X.org X11 Server Release 6.8

kormoc writes "The developers of X.org have just release the long-desired version 6.8.0. This release brings real translucency and allows one to set values on different windows. Also, nifty drop shadows as well as XDamage, an extention that limits redrawing of windows to only the areas that were damaged. The Xcomposite extention is still not stable, but it works well for some people. Why not give it a shot?"

Comments

not stable ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Xcomposite extention is still not stable, but it works well for some people. Why not give it a shot?"

yeah, a neckshot.

Comeon... since when do unstable, alpha releases need a front-page announcement ? Either send out a call for testers, or stfu about it.

Re:not stable ?

[lrandall]

It's part of a stable X.org release. The unstable extensions are not compiled by default, but they do bear mentioning because they are significant additions to X, and will make huge changes to the eye candy, as well as the utility (eg expose in mac os) of X

Re:not stable ?

[justsomebody]

Longhorn, .NET, WinFS, Avalon, Indigo, Blackomb....???? XP SP2 for 1 year????

If youhaven't realized it, computers are still in pre-alpha stage and all seems that they'll never get out. Either front-page about beta or there's no news

Re:not stable ?

[lanc]

If youhaven't realized it, computers are still in pre-alpha stage and all seems that they'll never get out.

you surely mean x86? That's right.

Re:not stable ?

[justsomebody]

More like Apple and then x86.

btw. I do own 2 OSX computers (besides others, 8 linux, 2 XP, 1 win2000server) and they are far from being what I would expect from polished.

Apple and OSX has far more flaws under its hood than any other OS or hardware. There's just too many flaws.

To name few:
Chooser (Finder - Go - Connect to server) - now sucks.
Network in finder - Ok, where's my other Apple???
Mounted drive - Command I ??? WTF? Where is this share from, I know that it is Appleshare but which computer
Printing - CUPS doesn't support CMYK, so forget to import CMYK profile like you were used in OS9
Safari - Konqueror ripoff without tabs, konqueror sucks
Mail - C'mon, who designed this, and a big flaw with deleting all POP accounts, try it. It managed to disable option of editing new user and always recreating new one
Terminal - try changing fonts, you'll know what I mean
theme sucks - it is a real pain, I can't stand brushed metal but that's just my preference
Window manager - No more rollup??? WTF
FS - God, I love this tracking where's this file in terminal, it's crosslinked to instanity
Netinfo - WTF????
Firewall - Is this a joke???
Monitor support sucks - If I wouldn't have broken 22" Mitsubishi I wouldn't know. When I connected 17" monitor it just blanked when starting system without detecting new monitor. Since this was my main monitor I got fucked, Either one 17" was blanked or the second one was (Didn't detect new, so I removed and hoped it will use second one with its prefs, but OSX used second one with 22" prefs). It was really enjoyable for me to drag another 22" monitor just to change resolution ...

Need more??? Or do you prefer me explaining why Apple hardware sucks???

Re:not stable ?

[franklx]

Yeah, but it's rock-solid. Macs' HW is not a great one, it's the OS that's great. 1. Remember that's a BSD; 2. Proprietary = Support, Opensource = Lot of apps. osx got both. 3. Look 'round for other programs (yes, the terminal sucks, but if you try iTerm you'll never blame - Mail sucks? try Thunderbird - iChat is crappy? try Fire). 4. It's the one OS that REALLY uses the high performance graphics card (Quartz Xtreme is a superb engine). 5. Safari is the fastest web browser outa here (but you can install firefox or camino or mozilla). 6. The priniting engine is very good by the way (what you see is really what you get). 7. Aqua is very exciting, nothing to say. 8. Remember that's a BSD. On a fact you're right: 1. Networking is very crappy (eg. you cannot have persistent smb mounts without external programs) and computer browser is simply stuck. The only thing that really sucks (a lot) is the one-button mouse: under linux (I use GNOME) U really use the 3 buttons (browsing with linux lets you drop the keyboard). However osx is and can be a good example for making Linux the best OS all 'round here: Linux is good, but now misses good video drivers (none of the existing ones is good enough), a consistent set of apps, an unified package management system (cross-distro) and a very good looking ui. But GNOME is on the way (in my opinion kde is very out of the way) and GNOME and Freedesktop guis are doing a great (more... greatest!) work to make it better. Maybe one day linux will have all of this, and will be really better than osx. I didn't mention wxp and others: too crappy, it simply sucks.

Re:not stable ?

[justsomebody]

Yeah, but it's rock-solid

???? We're not from same planet, are we???

1. Remember that's a BSD;

Where's the point??? I worked with *X from SGI Indigo1 days. Not that BSD is anything special

2. Proprietary = Support

Guess you never tried to contact support out of USA

Opensource = Lot of apps. osx got both.

Take from OSS where it suits you and return only what you think it will suit you.

3. Look 'round for other programs (yes, the terminal sucks, but if you try iTerm you'll never blame - Mail sucks? try Thunderbird - iChat is crappy? try Fire).

Yeah, and install fink etc... Isn't easier to install linux???

4. It's the one OS that REALLY uses the high performance graphics card (Quartz Xtreme is a superb engine).

??? And the point is??? Software that uses it still sucks

5. Safari is the fastest web browser outa here (but you can install firefox or camino or mozilla).

Fast??? Where, (on G5) it renders /. page a lot slower than mozilla on my laptop.

6. The priniting engine is very good by the way (what you see is really what you get).

Missed the point. Engine is driven by cups. Cups doesn't support CMYK

7. Aqua is very exciting, nothing to say.

As I said, it is a personal preference only. It is a pain for my eyes

8. Remember that's a BSD.

Your point 1 didn't matter, why would this one???

On a fact you're right: 1. Networking is very crappy (eg. you cannot have persistent smb mounts without external programs) and computer browser is simply stuck. The only thing that really sucks (a lot) is the one-button mouse: under linux (I use GNOME) U really use the 3 buttons (browsing with linux lets you drop the keyboard).
However osx is and can be a good example for making Linux the best OS all 'round here: Linux is good, but now misses good video drivers (none of the existing ones is good enough), a consistent set of apps, an unified package management system (cross-distro) and a very good looking ui. But GNOME is on the way (in my opinion kde is very out of the way) and GNOME and Freedesktop guis are doing a great (more... greatest!) work to make it better. Maybe one day linux will have all of this, and will be really better than osx. I didn't mention wxp and others: too crappy, it simply sucks.

Fact 1. You can connect 3 button mouse on OSX.
Fact 2. OSX sucks
Fact 3. Better than copying OSX, would be dismantle OS9, and take over from there. Apple tried that but screwed major.
Fact 4. Maybe that day is nearer than you think
Fact 5. Unified package managment? Here you step on a nail. Compile applications as static and you can just copy them. People still think too much about small distro software. Look at blender example. Copy and it runs. Firefox, Thunderbird, Openoffice.... Get the point? If app is compiled for unified use then unified use is no problem, if not here goes the trouble with .rpm .deb and dependancies
Fact 6. ATI and NVidia drivers are good, believe me

Re:not stable ?

