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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.)
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.
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 !
..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.
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
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.
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.
Well, you could have read the Xouvert FAQ before posting to educate yourself on what they actually plan on improving. That way, you wound't sound like you have no idea what you are talking about. Anyway, from the FAQ:
2.5) So why is X so slow on my machine if not for network transparency?
Yes, XFree86 /can/ be slow, especially on uniprocessor machines, but network transparency is NOT at fault. More common culprits appear to be toolkits, video drivers, and font rendering/render. Render really needs to DMA driven. Right now it pulls bits from the framebuffer using the CPU which with PCI is abysmally slow.
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.
Like what I said? You might like my music
"Changing resolution on the fly springs to mind as one thing it cant do"
Thats strange , because I've been able to do ctrl-alt-+ and ctrl-alt-minus to change the resolution ever since linux 1.2 days...
informative, sure. but... you fail to mention that this feature requires support of the window _managers_ to be able to use this feature. to use this in kde you're gonna need 3.2 which is still in beta. i'm not quite as familiar with other window managers, but last i looked into this, there weren't ANY that let you resize your desktop on the fly similiar to right clicking on the desktop, thenchoosing "resolutions", then selecting something different than the one you're using, and giving you and option to try out the new one.
IIRC, xrandr has been in xfree since the 4.3 series, which i suppose you could consider "a while now". this version of the server which was released 27 Feb of 2003. are the wm's slow to implement this feature? this is a feature Microsoft has had for 8 years now.
while XFree86 _is_ nice, it seems very cumbersome to change. there's probably a small list of feature requests from the user community out there, and they're not getting implemented.
when you tell the truth, be sure to give the whole story.
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.
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.
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?