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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.)
People complain about X a lot, but when it's all boiled down there really isn't much to complain about. X is a great windowing system.
I have been pwned because my
For the non-french speaking under you: Xouvert means "X open".
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.
This is an X server, not YAWM.
Uhm, there are actually not that many X servers. It's not like windowmanagers or anything like that. Besides , the goal of Xouvert is to get their changes back to XFree
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."
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.
Less is more !
No you're not. Check his post history, he's just an idiot ;).
..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."
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.
Please login to access my lawn
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.
I've used NAS for quite some time now. many apps are already compatable with it. (madplay mpg123 xmms gnome sound server) and it works great for X terminals to get sound (and hogs network bandwidth like no tomorrow)
is MAS anything like NAS? is it compatable?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
why not use alsalib or libaudiofile?
Well, ALSA is the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, and any X11 replacement would have to serve FreeBSD and the Hurd as well.
As far as libaudiofile goes, I'm not sure it is strong enough to serve as the basis for an entire array of audio uses.
As for playing sound "fast", all you really want is minimal lag between sound being queued on the server and being put out on the speaker. The main problem there is network lag during congestion; I guess that could partially be offset by (a) a good, switched network and/or (b) QoS providing audio with a higher priority.
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
As said before this guy appears *not* to be a Dev on the Xouvert project.
Have a read through some of his previous posts on other topics.
Thanks.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
I've seen MAS demoed on a couple of shows already and I did like what I saw. They are aiming for professional quality sound delivery with extremly low latencies which definitly is a good thing. MAS of course is network transparent of course, but the network is just another input-/output device to MAS (like a soundcard), you don't have to use it for local playback. It is a handy feature though: You can pipe your sound to an effects mashine for processing, something that might come in handy in a professional environment.
Regards, Tobias
Check your facts before blurting out. QT is available under the Gnu Public Licence!
e .h tml
http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/freelicens
I think the following should settle your fears.
//end direct quote from site.
From their site
"Many of the visually impaired have finely tuned auditory sensibilities, allowing them to react quickly to sound. From its beginning, MAS was designed to handle timing issues exceedingly well. It was optimized to provide tight synchronization of multiple media streams. More importantly, for users dependent on audio cues, it is designed to stop some functions and start others quickly. For example, a user, hearing the opening syllables of a menu option, can either select it or move to another option without waiting for a complete articulation of the option. MAS's original accessibility requirements, developed with leading accessibility authorities, included:
* Ability to stop utterances quickly
* Controllable low latency
* Format independent media handling
* High audio quality
* Multiplexing--with priorities
* Small memory footprint
* Synchronization of multiple media stream
"MAS enables low-latency Internet conferencing and telephony. Automatic bandwidth measurements and MAS's dynamically-switchable CODECs insure that the conference quality scales from 56K modems to T1 lines".
"MAS integrates with a compatible X11 server on your desktop. It processes graphic information locally, alleviating the need for network transmission of uncompressed graphical content. Graphic events are easily synchronized with audio events for professional-quality multimedia and accessibility-enabled applications."
"MAS handles network-distributed media processing and intricate format configuration tasks. It continually measures system performance and adjusts its actions depending on the available system resources. The longer it runs, the better it knows your system".
Obviously this has been designed for performance/scalability.Of course the real trial is actually running it for yourself but give it a chance before you write it off.
You know, you are right. And it's by design. And it's well known. I remember several years ago CmdrTaco posting an article to discuss just that particular topic. IIRC, if you put in a comment as an AC, then you can't moderate comments attached to that article you posted against, just as if you had posted from your normal account.
/does/ get logged, you know). There is rarely any true anonymity in this world. It's not a bad thing, unless you are doing something wrong...
It's all well known about, and well documented. The idea of the AC account is that nobody knows who you are, but admin can always find out things anyway (stuff
Ok. I see now. I just didn't realize before that standards organizations like IEEE are just stagnating the development. What a revelation! How far our technology would have developed already if we just didn't hang on to standards. Who the hell needs consistency anyway?
a lousy GUI that will remain lousy forever
Linux desktop will remain lousy as long as the distro manufacturers refuse to create a common set of rules for a standard Linux application toolkit.
Having such a standard would not stop a pro like you from reconfiguring your desktop to your liking, but it would make the initial desktop look the same on every distro and thus easily adapted by a newbie.
