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The Power of X
An anonymous reader writes "The license changes in the last version of Xfree86 have caused many distributions to reject the project in favor of the forked X.Org X server. As X.Org prepares to release the second version of the X.Org "monolithic" X Server (dubbed version 6.8), Ars Technica investigates the future of the X platform, as cooperation between X.Org and projects like GNOME and KDE begin to take take hold at freedesktop.org. Already host to an impressive array of projects, it appears that freedesktop.org will become the hub in which other Free Desktop projects can collaborate. Daniel Stone, release manager for freedesktop.org, gets into the details on how it's all going to work, in conjunction with freedesktop.org's upcoming platform release."
The supposed 'modularization' that is to take place in future 'X' releases sounds promising - release enough to work (or 'major' fixes) and then extremely long development cycles can be diminished.
The one caveat is to not micro-modularize; do not release things for install/upgrade that cannot stand on their own (i.e. - limited functionality vs. not executable).
I would like to see 'X' go on a diet, though (if possible).
From the interview:-
For the less code-inclined, there's always lots of documentation to be written! Manpages need to be written, documentation needs to be released Xorg 6.7. converted from random archaic formats to DocBook, et al. This is one area that really badly needs some love from those with the requisite skills.
I realy wish that this was a higher priority among developers, as it would greatly help both new users, and future developers.
Don't bother with the next cool widget until the docs are up and understandable.
That said, it has long been true and well-supportable that those XFree86 guys have definitely been a bunch of assholes for a long time. They maintained a really closed community which gave the appearance of complete disdain for what anyone else wanted out of X. Whether their actual behavior was in that mode is arguable (recall the massive enhancements of XFree 4), but they certainly didn't like to "play ball" with the rest of the community.
Then of course this license thing was the last straw, and that's what forced the distros' hands...they couldn't build their systems at all anymore when core components were GPL'd and either linked to XFree stuff or used its code.
In other words, I'm not sure how much this will impact the technical progress of X...but it's certainly good to get a broader base of people working on it, and a more open development in general.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
**I was thinking of English. Most computer literate users speak it well enough, and if not by all means pick up the internationalization pack**
but that is not what internationalisation is all about, I for example use my computers in english, yet I write and read Finnish on them every day.
äöäöäöäöäöäöäöääöäÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅ 7;
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I'm currently using a beta release of the new Xorg and whoa is it nice. Finally true transparency, nice real dropshadows, etc. are possible.
;-D
There are probably more exiting features than the inclusion of Composite in the next releas (XDamage seems to be a great step forward for X over the network for example and XCB looks interesting too, RTFI) but hey, I'm just a sucker for eyecandy.
All in all I do get the impression that we all should thank Mr. Dawes for behaving in a way that lead to a fork of XFree. Xorg and freedesktop.org put the development of X back on track and it is only just beginning.
Finally, thanks to all the folks at freedesktop.org for doing such a great job and putting the fun back in my computer.
Yeah, people realized that they liked all of their old applications and the project never really took off.
I read the internet for the articles.
As someone who often puts together presentations, marketing slides, flyers for printing, etc., this is my single greatest annoyance about Linux at the desktop (and we're using Linux on all our desktops; heck, we're even a SUSE technology partner). Copying text between my Java IDE and OpenOffice gives me only about half a page of text - the rest is simply lost. How on earth can I simply copy from GIMP into an OpenOffice presentation like I can copy/paste from PaintShop pro to PowerPoint? The last time I tried, I couldn't even copy/paste consistently between various KDE apps.
As much as I hate to say it (and I really hate to say it), this is *the* one thing that Windows does right. More or less seamless application integration which works the way I need it to work.
Dan.
my biggest complaint is the configuration of X. xf86config should just be plain outlawed. I am an experienced unix admin and love linux but the only real complaint I have with is the configuration of X. I can get it working with no problem with xf86config or x86setup - but I really like what fedora has done - it is a non issue and you don't even have to mess with it at install time - this is the way it should be. I have installed fedora on at least 20 to 30 computers and they all went without a hitch and I didn't have to have the monitor sync rates. thanks fedora and keep up the good work!!
Then in ten years time, you will end up with exactly the same situation we are in today; obsolete crap in the base protocol, all effective new development in extensions. Except that you will have utterly broken backwards compatibility in the process. :)
:)
Time and time again, X11 has showed us that it is better to provide mechanism, not dictate policy--even unto the protocol itself.
The Extensions mechanism provides the X11 protocol with extrodinary forwards compatibility.
