First Xouvert Milestone Released

An anonymous reader writes " The first milestone of xouvert, the X-server replacement has been released. Xouvert includes MAS giving the X server its very own sound server. Nice. :) Also, just noticed that enlightenment quietly released an update to the 0.16 series. " (Here's a link to the Xouvert download page.)

Comments

Funny....

[IamTheRealMike]

People were talking about XFree forking for so long and nothing ever happened. Now within the space of a few months, we have two!

It seems at least to me that the freedesktop.org x server (kdrive) is where the interesting stuff is happening, but we'll see how the Xouvert guys get on.

sounds nice

[axxackall]

Xouvert includes MAS giving the X server its very own sound server. Nice. :)

Just nice? It's excelent! This is the biggest X Windowing achievement since first actual implementation of X Windows.

It is in human nature to assotiate visual and audio information in the process of percepting it. Therefore video without audio mean seriously broken usability. That's why I think all these years X Windows has been developed in essentially wrong direction. The made in recent XFree86 versions transparency, which is really just a candy, while so important prime functionality was missed all the time.

I am really happy that MAS in Xouvert now. I am going to switch to Xouvert as soon as possible. Good-bye, XFree86 - thank you for keeping me in the void silence all these years.

How's this going to work with KDE/gnome etc?

[carnivore302]

Xouvert has its own sound engine, MAS. If Xouvert catches on, does this mean that the sound engines of KDE and gnome will become obsolete, or will they collide with MAS?

If they collide, it basically means that KDE and gnome will have to support both X11 and Xouvert. I'm not sure if that is achievable. On the other hand, if they don't collide what's the use of MAS? I'm pretty happy with the way it works now. So I'll then continue working without MAS.

Re:How's this going to work with KDE/gnome etc?

[Amiga Lover]

If Xouvert catches on, does this mean that the sound engines of KDE and gnome will become obsolete, or will they collide with MAS?

There's a few places Linux has failed miserably for me as a desktop, and consistent audio has been one. If I get KDE audio working, six other non KDE apps suddenly go silent, If I get those working, KDE audio apps error on me. Same story sadly. Now, perhaps it's just me not knowing what to futz around with, but to repeat a cliche, "I shouldn't have to do that".

Perhaps kernel level device sharing would work, but I don't know if adding another sound engine would help much

Re:How's this going to work with KDE/gnome etc?

[TheRaven64]

Perhaps you should look at FreeBSD? It contains kernel-level sound mixing, and exposes several virtual /dev/dsp devices (/dev/dsp.0, /dev/dsp.1) which are mixed together to produce the final output. I have the KDE sound daemon pointing at one, the Gnome one pointing at another and leave `legacy' apps and games (which can't tolerate the latency imposed by one of these daemons) to use /dev/dsp (which is a symlink to /dev/dsp.0). In the 5.x series, this is handled automatically, and each request to open /dev/dsp returns a new mixer channel, rather than the device.

Having said that, MAS is not a replacement for /dev/dsp. For one thing, it is network transparent (so I can run a MAS enabled MP3 player, for example, in a remote X session, but still hear the sound.) MAS is cross platform, so I can (in theory) post the sound between any combination of machines that run an X server, as I can with X11. MAS uses a stream/filter graph-based model, and so is very flxible. I regularly use a remote X session, and audio is one of the things I have been missing. MAS should provide that, and this is the first real implementation I have seen. Hopefully it should make it into the main XFree86 trunk soon...

X is not bloated!

[lokedhs]

X isn't and never was bloated. People think it's large just because the framebuffer memory is included in the "ps" listing.

Read the explanation on the freedesktop site. There they mention the fact that people developed X on really old VAX machines. I even ran X myself on an old VAXStation II which had several times less memory than your average palmtop computer, hardware which happens to run X as well.

Re:The things people complain about X...

[fucksl4shd0t]

I'm afraid that Xouvert shows the worst side of Open Source. And that is that anyone can write OpenSource. Where's all the profiling data showing where XFree86 is slow. Why if you're trying to improve on XFree86 are they using a code fork and not starting from scratch? It seems to me this whole project is based on a gut feeling that removing all that socket code will speed it up rather than doing the proper research.

Another poster already showed you their FAQ where they say they cannot remove network transparency.

I think the Xouvert actually shows one of the best sides of open source. They are being non-critical of the fact that the XFree86 organization is slow, bloated, and more or less unable to keep XFree86 in a constant, modern state. Instead, they are providing a 'branch' of XFree86 that will focus on being bleeding-edge and providing fast turnaround for development and testing, so that they can interface with the slow, bloated XFree86 organization to improve XFree86. I think that says a lot of good things about OpenSource, taking care of our own, getting the job done, etc.

Enlightenment is a good example of....

[bnavarro]

Why keeping a project in an alpha/beta state is a bad idea. I used to use E a long time ago, but they never went 1.0, and all the distros just started ignoring it, so now I use Sawfish.

This is a real pet peeve of mine. There are many OSS projects that do this. OpenSSL, anyone? The question is, why?? There must be a stable enough "beta" version of E that could be considered production quality, and should have been bumped up to 1.0 release status. I know that this is the case for OpenSSL, and a lot of other OSS projects out there. The fact is companies and non-hackers don't like adopting software that's advertised as "beta" quality. If you wan't your project recognized in the Real World, step up to the plate.

I know this sounds like a whining rant, but I belive that the plethora of OSS projects forever stuck in a "beta testing" phase is one reason for hesitation for mainstream adoption of Linux.

Re:Who really wants all that garbage?

[Just Some Guy]

Who really wants all this shadowing, and translucent windows, and animated desktop graphics?

I do. I really don't know how they'll benefit me, but I guarantee that someone will make a newly-possible feature that, once you see it, you'll wonder how you lived without.

OK, here's a tiny example. What if your window manager used translucency to indicate window selection: the window with focus is opaque. The one you just left is slightly less so. The one before that is starting to become transparent. I think that'd be a much stronger (and faster) visual indicator than "window with focus is dark blue, windows without focus are lighter blue".

Is that a trivial example? Sure. But the point is that we don't know what will turn out to be the productivity enhancing killer feature that we've been waiting for until we try it. These new features may very well be useless and unused, but they could also change the way we use our systems. New functionality is good.