On a more personal note, the mishmash of different toolkits (run xawtv and some kde applications side by side and you'll see what I mean) just makes the GUI look so goddamn ugly and cumbersome to use ("now did I move the scrollbar in this application with the mouse middle button or with the left?" etc.).
The owls are not what they seem
A consistent GUI allows for the things you learned in your word processor to be reused in your browser, e-mail client, etc. Thanks to the thousand of toolkits, desktop environments, support libraries, sound backends, printer support solutions, etc. that's plain impossible in X. So a user has to spend lots of time relearning how to do simple tasks for each application he uses (and mixing them up after learning them). That ruins productivity!
Wether someone runs one or onehundred word processors is absolutly irelevant to the GUI consistency discussion.
Regards, Tobias
I believe your right, It works *abobe* ALSA. ALSA will do the hardware bits while the MAS will back into it, or if your XWindow is running on OSX, back into the Darwin equivelent, or Windows, back into ActiveDirectX.NET(?)
Im not certain, can someone verify?
Sir, may I suggest you RTFA? Xouvert is a fork of XFree86. The current release is basically exactly the same as the current release of XFree86, but with a handful of extras. Since they are the same thing with different names, I suspect they may just be compatible.
It's not a bad thing, unless you are doing something wrong...
Or unless somebody thinks what you're doing is wrong. Better to just say, "On the internet you're going to get logged and there's not a whole lot you can do about it."
After checking out the following screenshot: http://freedesktop.org/~keithp/screenshots/sharp_s hadow.png and then reading the contents of the X-Chat window, specifically, "I'm hoping to do things that won't be fast enough with 2D/3D hardware as it exists today.", I have to ask: Who really wants all this shadowing, and translucent windows, and animated desktop graphics? I mean seriously, what's the point? Does it help you get you work done? Does it increase your productivity? I see it being more of a nuisance and distraction.
It certainly shows that Mr. Packard works for HP, what with him writing software that would require users to purchase new hardware just to have the next generation desktop. Hell, the desktop might as well be free, if we have to shell out the dough to purchase a new video card.
Because it's cheaper and good enough. That combination wins every time. It does not have to be better.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I always see people post stuff like..
It'd be nice if we could get everyone to focus all their energy on making...insert software name/type here.
This is how open source happens my friend. In a way, they are ALL working on the same thing. Since this is open source, the code, the ideas, the research, the development can all be shared between them meanwhile the competitiveness keeps them going.
Its much better than say, having a bunch of people who don't like each other work on the same thing or having talented developers not work at all.
Also, its not a window manager.
The visual stuff is there for (eg.) = 8 bit displays where apps really do need to have exact control over colormaps. No longer useful on the desktop, but very handy for embeded or PDA developers.
"Also, just noticed that enlightenment quietly released an update to the 0.16 series."
uh... that was over a month ago, on November 5th. It was a good little bugfix release, though.
I've seen this post so many times about how much X or XFree sucks. Please enlighten me because I seem to be living in an alternate dimension. Right now at my house, I have a large dual-Athlon basement machine running headless. My main X term upstairs is a $40 used PII with a good graphics card and no hard drive. I cannot perceive a performance difference between this machine with applications, scrolling, switching desktops, etc, with the 2GHz P4 running WinXP at work. I can play fullscreen NTSC quality videos over the network. Everything but page-flipping games run flawlessly, and I'm sure cheap gigabit would solve even that problem.
In the living room I have a 1GHz Athlon game box that runs all sorts of games and emus at 60 frames per second fullscreen with no problem.
My wife runs a PII system with a good Matrox card and other than slow load times for some apps, the graphics performance (scrolling, menuing, maximizing, etc) is superb.
Where is the horrible performance? Windows is supposed to be so much better, but I have yet to see a window that didn't shear when "Show Contents when moving/resizing" was turned on. That's why I turn it off and use the outline. And, by the way, no matter how fast your graphics updates are, you will always get shearing on a CRT, unless you blast your updates while the electron gun is returning to the top corner. I imagine that would add a great deal of complexity to the windowing system, which is probably why it hasn't been done on either platform, just so a tiny part of daily work will "look better".
I just wonder what I've been doing right with these systems (all running XFree), especially since I'm pretty picky about graphics performance.
