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Metisse - New Looking Glass Alternative
Interested in a 3D desktop? zoso submitted news about about a project called Metisse, writing "There is working and freely available alternative to the (soon to be released under GPL) Sun Looking Glass 3D desktop ( Slashdot story here)
If you have spare CPU/GPU cycles just go download and compile the first publicly available version of this X Desktop. Everything looks nice (screenshots here), has OpenGL support, transparency and all other whistles...."
It's also the name of a cool Irish-French musical duo
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
You seem to be misunderstanding it. The pixmaps are updated in real-time. There are two layers: the Xwnc layer renders the windows as pixmaps, and the FvwmAmetista displays the pixmaps using OpenGL.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
Because I know that's the first thing I clicked on, and it was slow then. Here's the mirror.
|/usr/games/fortune
tell me why I would want to look at my document while it's twisted sideways?
If you only have 1 window open at a time, it would be useless. If you have multiple windows, shrinking or moving at an angle keeps them in view. Being able to zoom out and still keep it visible gives more desktop space.
Wonder what multiple videos would look like, if any movement the window could be enlarged. You could do all kinds of interesting new things with this type of desktop, if its not staticly rendered.
+5 'not getting it'.
from the site:
"Auto scale mode. The window with the focus has its normal size, the others "normal" windows are scaled (here 70%). This is done automatically. This reduce windows overlapping as the content of the scaled windows are still viewable.
Shot-3 Surface mode. Windows are automatically rotated to simulate a non flat screen (here a 1/4 of sphere). Optionally, the window with the focus is not rotated. Note the zoomed mplayer.
Shot-4 Peeling (or folding) window operation. "Clicking on a corner of a window of a window peels it back, revealing the window underneath it. The window springs back to its original position when the mouse button is released." (From M. Beaudoin-Lafon paper "Novel interaction techniques for overlapping windows")."
basically, you can fit more into the same desktop space and find the windows easier(like on macs now..)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Especially the time-travel kernel module in FreeBSD. That was really cool, allowing the operating system to travel back in time to before it was even created so that it could do all those things before Linus started Linux
FreeBSD didn't exist when Linus started Linux. In fact its precursor, 386BSD (not to be confused with BSD/386) started as a separate project at around the same time as (and I believe a couple of months later than) Linux.
check out Object Bar (no i'm not going to get you a link becaseu i am lazy and you are a big boy and can google it your self) but it minimizes windows into screen shots the size of icons.
That's peculiar. I run KDE 3.2.3 with full eyecandy (transparency, antialiasing, etc) on my xeon 2,6 512 mb laptop and its much faster and responsive than windows xp (I dual boot so I compare the two desktop environments very often).
/proc/sys/vm/swappiness (mine is set to "30" and 3) with your /etc/hosts file (usually the real culprit).
I don't know if you're on a 2.6 kernel but if you are I suggest messing around with 1) prelink 2)
KDE on my box is a real dream, really faster than Windows XP.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
If improved a little it could make me more productive, apart from pleasent looking desktop. The thing that I'd look unto is sphere windowmamanger.
I would put on a background star map (like in skyglobe) and I would be able to look at whole celestial sky, and with zooming! (currently with xplanet I have on my desktop only current view of the sky).
Oh, and I downloaded their videos.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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What you are describing looks exactly like Mac OS X's Dock. See, you can even play a video with the player minimized.
Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
Okay you are right, I mis-recalled this:
M: What is your opinion of 386BSD?
L: Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I started on Linux it wasn't available (although Bill Jolitz' series on it in Dr. Dobbs' Journal had started and were interesting), and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.
The more you know, the less you understand.
And it's cool. A little slow (OK, so I ran it on top of KDE) but I think it has some cool features, the setup I really liked was: - surface like a sphere or cylinder - window auto scaling to 40% - auto flat (the window you focus on becomes flat instead of staying all distorted). That window-peeling stuff is very nice, although I don't know how useful it can be, unless it gives you enough time to bring the window in the back to the front before becoming flat again. This stuff can be really useful for having many windows on the same desktop (could be a little better than having several virtual desktops). I think this could at least be used as the foundation for an Exposé-like feature in other window managers. Of course someone is bound to say that OSS should innovate and not just imitate, but hey, Exposé is really cool, someone could add a similar feature (though not exactly the same) to KDE, GNOME or both...
Go hug some trees.
Ok, so I had a look at the screenies, and wasn't completely repulsed. Certainly, there are some aspects of the wm that could, theoretically, be quite useful. Transparency on any window (and not to the root window, I mean real transparency, like has been possible in windows since win2k), rotation on an x-axis (well, sometimes) and certainly scaling would be really useful. Well, at least, that's what I think, but the crux of the matter is that we all have personal tastes, and that's probably part of what draws us to "alternative" operating systems like linux and bsd. And any others that I have left out before an OS zealot flames me.
So I go get the packages, which, on dialup, does take a little time (Ok, I was kinda using all the bandwidth I could at the time). I compile and install both nucleo and metissa. So far, so good.
I followed the instructions that were given to a T, and the X server actually started up, joy of joys, with what seemed to be a working wm.
Seemed to be.
Because none of the goodies that were supposed to work (rotation, scaling, transparency, feeding the dog) did, in fact, work. Neither did any of the usual things you would expect a window manager to do: window movement and resizing, for a start.
And don't even start me on fvwm. Or the color cyan. We are out of the 70's and there's no need to inflict that on ourselves any more. Heck, if I wanted that, I would just go get a fugly sun box.
I'm quite willing to try it all again, if there is someone with some ground-breaking tips for me. I'm certainly not beyond being told that there was something banally silly that I was doing. But remember, I was following instructions.
All the negativity aside, I think that there is potential here. Perhaps this is something for the good people at x.org to look at. Certainly a properly hardware accellerated X server would be good. Something that does all of the other nifty things that metisse promises (the aforementioned scaling and transparency at least, though I think that the rotation and pee-back ideas are quite novel) would be a great step in a good direction, imho.
Perhaps it's also time for the good people at the enlightenment project to get something solid from E17 out there. Much of the hardware accelleration that should be taken advantage of on today's desktops is supposed to be in there.
Let the flames begin.