[franklx]

You cannot say that BSD is not a good OS: it's security and stability centric. Linux misses some of the features BSD has in the network layer (especially in pf), and on the other side Linux have based a lot if its net layer upon the BSD one. The 3-button-mouse should be provided by default not as an optional (what's the meaning of 1 button? it sucks!)! The application I've mentioned doesn't require fink because they're native apps fully integrated with the OS (you simply drag them out from the DMG into the applications folder). Using fink graphical apps still sucks, 'cause they depend on X11 (like gimp, that works at its best on linux). If Linux will have a real aqua theme and it hurts you, you can change it (you can do it also under osx, but it's more difficult). I've compiled for years EVERYTHING myself, so the installation problem is NOT my problem, but is the primary obstacle to linux diffusion: if I write an app I've got to provide rpms, debs, tgzs and ebuilds if I want that everyone can install it - I don't want linux to be only for experts - I want linux for everyone from the 1 year-old child to the 120 years-old people. Linux should be usable from the unix guru to the complete idiot. I don't understand why U don't appreciate some of the features of osx: gnome is basing part of the work on it (just think to spatial nautilus). I do use NVIDIA driver and it's good, but it's NOT at its best -- can be improved -- and nvidia knows this. ATI drivers are released very slowly and in my opinion they have not the quality of the actual nv drivers. OSX is NOT the best, but has features that has to be considered to bring tux at its best. I use Linux everyday for everyday work and I'm convinced that's the best of the bests, but can grow taking the good things of others, osx included.

Re:not stable ?

[franklx]

Looking around I've found this http://harrington.com/QuadReadMe.html Maybe can help.

Re:not stable ?

[justsomebody]

You cannot say that BSD is not a good OS

Never did, all I said is that it is *X, and nothing special for this branch.

BSD has some good sides and some bad sides. Let's say threading model is one of the worst *X implementations

3-button by default?

If you'd be OS9 user, you would believe that this is not true. One button and OS9 was natural, never missed 3 buttons. But OSX and its UI (or UI flaws) does make your comment valid.

I've compiled for years EVERYTHING myself, so the installation problem is NOT my problem, but is the primary obstacle to linux diffusion: if I write an app I've got to provide rpms, debs, tgzs and ebuilds if I want that everyone can install it

Hmmmm, ... again blender, firefox, mozilla, OO.o??? Obviously you didn't read what I responded.

I don't understand why U don't appreciate some of the features of osx

Why??? Ok, here it goes.
I started using my first Mac with OS7, left with 10.0 and was forced to come back with 10.2

Up to now I owned around 20 Macs (3 powerbooks). Now I own 2: G4 1.25 and G5. Both with 10.3

UI before X was strict and clean, everything was specified and respected. With OSX it just seems to me that Apple rushed into first applicable version being developed on few completely different divisions, while on the other side looking OSS where they can fill their gaps. Too much of their efforts has gone to eye candy which made OS inconsistent inside. If your comment about DMG and one install would be true, then applications wouldn't stop working when you upgrade OS for .1 as it does with OSX.

Sorry, but if feelings towards OSX offend you I can't help it. It is as I said. OSX sucks for me (and I always specify that this is my own preference), but you must agree that I at least stand with facts. I loved OS9. UI feel in OSX has just gone down major if you compare it with OS9.

gnome is basing part of the work on it (just think to spatial nautilus)

Actualy that would be OS9. (spatial nautilus, model coresponds to OS9, check mailing list and look what discussions happen there when people want to implement nautilus like OSX finder) and OS9 is something completely different and gnome community is against OSX like finder.

Re:not stable ?

[franklx]

I'm sorry but I have never used os9 (I used os7 years ago), so I can't say much. On the threading implementation U are right, but the rest of OS in very good. Back to apps installation... Mantaining the current structure of the linux filesystem (with /etc /lib /bin /var etc) for many apps packages are necessary -- you cannot simply copy them like you do with firefox or openoffice). By the way firefox needs gtk and friends, so, if a people is not a tech he has to install it, so it needs a package... Please, try to understand me: you cannot say that installing ALL applications is simple under linux... try to install the applications found around... one need wx --- but what version, one need qt --- but the threaded or not threaded one --- one another needs libsomething --- and not everything can be found on something.sourceforge.net or www.something.com. Think that a non expert user never arrives to the... questions!

Re:not stable ?

[justsomebody]

Please, try to understand me: you cannot say that installing ALL applications is simple under linux...

Most of the reason is that people can't let go. Userspace program has nothing to do with the hierarchy you mentioned. Userspace is userspace. Programs that would need to be inserted in system are very rare, near zero count. To tell this to developers is a job for fd.o. They should make specs and those specs should be respected. Just like gnome HIG

But I must admit that wx (ok, python is even worst) example was a real bullseye. Applications needing qt or gtk are just too easy to install. That comes from the one that always uses one widget set only, I like to keep my computer as polished and consistant as possible. My choice was gnome and there's no other software that I use (ok, there's k3b, and hopefully I will find gnome app that will replace it, and OO.o but with 2.0 it will be real gtk app so I don't really count it). Gnome icons, layout (remember not UI feel and design) and simplicity reminds me on OS9. I think we both agree that if OSX would be so great I would use my G5 more. (I'm not some geek dreaming about eye candy I saw on some screenshot, I have 2 of them at home)

Personally, I hate Apple way. Make something up and throw all in face of the users. It will seem like a major change. Ok, it does seem like that. But not everything was carefully planned and checked. Correcting structure that already exists is much harder than carefully implement new one. That's the reason why I love Maya, scribus, inkscape, gnome (remember, I've bought Adobe collections and Quark, but still, whenever I'm not bound to some filetype, I never use them). Everything is just where it is supposed to be and nothing is rushed just to gain some functionality. Example, KDE had features like composite and damage solved internaly for a long time (At least to some point) and that's the reason why redrawing gnome windows and desktop seemed slugish. Now X.Org implemented those and I wonder if old solutions in KDE won't just make doublefeature and slow things down.

Same thing should happen with installer. First on the drawing board then testing and after that implementation. But not sooner than a moment when userspace app is userspace app and system app is system app (With a really thick steel wall between them).

btw. I've got few non-techie friends using fedora. Not even one had one single problem installing anything. They've all been lucky that I keep yum repositories with software and sometimes even respect their wishes. Maybe I should cut them with fedora 3 just to see how they would manage:) That would be probably the best field research. Since FC3 is near, the experiment will soon begin.

Personally, I think that I'm pretty correct when I predict that all troubles you mentioned will be solved in FC5 (One year from now).