I'm pleasantly surprised to see that Xouvert is using the Arch revision control system.
Does anyone know if you have to create individual UNIX user accounts for Arch users as you do with CVS? I've always hated that about CVS.
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.
Xouvert includes MAS giving the X server its very own sound server.
Just in time for X-MAS. How convenient.
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
Asking for consistency between desktop environments is unreasonable. For one thing, it imposes a burden on developers who are ultimately trying to scratch their own itch. For another thing, nobody asks for consistency between MacOS and Windows environments, yet KDE and gnome have no reason to be any more similar than those two. The fact that they both use the same server application (X) is irrelevant - the projects themselves are as different as chalk and cheese (one written in C, one in C++; one using bonobo for IPC, one using something else, one focussed towards strict HIG, one using different UI guidelines etc.) and it is quite remarkable that they coexist as well as they do. If you stick to one or the other then you get consistency, just as you want. If you mix and match, that's your lookout.
Besides which, have you ever really considered the "consistency" of Windows apps? Internet Explorer has a different feel to Office apps, which in turn are different to apps made by third parties (nobody will convince me that Windows Explorer's CD-burning capability shares anything in terms of look or feel with Roxio CD Creator, or that Excel is consistent with Quattro Pro).
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Actually, this is isn't correct -- having spent too many years programming video games in the 80s-90s, I'll have a shot at explaining...
You fix the problem of onscreen redraw glitches simply by using double (or triple) buffering - all updates are then drawn to an off-screen back-buffer instead of to the visible surface, and once the back-buffer update is complete you wait until the next vsync (when the CRT is in an offscreen period) and 'flip' the visible surface out, bringing the newly drawn one into view.
Double buffering is simpler to code than triple buffering, but any system implementing either of these will still have a pretty simple API to call, and both will be similar (if not identical if you plan correctly) -- the tricky stuff all happens 'behind the scenes', usually implemented with a combination of interrupts, threads and code to handle 'surface locking'.
The 'cost' of using double buffering is: you need video memory for both a primary and a secondary surface, you have to write a small piece of (fairly technical) code -- and when you call flipSurfaces() no code can access a visible surface to draw upon until the 'flip' has actually taken place (the next VBlank interrupt), which will likely mean waiting code... tidy screen redraws, but stalling code. :(
If you have enough video memory, you can get around this 'waiting' problem by using triple buffering. It's a bit trickier to implement, and requires three times more memory than an unbuffered display - but you avoid the problem of having a locked back buffer (waiting to become the primary surface) by having the extra (and therefore always 'unlocked') surface ready to return when any code calls getBackBuffer().
When flipping screens (during the CRT gun's offscreen period), the new buffer can be made visible by either copying it to the front buffer (maybe using blt h/w, if available), or by changing some kind of magic memory pointer in the video hardware.
So stopping tearing can in fact be done fairly easily -- a heck of a lot of video games use a double or triple buffering, and have done since at least the early eighties. I don't think any of the PC Windowed-style OSes use this technique yet (...but I don't have a Mac, and with all that transparency and other eye candy I sure hope that they're drawing to an offscreen surface!)
(Sorry for the almost off topic ramble, but I had to satisfy my innermost geek)
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...
And, I would guess, many OS X users were seduced by the oh - so - beautiful user OS X user interface. I don't use OS X, but I wish I did, at least, if it was open source. (I need to be able to hack my OS.)
OS X uses translucency, antialiasing, smooth shadows around windows, window warping, and 'fancy' things like the launcher bar thing (sorry, Mac users, I don't know the name of it!) at the bottom of the screen. Have you ever actually used OS X? Try it. Go to CompUSA or something and play around with a G5.
Apple's interface makes you forget you're looking at simply a matrix of pixels, which is displaying rectangular regions called 'windows'. The smoothness of everything *far* surpasses anything I have seen in X. I've used KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, IceWM, and others. I've tried hundreds of themes. I've made my own themes. But I still have no good visual cue where the bounds of the focused window are. The drop shadow is, IMO, a great feature. Your peripheral vision picks up the area of the focused window automatically.
I could go on and on, but the point is, some people *do* care about having a beautiful desktop. It is also a usability feature and can make a person more productive.
I spend 70% of my life looking at it, and I want it to be beautiful, dammit.
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome