Waimea Developer Returns From Beyond

An anonymous reader writes "Waimea 0.5.0 was released after about a year from the developer disappearing. It turns out he was just working on getting the OpenGL backend for Cairo completed. Waimea is the first window manager that uses Cairo for rendering."

Comments

Dear editors

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a good example of a submission that cries out for a little "Here's what the hell this article is talking about..." trailer. That's the place to add your two cents, not Michael-ish "Here's the acceptable position to take on this controversial subject." comments.

"Waimea is the first window manager that uses Cairo for rendering."? To me, "Cairo" is Windows 95.

Re:Dear editors

[metamatic]

Indeed. WTF is Cairo other than Windows 95?

Re:Dear editors

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to nitpick, but Cairo was what Win2000 became, without a lot of the advanced features that are giving the Longhorn developers fits. The Win95 codename was Chicago.

Re:Dear editors

[Moderator]

Wasn't Windows 95 Chicago?

Google time

[Curtman]

Cairo: Cross-device Rendering for Vector Graphics

• Cairo provides a vector-based rendering API with output support for the X Window System and local image buffers. PostScript and PDF file output is planned. Cairo is designed to produce identical output on all output media while taking advantage of display hardware acceleration through the X Render Extension.
• 
  
  Cairo provides a stateful user-level API with support for the PDF 1.4 imaging model. Cairo provides operations including stroking and filling Bézier cubic splines, transforming and compositing translucent images, and antialiased text rendering. The PostScript drawing model has been adapted for use within C applications. Extensions needed to support much of the PDF 1.4 imaging operations have been included. This integration of the familiar PostScript operational model within the native application language environment provides a simple and powerful new tool for graphics application development.

Re:Google time

[nelsonal]

What does the descriptor stateful (or stateless) mean in this sense?

Re:Google time

[hummassa]

basically, that you have a current point, a current pen, a current brush, a current path, state elements you use to draw and compose whatever you want to compose in your screen (like PDF/PS composing in a paper)

Re:Google time

[drfuchs]

"New tool"? Credit where credit is due: Sun created the NeWS windowing system (Gosling's project prior to doing Java); and NeXT (Jobs' project before Pixar and rescuing Apple) used Adobe's Display PostScript. Note that none of these exist anymore, but maybe the time has come for this idea to really work. MacOS 10 has Quartz, and that seems to be working out, unlike those earlier attempts.

Re:Google time

[Creepy]

That would put my guess completely off, then, Waimea being a canyon in Kauai called "the Grand Canyon of the Pacific", and Cairo is the capitol of Egypt. Silly codenames :)

What Cairo is.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know all that Next generation Windows Avalon stuff?

Cairo is linux's answer.

It's vector graphics that now uses an OpenGL backend. As soon as glitz is complete (another component of the NG linux desktop) Keith Packard (that guy that got kicked out of XFree86 and then utterly destroyed XF86) will be doing a quick OpenGL based X server.

At this point, The only driver that graphics card companies need to produce is an OpenGL one. That's really simple.

And the desktop is 3d accelerated. Mmmm....

Re:What Cairo is.

[Tyreth]

Do you have some examples of what this will let us do? I know nothing about Avalon, so I've little idea of the potential of Avalon or Cairo, or any examples of useful implementations. On the screenshots for Waimea all I see is a nice OSX kind of look.

Re:What Cairo is.

[aminorex]

Just think of it as being almost as good as display
postscript, and 15 years late.

Re:What Cairo is.

[The Analog Kid]

Vector graphics is where is going to be, screen size won't matter with vector graphics, as icons with stay in proportion with your resolution(such as svg which is a part of Cairo).

Once these technologies mature a bit, it will give Microsoft a run for their money. Xorg should have compositing by the summer(so I read), Xfixes and Xdamage are already part of it. Good bye David Dawes and your old XFree86.

Re:What Cairo is.

[Quattro Vezina]

Do you have some examples of what this will let us do? I know nothing about Avalon, so I've little idea of the potential of Avalon or Cairo, or any examples of useful implementations. On the screenshots for Waimea all I see is a nice OSX kind of look.

I've since lost the link, but I once saw a video demonstrating some of the capabilities of Avalon. It's a fully vector-based graphics rendering system. The video started with simple things like rotating buttons and text at angles.

Then it went onto doing things such as using full-motion video as the background of a dialog box. There were even transparent controls on top of the video (a text box and a push button, IIRC). And the UI all ran smoothly--none of the lag or slowdown you'd expect if you were to do something like that.

Really impressive stuff, and the sooner Linux can get something similar running on it, the better.

Keith's X server

[JohnFluxx]

How does cairo tie in with Keith's X server?
Are they competing? What are the differences of each?

Re:Keith's X server

[OmniVector]

Sorry, i don't have this pdf in web form at the moment (so it's horribly large -- 3.4mb) but i wrote this on the current and future display system technologies: http://www.otierney.net/files/displaysystems.pdf

hope this answers your question

Re:Keith's X server

[Muvlo Redond]

As is says on the site linked to in the article above, "Waimea is a highly customizable window manager", meaning it is not an X server, and doesn't compete with Keith's X server or any other X server because it is something quite different.

Re:Keith's X server

[JohnFluxx]

Good think I said Cairo then, and not Waimea. :P

Re:Keith's X server

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks - that was a good read.

IMO I wouldn't be so positive about Berlin/Fresco. It won't be finished near to Avalon's date, and it's no where near usable now. I've been on the mailing list for years and it's going nowhere. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh but it really isn't.

See this recent message from Graydon (a dev) about some of the architectural problems in Fresco/Berlin

YES YES YES

[Anonymous Coward]

the screenshots say it all.
finally a nice scalable window manager for ultra high resolutions . it looks sexy

Yea, so..

[Visceral Monkey]

What exactly does this mean? Is it an xserver capable of doing flash-like stuff on the desktop? Someone point out what makes this cooler than the existing stuff.

Sorry for my ignorance..

Re:Yea, so..

[swmccracken]

http://www.freedesktop.org/.

Cairo: Vector graphics rendering library that can take advantage of XRender and other such extensions, especially those supplied by:

Keith's X Server: A redesign of X Servers, focussing on "Modern" design and features used by modern X Software. (Client side fonts, composing offscreen.)

Wiemea: X Window manager that uses Ciaro for output and rendering.

The theory is that Ciaro will become the standard way of drawing graphics, and since everything is vector based, it becomes resoultion independent. (Increasing the resolution doesn't make things smaller unless you want it to - it simply makes things smoother.)

Re:Yea, so..

[jdowland]

window applications, much like web pages, use bitmap graphics for things which really should be vectors : simple, scalable, size-of-image independent from size-of-file graphics.

Like OpenGL

[IshanCaspian]

OpenGL is a stateful programming language, in that you can call glColor3f(1,0,0) and then everything will be painted red until you select another color.

Although they're not a programming language, the command-line tools are a good example of statelessness...you call ls or dir and it performs its function, and then it's done.

Re:Like OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

you can still call cd and you have state.
command-line tools do have state (setenv LSCOLORS).
the means are just not that rich, as in a single process.

Slashdot redefines minimalism

[molnarcs]

So this is a submission about three screenshots showing a GNOME desktop - oops, I mean waimea. Seriously, even though 3 screenshots might be interesting, but can someone point out something waimeaish on those screenshots (aside from that 16x16 pager like thing on the right bottom corner)?

A link would have been helpful to the source of the info. (Unless the developer whispered it in the submitter's ear).

Re:Slashdot redefines minimalism

[floamy]

Those screenshots are of Waimea. It's drawing the window decorations with Cairo.

FYI -- it sucks

[oldosadmin]

Just to save some people compile time. I compiled this on fedora. It's slow, flickery, and generally sucks on my Fedora Core 2 box.

Re:FYI -- it sucks

[xedx]

There's maybe something wrong with your compilation
Mine is smooth and fast
Actually its faster cos dragging windows around doesn't bump up the cpu load to 100%.
And Im not using any third party drivers, just the old xfree driver(nv instead of nvidia)

Re:FYI -- it sucks

[oldosadmin]

Using it with Gnome 2.6? I'm running AMD XP 1700+, 512 mb RAM, GF FX 5200 (nvidia drivers) as the WM for gnome 2.6, and it's unbearably flickery.

Re:FYI -- it sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

He's using Nvidia's "nv" driver. It is a lot faster and uses the 3d circuitry, IIRC. It was _WAY_ faster for Quake when I used it in the distant past (about 2 years ago).

wrong

[IshanCaspian]

Your SHELL has state. Command-line tools do not.

I was wrong

[oldosadmin]

I was wrong. Waimea is OK, just the default config is horrid. It is set to scroll desktops when your mouse even acts like it's going to the edge of the screen: settings I changed in /usr/share/waimea/waimearc to make it usable: change 4 to 1 change 3x3 to 1x1

Cairo+glitz = Quartz, but...

[cjwl]

Why are they defining a whole new API?

These guys should just do an open source implementation of the OS X Quartz API's, would be much more useful to developers...than...constantly....re....inventing. ...the.....wheel....with....yet....another.....API ....

SIGH.

Re:Cairo+glitz = Quartz, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ass.