And here is a question for you (based on all of my blabbering): Do you like features sonner or better?

Re:not stable ?

[franklx]

Better is better that sooner -- of course! But we are in rush. M$ will release longhorn in a couple of years and osx will evolve in a couple of years too, maybe resolving many of the issues you have mentioned. I don't think that M$ will do a revolution -- xp is too crappy to fix it without a from ground up rewrite :) but linux must be ready to this to do a serious break-in on the desktop systems. Monopoly is very hard to break, but linux have the weapons to do it. In my personal opinion osx and macs will remain a system for a small elite -- not for the masses. Linux can be for the masses but need to be simpler. You're right when you say that FC is great, but in my opinion the change from redhat to fedora core left users and potential users a bit confused (many people doesn't know that FC is an evolution of RH) this fact mustn't be repeated! As I said in my other replies I think that Linux (and GNOME) hackers must look at other OSs to take some inspirations. I've understood the anger in your first post (simply I have never posted my temper about windoze :) ) and my reply wants only to explain you some of the features I hope to see in Tux/GNOME one day, remembering that a feature that linux "clones" simply becomes better: for example think about the linux kernel modules: they give you the advantages of a monolithic kernel with the flexibility of a microkernel -- no other os got this before linux... but this is a single example taken from thousands of other. The thing that linux really misses is fast support for new hardware, bacause of the obtusity of hardware vendors that releases drivers just for the "king of the crap", most of the times we need a good hacker that have to do an enormous work to make it work -- reverse engeneer the hardware to make a favor to the vendor: it's ridiculous! This situation is better in the last years: in a little bit of cases thanks to hardware vendors (like nv and ati), but in all others thanks to the great hackers we have. For example most of the wlan cards today runs on linux thanks to the ndiswrapper driver that emulate the ndis subsystem under linux, but NO native support for now: like as linux is the last wheel of the wagon! Some others SELL, oh my god, SELL DRIVERS for THEIR hardware... it's a scandal! If this situation will change... then... there wouldn't be so many obstacles to linux diffusion. [ :) Sry 4 my english :) ]

but,

[Anonymous Coward]

does it run linux ?

Great.

[uncl_bob]

So now is the time to ditch my DirectFB. Or not.

Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, why?

What is it with drop shadows?

Do they make you appear super l33t h4x0rZ111!11one w00t!!!?

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[julesh]

Really, why?

What is it with drop shadows?

They're something that's easy to define, work well in MacOSX and Windows XP, and don't work very well in (some) current X11 servers. So obviously, you're going to get loads of graphics geeks rushing to fix it.

That said, the drop shadows in KDE on XFree86 look fine to me already.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even read my post?

I said "WHY DO PEOPLE CARE"

I don't care if they look fine or not in KDE, drop shadows are pointless.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Drop shadows aren't that pointless. You can see more depth and focus more easely on the active window this way.
Not all Eye-candy is as useless as it may seem

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[mccalli]

Really, why?...What is it with drop shadows?

They look good.

That's it. No hidden meaning, no technical advantage, no uberl33th@x0r nonesense, nothing about skinning...just straightfowardly it looks good. No deeper explanation exists. Or needs to exist.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, why?...What is it with drop shadows?

They look good.

That's it. No hidden meaning, no technical advantage, no uberl33th@x0r nonesense, nothing about skinning...just straightfowardly it looks good. No deeper explanation exists. Or needs to exist.

Cheers,
Ian


BUT THINK OF TEH CLOCKSYKELS!12!!21

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Draoi]

Personally, I find that dropshadowing allows layered windows to be clearly delineated even if there isn't a thick (read 'wasteful') border around the windows themselves.

I've five iTerms going right now (yeah, MacOS X). They're all the same colour yet I can easily see where they intersect *and* I can see the text below through the shadow. It's an efficiency thing ...

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[julesh]

Did you read mine. I answered in my first paragraph -- they care because its something that Windows & MacOS do better, and because it's easy to fix.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Firstly, I have 2 eyes, so I can already do depth.

Second, without drop shadows, it is really easy to see which window has focus: <img src="http://ratpoison.sourceforge.net/shot2.png"&g t;

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[julesh]

Firstly, I have 2 eyes, so I can already do depth.

2 eyes only help depth perception when the images they see are different; with a standard computer monitor, this isn't the case.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Draoi]

Firstly, I have 2 eyes, so I can already do depth.

That's of zero use on a 2D screen! Close one eye. Spot the difference? Nope, me neither.

Second, without drop shadows, it is really easy to see which window has focus:

Your URL screwed up. Try this. I disagree with the point that drop shadow interferes with focus. Right now, my focussed window has a *deeper* dropshadow than all the others, giving the illusion that it is actually 'closer', not to mention the outlining, title bar colouring, etc, etc

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Anonymous Coward]

But my eyes both see different images of the monitor, so I still get depth perception.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Anonymous Coward]

but there's no depth to percieve you fucking moron. you're looking at a flat image

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[julesh]

Yes. You perceive how far away from you the monitor is.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Anonymous Coward]

but there's no depth to percieve you fucking moron. you're looking at a flat image

But my screen is at an angle, so I can tell that the top is closer than the bottom. Who is teh morron now?

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Morons, morons... hmm, let's count them. People who responded to you, thinking you were serious... that's about 6, at 1/2 each for a total of 3 morons... plus you, for being such a complete waste of oxygen and bandwidth, makes a total of four.

Ah! But! The most important metric, the number of FUCKING morons! That's just one, sir. You. Yes, you, the troll. Get back under your bridge, sir, or I shall be forced to say...

"Billy Goat!"

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Phleg]

Four pixels isn't efficient, it's pedantic.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Anonymous Coward]

At last someone figured I was trolling :-)

10/10 well done.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[FromageTheDog]

I have a Windows XP box on my desk right now; the only drop shadows I see are under the icon text. I'd be hard-pressed to compare that to the (gorgeous) Mac OS X effect or this new X effect... - Fromage

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[archen]

To me drop shadows add a bit more depth and make it slightly easier to determine the active window by giving a perception of which window is 'on top' of the other. It seems to make it a bit more intuitive then just changing the titlebar color.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Enahs]

Using four pixels demonstrates a concern for book learning and formal rules?

Huh?

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[makomk]

Do they make you appear super l33t h4x0rZ111!11one w00t!!!?