You can take a modern X11 Window Server from 2004, connect to it a crufty old X client from some godawful old piece of embedded hardware from twenty years ago, and have it work perfectly. At the same time, your modern server can perform nifty tasks that the protocol's designers never dreamed would be necessary, such as, well, everything Keith Packard and co are doing today.
In a well designed windowing system (such as Display Postscript, Quartz and even GDI although it falls down in a number of other areas), the drawing commands sent to the windowing system are exactly the same as the ones sent to the printer. This makes it very easy to create true WYSIWYG applications (you don't need to write an X11 rendering path and a PostScript rendering path for the same data, and hope you've done it correctly). The Xprint extension provides this functionality to X11.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You're kidding Right?
Filesystem permissions on NTFS are a joke. In theory, they'd be great, but In reality, XP opens up everything wide for you upon install. They could take the OS X approach and prompt you for a password upon installing things and have a more secure desktop with no user inconvenience, but as it stands, Spyware X can be installed by a user and affect other users because generally, a user has way too much write permission the way MS has set up XP.
Home directories are worthless unless they A. work right and B. Come with well-implemented and executed file permissions. Again, this is an area in which XP is capable, but the issue of most users in an XP system having far too much power weakens it.
The Dos/Windows command prompt was, is, and always will be a joke. It feels like it was written by someone who never had to be productive at a command prompt. It hasn't had command completion until recently, it doesn't have 10% of the utilities (packaged with windows) that one needs to be productive, and it doesn't have enough device/file mappings to be able to truly take advantage of it. Just cause you can do ls doesn't mean you can do du -md 1 | sort -n or dd if=cf_img of=/dev/sdb bs=2k. As an additional kludge, the cmd.exe window is awful for running an editor in and doesn't resize well.
Just because Microsoft provides some of these features doesn't mean it does it well. Truthfully, I think they should give up on the command prompt. they'll never get it right, and remote administration can be done in a web browser anyhow (webmin, anyone?) It's not like they're going to build software remotely as source code is not a popular distrubution method on windows.
Basically, saying that Windows has a command prompt is like saying that linux has direct rendering support. They're both true, but in such useless ways.
Brian
development seems to move at a snail's pace, and let's be frank, it's almost the same as it was back in the good ol' unix days.
/.ers actually give a donation to projects that they use a lot, but don't contribute to? Maybe a poll is in need?
While I love open source, sometimes the fact that it is done for nothing is one of the things that ensures it is developed slowly. Unless you are a full time student, most people are working a day job to put food on the table. Without the cash motivation it is not always easy to spend the time and effort necessary to make a great project. I am not saying the money is what is important to them, though being comfortable, being able to buy a workstation and not living on the street is.
I don't know how many
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
One of the things that has always bothered me about XFree86 in the past 6 years I have used linux is XFree86's kind of lag in new releases... development seems to move at a snail's pace, and let's be frank, it's almost the same as it was back in the good ol' unix days.
Which, together with the license change, is the reason people have given up on xfree86. X.org 6.8 will include all the flashy cool new stuff people have been talking about for years, like translucent goodness a la mac os x.
I for one enjoy X.org and a windowing system that can hopefully be kept up to date and have more active development.
But my question is... how many more forks will we have?
Given that X.org is the original X foundation that has been maintaining the X11 codebase XFree86 split off of, and all the non-xfree86 X projects are now basically working under the X.org umbrella, I wouldn't say that we're seeing all that many forks.
But it wouldn't. Plenty of hardware can't do transparancy, and is used on systems that aren't powerful enough to do the job in software. Besides, it would break the protocol.
People said that fonts would be better served by making font rendering a core part of the system. What do we have today to show for it? A crufty, obsolete, nonextensible set of functions for drawing glyphs on the server side, that no new development uses because Xft/pango/fontconfig work together to do a much better job on the client side.
No one foresaw anti-aliased text, Unicode, truetype fonts, glyphs drawn with an alpha channel, etc. Fortunatly the mechanism that X provides allows a client to use these features without requiring every X server it comes into contact with to be upgraded to X12 or whatever.
If Windows has such a "tight" and "well-designed" GUI, then please, tell me:
1) Why does Luna look like a pre-schooler threw up after eating several crayons?
2) Why do MS Office, MS Visio, and MS Visual Studio all look different (hint: they use different toolkits!)
3) Why does every other Windows apps (Winamp, Windows Media Player, Ephpod, etc, etc) use their own weird-looking skin?
4) Why do the buttons on every single installer (Wise, InstallShield, MSI) all look different?
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