.
But this was Xr. So shouldn't it be pronounced Chigamma?
--AC
Pronounce the Greek letters.
X == Chi
r == Rho
Okay
XR (or XP) can be read as "Chi Rho" ...
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Switching to GPL would solve nothing. The problem is not people hoarding code, but lack of good developers. That has nothing to do with which license it uses. It is more important that the various X11 forks use the same license so that they can freely share code (in both directions).
care to enlight us about whats wrong with the name "cairo" ?
disclaimr: I'm biased.
You read too much into too little.
;)
If you bothered to read the mailing lists, or even the three links to roadmap/goals in the article, you'd recognise that it's not that simple.
Yes, Xouvert intends to be a development branch of XFree. No, Xouvert does not intend to be shackled by a slow adoption of new features in XFree. If XFree fails to move with the times, Xouvert will be a drop-in replacement for (and indeed coexist with) XFree.
In fact, the goal/roadmap links suggest massive architectural changes in the code base. But that's mean of me to point that out - I mean how would you know that since you didn't bother to read it.
This way, new features get developed and there is a option for the future. I suspect that, supposing XFree do not align themselves with Xouvert as it evolves, this project will indeed become a full fork.
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but my workstation might. I'd need to still be able to tunnel X from my server to display GUI apps locally.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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Only 13 years after Windows 3.0
Linux on the desktop? (* snort *)
"We're on the road to Cairo" he was right but his timing was just a little off.
I like the sound of Xr/Cairo, seems pretty cool.
Zer-kai-roh. Sounds like an anime title to me.
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For anyone who has not used an SGI machine before, windows often have one or two widgets (if two then one would be oriented on the horizontal axis, the other on the vertical) which resemble long, thin, ridged wheels. When you click and drage so as to rotate the wheel showing in a file manager window the file icons will all resize automatically in realtime and smoothly, since it is all drawn in vectors. To me this would make a graphic desktop in linux a lot more useable.
That, and the way you can use a mouse and three buttons in OpenInventor windows to navigate/manipulate in three dimensions are a couple of the best things about SGI user interfaces to my mind.
A picture of an IRIX desktop with an icon resizing wheel is here
But wasn't Cairo the codename for Windows 95 during its development?
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