Of course that's the reason. I'm currently using Windows 2000 for the first time (don't ask). The menus fade in, and there's a translucent shadow under the mouse cursor. It's totally useless, and probably wastes loads of processor power, but it's really cool-looking

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[essreenim]

As for MACOSX and WinXP, I have no desire to make my Slackware distro more like them. Its going to take more than that. And won't I have to recompile my kernel if I install a new X-server - something I am reluctant to do unless Im testing it. I have no problem helping with testing betas etc but Im going to want to know they are putting in something that useful. If a new ALSA driver comes out that vastly improves my sound experience I want to know but this doesn't sound so great.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[after fallout]

go search for and install yzShadow

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Zephaniah]

no self respecting troll would make such a statement. This is a new troll trolling in on a troll's old troll... uh, hm actually WHO GIVES A FUCK? Hahah, uhh.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[nuOpus]

Actually ... for some people it is practical. After working at the computer for long hours with lots of windows open in the background, corners, sides ... every which way you can stick them ... the windows kind of run together! lol. Shadows around windows allow a window to appear on top making it easier for your eye to pick up the open window.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Directrix1]

You don't have to recompile your kernel.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[diegocgteleline.es]

Its not just that it looks nice. The technology behind it is what matters. The Composite extension for example double-buffers the windows (or something like that, I'm the person to speak about this) so moving your windows is much smoother, and you can notice that even now in this released version, where all those pieces are far from being "rock stable" or "fast". It also allows to have a miniaturized version of your desktop (one which is a _real_ miniaturized version of your desktop, with the miniature of a video player in other virtual desktop being updated, etc) much more easily. Damage can reduce greatly the amount of bandwith used in VNC-like clients, etc.

Shadows and transparencies are just one of the things which you can do with all those toys, but the fact that the pieces behing them are there is what matters, using the hardware to do all this, etc. As a plus, shadows and transparencies are nice (I'd like to have them even in the light window managers at least). I don't know why people is so concerned about "shadows are not useful". This is a win-win situation, no drawbacks.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[arose]

"If the monitor fills your field of vision you are too close."

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[RichiP]

Personally, I think it's easier to tell one window from another, specially on those occassion when you have one obscuring another. The problem with flat windows and widgets is (specially if they're all the same color) that it's not easy to tell where it is in the mess of stuff that's on the monitor. Putting a wide, different-colored border around it usually helps, but that eats up screen real-estate. With drop shadows, you get the advantages of borders to tell you one window (or menu) from another window and yet doesn't "eat" up the space (since whatever's underneath is still viewable).

It doesn't even have anything to do with being elite. In fact, if anything, most hackers nowadays coding on X, Gnome, etc. seem to be very practical and less 31337, as you put it.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Tobias Luetke]

Our brain is trained to do Z sorting by shadows. The sun has been around since we humans where outfitted with these modern brains of ours. If you ask someone who has only one eye of how they work out deph they will tell you it only works well during day light.

Shadows are the single best clue for which window is on top. Additionally they look great. Because there is no doubt which window is in the foreground we can do away with the stupid title bars which where supposed to do this by a color clue.

This means more net space for the window content among many other advantages.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[escher]

"If the monitor fills your field of vision you are too close."

But... but... that's the perfect viewing distance for watching Attak Of Teh Clonez!

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[escher]

You fools! Four is the number of the pixels and the number of the pixels shall be four! Not two! Not three, unless one then proceedeth to four! Five is right out!

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[jekewa]

That's of zero use on a 2D screen! Close one eye. Spot the difference? Nope, me neither.

Hey, when I shut my right eye, the monitor shifts to the left a little, but it doesn't knock over the speaker. And when I shut my left, it moves the other way, but the dust on my desk isn't showing any tracks... Why's that?

Oh, yeah, I agree with you. Don't get me wrong. I could just envision our depth-perception-challenged friends out there griping...

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[caseih]

It's not the drop shadows that I'm looking for. It's the new extensions that make window dragging silky smooth and speed up redraws. Really all these new features actually improve the speed of entire desktop. The drop shadows are a nice touch, however. They really do make a huge difference in the look. I'm also hoping that more and more themes will come out supporting alpha-blended widgets. I get tired of OS X-style gtk themes that have hard, aliased edges on the UI components. Another thing I noticed in the screenshots so far is that no one has made a metacity theme that has alpha-blended edges around the window border. Little improvements like that really do make the system look more professional and more comparable to what people expect a modern UI to look and feel like. No I'm not talking about making the interface more Windows-like or Mac-like.

Clearly these new extensions will make a Linux desktop much more able to actually make it. Some of the extensions are also for accessibility purposes. Screen magnifiers (real-time, not faked), event interception and injection (without using hacks), and other things. Definitely a huge step forward. With accelerated Cairo on the doors, the Linux desktop will be the first vector-based UI period.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's simply astounding! I will now take 12 seconds to re-evaluate my philisophical outlook on life.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Darby]

The sun has been around since we humans where outfitted with these modern brains of ours.

Heathen!!!
Everybody knows the sun has only been around since the Enlightenment. Why do you think they called it that?
And why was it that that followed the *Dark* ages.

Sheesh, some people.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[ultranova]

And won't I have to recompile my kernel if I install a new X-server - something I am reluctant to do unless Im testing it.

No. The kernel and the X server are separate programs.

If a new ALSA driver comes out that vastly improves my sound experience I want to know but this doesn't sound so great.

You know what ALSA does, but claim that you need to recompile the kernel when updating the X server ? My troll sense is tinkling...

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[michrech]

You know what ALSA does, but claim that you need to recompile the kernel when updating the X server ? My troll sense is tinkling...

I'll go get you a mop, then. =]

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Paul d'Aoust]

I second that. It's extremely customisable, and you know what? Drop shadows, although a luxury in some people's minds, really do help you pick out the borders of a window at a glance. I find them incredibly handy for just that reason.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"I have a Windows XP box on my desk right now; the only drop shadows I see are under the icon text."

Try opening up a menu sometime. While I agree that the XP shadows aren't as pretty, there are 3rd party applications that can create the "pretty" drop shadows. The layered window support in Windows since Windows 2000 allows per-pixel alpha to be specified for windows. With the proper graphics drivers, it's even hardware accelerated.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[ChipMonk]

Without denying your humor (yes, I wanna be s00p3r 1337 too), there is a practical sense for having shadows along the bottom and right side (or left side, for RTL languages like Hebrew and Arabic).

The shadow makes visual delineation of the menu much easier, when the menu background color is the same as the color "behind" the menu. Sure, the menus themselves have borders of one or two pixels, but the drop shadow expands that border, increasing visiblity by an order of magnitude.

Have you noticed how The Sims puts the dark cloud behind their pie menu? It's a similar principle: it makes the menu visible, no matter how brightly-colored the scene.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

Regarding your sig: at the time being, it seems goatse.cx is not running on any server. It's been removed "due to lapsed registration or violation of policy".

I wonder what that guy might have come up with to finally break the policy... I guess I better never find out.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks good but shouldn't be a priority. There are lost of better things that should get attention instead of eye-candy...

