freedesktop.org xlibs 1.0 Released

Daniel Stone writes "A short time ago, freedesktop.org xlibs 1.0 was released. Simply put, this is the collection of libX11, libXext, and other little-used libraries that kind of power your whole desktop. The xlibs team at fd.o are now maintaining all these libraries, and more, and we're going to be making releases as part of the fd.o platform, which is far more wide-ranging, but it still forms an important part of the platform. Share and enjoy!"

Comments

Some of us

[Anonymous Coward]

still use non-bloated window managers like WindowMaker, Blackbox, IceWM, and Enlightenment that don't use the GTK/QT libraries.

Any idea on the total size of the libaries?

[saskboy]

Is there any chance of this desktop being used on a distribution small enough for a credit card sized CD? 50MB.

From the site:

This table represents the state of libs from XFree86 that should be brought into the Freedesktop cvs as autofooed projects. Please update these if you have any further information.

Library current status
GL needs to be done
GLU FreeGlu? may be better? (don't think so, and Mesa should have the same libGLU available --EricAnholt)
GLw
XThrStub? would be part of libX11, but may be better not as a separate library
XTrap
Xaw6
Xbsd
Xfontcache
Xft1 Maybe do not need this
Xinerama Multiscreen unified display
Xp X print
Xss X screen saver A newer smarter version of this may be nice
Xtst
XvMC?
Xxf86dga Probably does not need to be done.
Xxf86misc getting and setting of input device attributes possible ideas for better device handling
Xxf86rush
Xxf86vm VidMode? extension that allows modifying video attributes on the fly
apple
dps There may be a GNU package for this, but it may be old.
dpstk See dps
expat Should be depended upon
font
fontconfig
fontenc
freetype2 Should be depended upon
libxutil
libxml2 Should be depended upon
misc
oldX
psres See dps
regex
xkbfile
xkbui
zlib Should be depended upon

vs XFree86 ?

[noselasd]

One more question. Whats the diffrence between the freedesktop xlibs, and the xlibs in XFree86 ? I understand they forked from XFree at one point. What did they change/improve ?

Too many damn x's!

[joelgrimes]

I've used linux for years, but still get confused when people bring up this subject. I can't make heads or tails of all the different X's being bandied about. Half the time I can't tell if it's a group of people or a program.

X11, x.org, xfree86, X Consortium, X Window(s?), not to mention freedesktop.org which is commonly mentioned in the same breath - i'm sure i'm missing some.

I'm sure there's others that would appreciate an unscrambling of the relationships between the x's

Re:Not that X is slow ...

[ajs]

IMHO, every major C project should use glib. It is fairly lightweight and provides a lot of the features that C programmers end up carrying around anyway. It's certainly not a Gnome thing in the strictest sense. You could ship glib with KDE and have no dependence on Gnome, GTK+ or anything else like that.

Glib 2.0 also includes GObject, the core object system on which Gtk+ and Gnome are based, though again, you could write grep using these objects, they're not graphics-specific.

How does this relate to XFree86 (Is it a fork?)

[rmsousa]

Are the people at XFree86 maintaining xlibs also? Will this be imported back at XFree86? The release email says xlibs is actively maintained by fd.o (does this mean it is not actively maintained by xf86.org?), but does this mean fd.o will become the official version (i.e., the version bundled in the mainstream distros)? Or will they be two competing implementations?

IIRC, Debian already uses libXft from fd.o (which is a bit obvious, as Keith Packard is in fd.o).

4Sight

[SimHacker]

"SGI shipped a very high-performance X implementation."

You must be talking about 4Sight, SGI's window server that integrated both X11 and NeWS 1.1 (Network extensible Window System). Thanks the NeWS, clients could make efficient use of the network bandwidth by downloading PostScript programs into the server, which executed locally and only sent responses over the network when absolutely necessary.

In 1988, I helped develop the NeWS driver for UniPress Emacs. James Gosling wrote UniPress's version of Emacs, as well as the NeWS window system itself. UniPress Emacs ran quite nicely on 4Sight. Emacs downloaded code to handle all the pop-up menus (pie menus or linear menus -- you could decide) and text selection feedback locally in the server.

After Emacs draws the text on the screen, it downloads a short array of numbers telling the server how many characters wide each line is, so the code running in the server knows just what it needs to give local text selection feedback.

So when you press down and drag to select text in emacs, the selection feedback is instantaneous even if you're running over a low speed dial-up connection. When you release the button or move the cursor outside of the scroll region, only then does it send a message back up to Emacs telling it to select the text, or initiate autoscroll.

How would you do that in X-Windows? Please explain your approach to extending the X-Windows server to support local text selection in emacs (and local pop-up menus while you're at it), without any unnecessary network traffic?

-Don