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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.)
Xouvert represents far more then merely tranparent windows etc, it represents a move to a more recognisable OSS model of working. XFree86 is charterised by a fairly closed development process, long patch intergration times, and close control by the steering group. I am greatly looking forward to seeing a true open source methodolgy accelerate development.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
..is an answer to Apple's Quartz 2D rendering capabilities.
Linux isn't going to make a dent in the desktop world until it's significantly better than MS windows, not just politically, but in ease of use, quality of rendering, integration, etc, etc.
Linux already does OpenGL. Take the next step; Apple's already shown you what to do.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
We haven't needed esd and arts from the first place if sound would be handled by X since the beginning.
Because that's what X is supposed to do - to isolate window managers, desktop managers and just applications from any knowledge about hardware. Gnome or KDE should just fire the sound event, not actually handle it.
I hope that at some point Gnome and KDE developers will drop their "proprietary" sound servers and just send sound events in a same way as they now do with graphics events. THEN perhaps Gnome and KDE will have more available human resources to *focus* on improving the usability and configurability of their applications.
Less is more !
The subject pretty much says it all ...
Read this or this for more info.
Death to ESD/ARTS today!! (and maybe even JACK, if we can low enough latency).
Sunny Dubey
We don't complain about X, we complain about Xfree.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
The idea is that you start up MAS instead of whichever Networking sound solution you are using now. MAS is a stand alone server taht can run without X... in fact there are others you could use, but then MAS was developed with professional audio and video conferencing in mind (both needing low latencies) and MAS is has a solid suport from the X consortium behind it. Both are thing I most alternatives can not claim for themselves.
Regards, Tobias
why, oh why does this ctrl-alt-+ ctrl-alt-minus keep coming up everytime someone mentions they want to change their desktop resolution?
to a user, this doesn't change the resolution. it seems more like a zoom in, zoom out feature. great if you need to zoom in/out. but if you want to change resolution, you're not going to find it here. a user would want to be in a 1024x768 resolution, have a browser window maximized, and change the resolution to 800x600 and still see that window maximized (and have that entire window displayd on the monitor w/o having to move their mouse around).
maybe XFree86 could go a step further than implementing a Microsoft change resolution feature. give the ability to have different resolutions on different virtual desktops. that's where it gets close to window manager implementation to me. it would be nice to have one virtual desktop with 800x600 resolution, and one with 1024x768 or what ever the user prefereances are. it would be nice if XFree86 could give each window the ability to be shown it its own resolution.
My old Agenda VR3 had a total of 8mb RAM and 16mb Flash- 13mb for the kernel and all programs. It ran XFree86 and FLTK. It was plenty speedy and never had a memory problem.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
The statement about being anti-Unix is very unwise.
What if the creators of Unix back around 1970 had had terminals with built-in speakers? How high do you think are the odds that they wouldn't have included audio into the concept of a computer terminal?
I bet you almost anything that we'd have a stdpcm in ISO C today.
It is absolutely ridiculous that the concept of a terminal only contains the lowest common denominator of text input and output. You should think of the terminal as an interface to the user. It logically follows that all kinds of other devices can become part of an interface, depending on the situation.
Obviously, sound in/out can be a part of an interface. A USB port or a DVD drive could be part of an interface. After all, the one who physically "sits" at a device should automatically be able to control it (yes, there are exceptions, such as computer pools - the keyword is "exception", though). This would automatically eliminate all those ugly permission hacks that are necessary today, by the way.
One could even imagine an interface that consists of only sound in/out *without* any form of text or video interface (e.g. interface for the blind).
You have correctly identified the competition to MAS: JACK. Some of my colleagues and I have been wondering aloud whether one could build a nice interface to JACK for network audio. It looks like the answer is yes.
As you correctly note, the real issue is latency. Servers like MAS cannot generally promise reasonable latency on the local side: latency matters there (indeed, it's all that matters).
Dmix looks cool too, but as folks have pointed out, it's going to be tough to get it to work with the range of systems X runs on. Unless it's optionally layered atop JACK...