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[builderbob_nz]

Close one eye. Spot the difference? Nope, me neither

Count yourself lucky, one eye makes things all blurry, the other all wobbly. Given the lenses I have in my glasses to correct this, I have to turn off a lot of these fancy effects. When I think about the fact that I don't particulaly care about not having them (so long as my PC does what I tell it to) I would have to agree with the first question... why?

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey - Listen Carefully!

Its not about drop-shadows at all, although that is the most immediate visual impact. Whats actually been done is that the rendering of the screen has been placed into its own process. Just like X seperates the graphics from the applications and both are seperate from the window manager, we now have a new element.

This new element, the compositing manager, is in charge of creating the final screen from the individual (now, off-screen) bitmaps. This means that fancy effects like shadows and transparency can be done much easier while solving redraw issues (flicker when moving windows around, etc). The new extensions created to make this work, such as XDamage have considerable usage for other applications.

Consider the Mac Expose application for Window Management - great feature. To make this work under X, we'd normally have to raise each Window to get a snapshot of it before creating the thumbnails. With the new extensions, we not only don't have to raise Windows to grab a snapshot, but we can have the snapshots "Live" as we can get on-the-fly updates of the changes and read directly from the off-screen buffers!

We're not talking about adding pretty shadows like some current hacks can do today (ie: KDE), but true desktop-wide image compositing with whatever fancy effects the author chooses to implement. Want your Windows to have smooth anti-aliased edges? Or do fancy anti-aliased animations? Well, its all coming. Expect this first release to be problematic, but after a few revisions, it should really tune up nicely.

Next up will be cleaning up the rendering used by the toolkits. I hear they'll be gluing Cairo into Gnome as a universal back-end renderer instead of the massive kludge of different APIs being used today. PS/PDF output can be done from Cairo, as well as OpenGL based back ends. Its very similar to the PDF specification. However, it doesn't have the problems in Apple's DPDF, and don't give Apple too much credit for DPDF, it used to be DPS on the NeXT. OS X is OpenStep (10 years old). Apple just gave it a face lift and it became one of the most popular OSs around. We're giving X the same face-lift, technology-wise. You choose how much eye-candy you want with it.

The new technology means X innovations are smaller, simpler, more efficient, more features, and more user-friendly. This major change to X is probably the most impressive advancement since DRI integration, and arguably out-classes DRI as well since we all don't have or need 3D OpenGL! Compositing will have dramatic effects for the future.

Thanks,
Evan@CoolRunningConcepts.com

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[mattyrobinson69]

and then there was feasting on the lambs and the sloths...

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know.

-- funny AC guy.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Crazy Eight]

With accelerated Cairo on the doors, the Linux desktop will be the first vector-based UI period.

Damn straight. Cairo + Glitz is a very cool idea. We might also note that Keith Packard wrote a paper suggesting a revamp of the X server/driver model that integrates 2D and 3D ops a la (Arnholt's?) Xati server. XAA disappears and the hardware side of Mesa/DRI occupies that void as the whole thing goes GL (If I understand him correctly). So we could end up with a windowing system that can operate solely off SVG while fully utilizing GPU silicon.

Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm. Why do people care so much about GUI??? What is the X server for?
And what are the computer games for? And OpenOffice.org, and TeX?
It's an excellent news that new x.org 6.8 is out. And that it supports drop shadows and translucency. But it's Your choice: You don't have to have it. Just like with GUI application, X server, OpenOffice.org etc.

Is it as good as Citrix?

[jkrise]

On the bandwidth requirement fromt? Frankly, I don't u'stand why we don't have a good windowing environment atleast half as good as Citrix so far. The X-Damage stuff could be the ticket though.

-

Re:Is it as good as Citrix?

[Anonymous Coward]

NX is as good
http://www.nomachine.com/

Re:Is it as good as Citrix?

[Anonymous Coward]

Citrix has many things that xorg doesn't have, but if you're interested in good BSD/linux terminal services, take a look at tightvnc
All i miss in this solution is audio :(

Re:Is it as good as Citrix?

[listen]

Citrix is a hack.

X may not perform as well, but at least it is designed properly - so you can share per application, or even per window, rather than having a goofy desktop in a window.

The best performing remote desktop solution for X is NX from nomachine. And yes, it does perform better than Citrix.

They have primarily pursued the goofy desktop in a window model as well. But there is nothing in their protocol mandating this : it is merely a limitation of the current client.

Best of all, NX is Free Software released under the GPL. Its a seperate process than the X server, so no legal viruses are going to eat up your nVidia driver.

NX sell a proprietary packaged up version. There is a project called FreeNX aiming to produce a fully Free set of NX tools ; however they appear to be closely allied to KDE, and aim to make it a feature for KDE to lord over Gnome. I hope I'm wrong.

Re:Is it as good as Citrix?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaha because the OTHER half of the people are saying "Why do we have this network bullshit, it just adds bloat and sucks and I never use it, losers!" while demanding drop shadows, transparency, and other junk that doesn't work well over a network and just adds bloat and sucks and won't be used ;)

Re:Is it as good as Citrix?

[Wudbaer]

X may not perform as well, but at least it is designed properly - so you can share per application, or even per window, rather than having a goofy desktop in a window.

What Citrix also can do, at least the per application part (never tried per window). You are thinking of MS's RDP (AFAIK derived from Citrix, but another product).

Re:Is it as good as Citrix?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a project called FreeNX aiming to produce a fully Free set of NX tools ; however they appear to be closely allied to KDE, and aim to make it a feature for KDE to lord over Gnome

Because KDE wants to integrate NX into some of it's parts? I doubt this is due to some agenda by nanomachine but a common interest with the KDE team. It's not like NX doesn't work with ALL X windows applications. I think I'll wait until they explicitly snub the Gnome team (assuming that they are even interested in NX) before I put on my tinfoil hat.

Re:Is it as good as Citrix?

[sanityimp]

They have primarily pursued the goofy desktop in a window model as well. But there is nothing in their protocol mandating this : it is merely a limitation of the current client.

doesnt the nx system really just work as a proxy for standard x communication anyway?

Re:Is it as good as Citrix?

[Perky_Goth]

On the other hand...

Fabian Franz: In fact, our FreeNX implementation is only the last piece of the mosaic. 99,9% comes from NoMachines's GPL/NX components, that we simply use unchanged in FreeNX.
[...}
Kurt Pfeifle: In the last 15 months, there have been servere misunderstandings concerning the whole NX software, which was considered to be "non-Free" by several Open Source developers, just because NoMachine also based its commercial products on top of it.
Without having a deeper look, rejecting NX as "practically unusable, if only the libraries are released under the GPL whereas the NoMachine NX Server remains proprietary". These biases simply overlooked, that a commandline tool was shipped by NoMachine almost from the beginning, including the source code which allowed everyone who was interested to build an completely working NX tunnel.
[...]
Fabian Franz: Our implemementation was intentionally kept simple. It's a simple Bash script...
You are surprised? Yeah, right: FreeNX Server is a Bash script, which glues together GPL library and executable components of NX to a working whole. All that stuff existed for 15 months untouched.
The fact that it is Bash means that every Linux developer can fix errors in our FreeNX server. ;-)
Kurt Pfeifle: I was merely a mentor for the FreeNX development and I do the documentation. But I can confirm: Fabian isn't lying... ;-)
FreeNX consists of less than 500 lines of Bash code (additionally to the NoMachine/NX source code parts, which are under the GPL).
Fabian did the implementation of the FreeNX server all by himself. First of all, Fabian is a true Bash wizard.
Secondly, this implementation should prove how "complete" the GPL components of the NX are already since 15 months.

So, i'd be guessing anyone from Gnome can code that up in a couple of days as well, there really isn't a whole lot of magic here.

Re:Is it as good as Citrix?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree NX is amazing project - my only complain is about authentication procedure on the server* side. ...however they appear to be closely allied to KDE

That's because the guys who re-discovered NoMachine software only recently are kde-ones. They just want also the client* to play nicely as a kpart and a kio. NX protocol is more-less heavy-duty caching and compressing of X protocol.

Big thanks goes to NoMachine!

* NoMachine uses terms client / server reversed to XWindows terminology: Application is running on a server, displayed on a client.

Re:Is it as good as Citrix?

[Zephaniah]

"Why the hell do I have fans?"

Come now, no need to be coy about it. There's 3 little words in there that will say exactly what you want.

I have fans.
Now THAT'S the plum line! ;)

Re:Is it as good as Citrix?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're kidding, right? Are you seriously braindamaged enough to think that using VNC running on a *nix machine which is running X is more effecient than just running an X server on your local machine and using XDCMP?

Has everything I just said totally gone over your head? All signs point to yes, I'm afraid.

Re:Is it as good as Citrix?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because the guys who re-discovered NoMachine software only recently are kde-ones. They just want also the client* to play nicely as a kpart and a kio. NX protocol is more-less heavy-duty caching and compressing of X protocol.

That doesn't make any sense. Something like NX should be transparent to whatever toolkit is running on top of it. However, the KDE project does have a habit of tying things into its infrastructure (and Qt) for no good reason (it was GNOME hackers who setup and did all the heavy lifting for freedesktop). Maybe I'm wrong, but history suggests otherwise.

Re:Is it as good as Citrix?

[Marlor]

On the bandwidth requirement fromt? Frankly, I don't u'stand why we don't have a good windowing environment atleast half as good as Citrix so far. The X-Damage stuff could be the ticket though.

Just compress the X connection with NoMachine's NX. I've been using the GPLed NX components to access my home desktop from work (over a dialup connection) for the past 6 months, and it works great. I recommend that you give it a shot if you require a low-bandwidth X connection.

Re:Is it as good as Citrix?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have my own "FreeNX" solution that I have been using for more than 6 months. It is a simple Bash script of 30 lines, that works well with my Gnome desktop.

AH

Word fp

[Anonymous Coward]

first post

Gentoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo users may have access to it first, but will they be the first to be able to run it? Teeheehee!

(Take it as a joke, gentoo fans...)

Re:Gentoo!

[IdleTime]

I accept it as a joke :)

When that is said, the latest release, the 904 drop, compiled in 21 minutes on my machine and has been running perfectly fine for a few days. Ofcourse, I'm running an AMD64 based machine. Your "joke" is actually true if you run a P1 160Mhz box, then it will take weeks to compile ...

Re:Gentoo!

[huge colin]

I run Gentoo, and I've had the Composite extension working to some extent since RC2. As of RC4, it works more or less perfectly and X is just about as fast as without it.

Future enhancements to various window managers and applications should take advantage of these new X features. (xcompmgr and transset are clumsy utilities intended only for proof-of-concept.) For example, KDE's feature plan notes that true transparency has already been implemented in Konsole.

Runs shadows/transparency smoothly:

GeForce FX 5900

Athlon XP 2000+

--Colin

Re:Gentoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it wont take weeks to compile. Its called distcc ;-) works wonders on pathetic slow ass machines.

Re:Gentoo!

[Svennig]

Out of interest, where there any hoops you had to jump through to get XOrg to compile on the AMD64 platform?

Re:Gentoo!

[FreeUser]

Out of interest, where there any hoops you had to jump through to get XOrg to compile on the AMD64 platform?

I run Gentoo at home on an Athlon XP, dual Athlon MP, powerbook 17", and an AMD64 box, as well as at work on everything from old Pentium 2/400s to dual Opteron 246s. Xorg is now the default xserver on all those platforms. No special hoops required: 'emerge xorg-x11' is all that is required. With my Nvidia card I use nvidia's 64bit binary-only drivers, with the others, I use the free ATI drivers and dri (I have older ATI 9100 cards).

I haven't yet tried to emerge xorg 6.8.0 (still awaiting the ebuild to do so), but I suspect all that will be required is adding 'x11-base/xorg-x11 ~amd64' to my /etc/portage/package.keywords file (the ~amd64 means it is marked experimental ... when it is deemed 'stable' it will become amd64, sans the tilde) and running the exact same command (emerge xorg-x11).

My experience with installing difficult software, such as cinelerra, transcode, etc. is that, in all the distributions I've used over the years (and I've used most of the big ones), gentoo's portage makes installation by far the easiest. Of course, the downside is the installation time ... compilation takes time, especially on slower boxes. However, current 64bit architectures are fast enough that it doesn't matter, and in a couple of years, compilation will probably be comparable to binary installation speeds of today.

Re:Gentoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

provided you have more than one pathetic slow ass machine

Re:Gentoo!

[karniv0re]

...gentoo's portage makes installation by far the easiest.

I have to pipe up and say that SuSE's YAST is really pretty simple as well. Unfortunately, it's not quite on the bleeding edge as a search for xorg turns up no results.

If I had the time, I would be doing the Gentoo thing. For now, I'll stick with my time-saver, SuSE.

Re:Gentoo!

[supun]

emerge distcc
distcc-config --set-hosts "192.168.1.1 192.168.0.2 192.168.0.n"
USE='distcc' MAKEOPTS='-j254' emerge x11-base/xorg-x11 :)

(yeah, it's missing little steps )

Re:Gentoo!

[Dave2 Wickham]

SuSE packages for Xorg are kept here, in the supplementary section.

Re:Gentoo!

[Curtman]

MAKEOPTS='-j254'

That might be fine if you've got 254 CPU's running distcc. Otherwise its just stupid.

WoW!

[nKBit]

I've been waiting for the release for such a long time, finally!!

I am going to install it once there is ebuild available in the gentoo portage!

Re:WoW!

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG!! Happy day day for linux users! Drop shadows and transparency!?!? That is so amazing!! I've never seen any other OS do that! OMG!!

Release notes

[lphuberdeau]

For those who like to have more details: http://freedesktop.org/~xorg/X11R6.7.0/doc/RELNOTE S.html Sounds like a nice release to me. Now I only have to wait for Gentoo to update portage.

Re:Release notes

[dJOEK]

I think you mean http://freedesktop.org/~xorg/X11R6.8.0/doc/RELNOTE S.html

as in 6.8.0

Re:Release notes

[wackysootroom]

Wouldn't that be the release notes for the older 6.7.0 release and not the new 6.8 release?

Re:Release notes

[ferratus]

That's the 6.7.0 release notes For the new release, you might want to check this link instead.

Fist post?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes!

"Why not give it a shot?"

[Anonymous Coward]

I run XFree, you insensitive clod

Re:"Why not give it a shot?"

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an ATI gfx card, and thank's to ATI's dedication to their Linux drivers and X.org I won't be seeing any drivers supporting even half of these new features within the next decade.

In another 5 years, I might have support for basic features of my 2 years old Radeon. Yay.

real translucency has been in X for years

[Anonymous Coward]

...in japan.

Re:real translucency has been in X for years

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I thought this was in the Sovjet Russia?

Or you were maybe thinking of the translucent guys after one of these nuclear accidents in Japan?

Re:real translucency has been in X for years

[LilMikey]

No, in Soviet Russia X.Org sees through you.

first dicks

[Anonymous Coward]

do i fail it?

Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope this finds it way into Debian soon...

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes in perhaps 5 years time, they skipped Xfree 4.4 so why not skip this as well :)

Re:Debian

[sxpert]

yeah, will be in debian in a couple of years

Re:Debian

[SnowZero]

It should, now that X developers can work with package maintainers rather than having an establishment work against them (the XFree86 way). Yay for more code and less politics.

Previous long lead times, according the Brandon (Debian's X release manager) were brokenness on some of the platforms Debian supports about which the developers in power didn't care, as well as reams of patches they wouldn't accept (like ones from ATI supporting "new" cards that weren't accepted after 6 months).

The whole point of FreeDesktop was to help everyone coordinate so that the process could be smoother. Most of the poeple on both sides were fed up with the politics and are working to make that the reality now.

Re:Debian

[l3v1]

Quoting from one of Daniel Stone's on debian-x list in may this year:
Changing stuff like this around (mainly, all the package renames, as well as a mass patch rediff) within Debian is actually really quite difficult, and very, very unlikely to be allowed to happen before sarge's release.

I'll leave it you to draw consequences. All I know is that news was spread Sarge will come around september this year (on debianplanet on aug.2), but then again: Debian releases when it is time. (from debian.org)

Anyways, since I'm a long-ago Debian man, I also hope X.org will come to us soon.

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

They skipped XFree 4.4 for legal reasons, like everyone else.

Re:Debian

[gmf]

Damn, that was my first thought, too. And you mod this as funny? You're so invidious ;)

Re:Debian

[fred3666]

For now, Debian is tied to their heavily patched xFree86 4.3

They have stated that they will not move to x.org until the modular version is available. Apparently it would take a lot of work to modify assumptions made in the apt-get respositories and they don't feel that the current release of x.org justifies the effort. Debian does acknowledge, however, that x.org is the future.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-x/2004/05/msg0043 1. html

I am making the assumption the x.org's X11R6.8 is still a part of the monolithic tree.

More information here:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-x/2004/06/ms g00084. html

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anybody made a prediction on the release date of the modular version?

Re:Debian

[Greyfox]

Hmm, I don't suppose X.org uses a directory tree that's easily distinguished from Xfree86? It'd be nice if I could just grab the source packages, compile them and not have to worry about clobbering the Debian-installed Xfree86 or having Debian clobber your x.org setup next time you do an apt-get upgrade.

Re:Debian

[JohnFluxx]

I don't follow debian development at all..

but at a random guess, it seems likely that they are holding off until the impending release.

Re:Debian

[Fenris Ulf]

Not this release, but one of the ideas for X11R7 is to move everything from /usr/X11R6/* to /usr/* where it belongs.

Re:Debian

[Dacmot]

Forget it man. You won't find X.org in debian for another 10 years!

Re:Debian

[tyrione]

I'll leave it you to draw consequences. All I know is that news was spread Sarge will come around september this year (on debianplanet on aug.2), but then again: Debian releases when it is time. (from debian.org)

What you are looking for is, "I'll leave it up to you to draw conclusions."

Re:Debian

[Curtman]

Howto install Xorg-cvs without breaking your existing Xorg/Xfree86 install

Taken from the channel topic of #xorg on freenode. Also note the "Contrary to Slashdot's opinion, 6.8 is not quite out"

This is cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm..yeah...XFree86 die die....

X.org is a good thing....yeah...bring on the Aqua-like eye candy I say.

composite rules!

[linuxpoweredtrekkie]

I installed this from cvs yesterday. The new composite extension amazing, full shadows and transparency possible, yet everything renders faster than i've ever seen X, no flicker whatsoever.

In order to use the composite extension i had to add:

Section "Extensions" Option "Composite" "Enable" EndSection

and
Option "RenderAccel" "true"
to my nvidia driver section of my xorg.conf file

then install xcompmgr to turn it on since kwin doesn't utilise it yet.

Re:composite rules!

[blahbooboo2]

The above message is eactly why Linux on the desktop will be a while. I have used linux for almost 10 years. I love it for servers, but it's exactly this type of thing that continually keeps me away from using it as my desktop. Tweak this, change this hidden setting etc to get decent windowing performance. Why is it that Linux always seems to run slower GUI then MS Windoz out of the box? Normal users will never do this type of moding to get decent GUI performance. Heck, I don't even want to do this type of thing, and I don't! lol :) But kudos to you guys who like this stuff, I am glad this is available for you tweakers with time on your hands :)

Re:composite rules!

[dpilot]

Maybe after people like linuxpowertrekkie have fooled with the new extension for a bit, and it's established as *solid*, then Xorg will turn it on by default. I won't argue that it takes some time, and it's behind. But it's also progressing.

Sometimes it's more difficult being able to see behind the curtain, and see the painful aspects of progress happening than it is to have the curtain suddenly pulled aside, and see a 'technology demo' or a 'release candidate' in full action.

Re:composite rules!

[blahbooboo2]

Hey mods, that was not Flamebait. Geesh, bunch of idiots.

God forbid you DISAGREE with the mantra LINUX is great no matter what!

Re:composite rules!

[IamTheRealMike]

It was flamebait, as you clearly haven't understood the principle that operating system component releases are different to operating system releases. I haven't had to tweak any X configuration file for a long time now, thanks to the Red Hat/Fedora config tools. I have no doubt that when I upgrade to FC3 this will all be set up automatically. That's what a distribution does, right?

Re:composite rules!

[blahbooboo2]

ok, i can see your view. Perhaps the comment was mis-placed for this article, but the concept was SOUND.

Why is it I take the SAME exact machine and place Fedora/Debian/Mandrake and it runs SLOWER out of the box then using Windoze?

Perhaps I am just an idiot since I don't want to go about tweaking things to get them fast etc out of the box, right?

Re:composite rules!

[cortana]

If you read the release notes, you would see that the composite extension is disabled by default because it is still experimental. Once it is finished, it will be turn on by default.

Re:composite rules!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it I take the SAME exact machine and place Fedora/Debian/Mandrake and it runs SLOWER out of the box then using Windoze?

Maybe you should just try running one version of Linux at once instead of all three?

Yeah, it's a facetious comment but you strike me as a whiney little fuck who is overly fond of using CAPITAL LETTERS to get across his point THAT MUST NOT BE IGNORED!!!

Re:composite rules!

[IamTheRealMike]

Well, there are a lot of reasons.

The first, and biggest reason (as far as I know) is that modern Linux widget toolkits are doing a lot more work than the Windows widget toolkit is.

For instance, full UTF-8/unicode rendering support combined with containment based layout, along with stock clipart using an alpha channel which is all double buffered simply requires more CPU time than a positional based toolkit which doesn't really support alpha-blended images (or indeed, stock artwork at all), flickers constantly and whos i18n support is patchy at best.

These are features which are useful and you don't want to lose. They make the GUI look great due to having professional artwork, smooth when resizing (internally), support users from all cultures and mean that resizable windows which react properly to font size changes are the norm not the exception like on Windows.

There are other issues. The focus of most Linux developers has not been optimization as of yet, as development effort has been concentrating on filling in the missing pieces (like HAL) and on catching up with the competition (this sort of X work). As an example I think Xrender and therefore font renderning had some serious bottlenecks until recently. There are a few notable exceptions. Soeren Sandmann for instance has been working on optimizing Linux graphics and GTK for some time now, and has been doing a great job.

Then there are scheduling/kernel issues. Con Kolivas mentioned some issues with respect to scheduling lately, I forget exactly what, but he seemed to think some change in the X server could allow the 2.6 scheduler to do a much better job. Also last time I checked the kernel did not expose vertical retrace intervals to the X server.

Finally there are issues within the toolkits themselves. GTK+ seems to really suck at rapidly responding to Expose events. I'm not sure why. However on COMPOSITE enabled machines this isn't an issue as everything is double-buffered at the server level anyway so time taken to react to Expose events isn't a factor. Just try the new distros if/when they come out with compositing enabled - they will feel a lot faster due to this change alone, assuming you have enough memory.

Re:composite rules!

[wagemonkey]

Why is it I take the SAME exact machine and place Fedora/Debian/Mandrake and it runs SLOWER out of the box then (sic) using Windoze?

It may depend upon quite what you mean.
Are you comparing a linux install you've done yourself with a Windows installation that came pre-installed? A lot of the fiddling and adjustments for Windows is done by the OEM.
When I have to install Windows it ususally takes longer than a linux install on the same box - both elapsed and my attention required. Windows needs about ten reboots and a few CDs (os+drivers) for a basic install before any office or dev tools go on. With SuSE its ten minutes booting the DVD and configuring the install, then everything including three different types of kitchen sink is installed and working while I do something else.

Linux isn't perfect but I don't blame 'linux' for the newest hardware not always being supported - it's not a technical problem if manufacturers don't support linux but it is a royal pain. I would like to be able to use my Stylus Photo R300 in linux one day - it would be one less reason to have Windows.

Re:composite rules!

[blahbooboo2]

LOL! WOW, YOU're RIGHT!lol

Re:composite rules!

[blahbooboo2]

Thanks for the nice response :) I was not trying to flamebait, or whine. Just ask a real honest question.

This was interesting.

Also, I was talking about both OEM and normal Windoze installs L(

Re:composite rules!

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Slower in what context? Gnome vs KDE vs the Windows DE? If you want a faster destop, you can use Fluxbox, XFCE, etc. A heavyweight DE takes serious resources, if you wanna play, you gotta pay.

I partially agree with your statement about not needing to tweak services, when I installed FC2 recently there was a boatload of unnecessary services (which are part of the base install) running by default. On the other hand, if you choose to install a server (Apache, Postfix, etc) running the service by default is only logical. Hey, if you didn't want to run it, why did you install it? :)

Re:composite rules!

[CaptnMArk]

For me, one thing that is unusably slow in xorg composite is window resizing or maximization. It needs to be much faster to be usable.

Other than that, seems to work ok.

(not running latest version yet)

Re:composite rules!

[shutdown -p now]

Windows XP does support alpha-blended images. Ever noticed those neat icons in My Computer have antialiased edges?

Furthermore, you can get alpha-blending on anything starting from Win98 if you use GDI+, but that one is really slow.

Re:composite rules!

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed this from cvs yesterday. The new composite extension amazing, full shadows and transparency possible, yet everything renders faster than i've ever seen X, no flicker whatsoever.

It's a great illusion. Of course, since it has to render everything to an off-screen buffer first, it's actually slower than X was running without it (at least for the foreground window). (I believe if you try running some benchmarks under X they'll tell you the same thing.) But because there's no flicker, it appears faster.

In Soviet Russia...

[tewmten]

.. the software shoots you!!

Why not give it a shot?

Re:In Soviet Russia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, where is this guys +5? Using tired, repeated jokes is like an instant +5 on Slashdot

Re: In Soviet Russia...

[Black Parrot]

> .. the software shoots you!!

> > Why not give it a shot?

Aaaiiieeeee! Top-posting makes its debut on Slashdot! [head explodes, intarweb collapses]

Re: In Soviet Russia...

[Jesus_666]

Damn. And I thought we were safe from it...

Aaaiiieeeee! Top-posting makes its debut on Slashdot! [head explodes, intarweb collapses]

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

We do announce releases of windows... so...

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I love these MS jokes. They never get old. This is why when I'm in the basement and Mom yells down "What are you always laughing for?" (cause slashdot has tons of these jokes, no matter what the subject). "Are you drunk?" I have to say "No Mom, I just watched a clip of a guy getting hit in the groin with a dolphin." That way I still look cool by laughing at non-techie things. LOL!!!

first "emerge it" post

[Anonymous Coward]

gentoo users will just emerge it.

thanks.

Re:first "emerge it" post

[Kynde]

why emerge it if you don't have place to submerge it?

Re:first "emerge it" post

[SnowZero]

"A man alone in the forest talking to himself and no women around to hear him. Is he still wrong?"

No, he's just waiting for Gentoo to compile X11.

Re:first "emerge it" post

[shutdown -p now]

It was OpenOffice, you insensitive clod!

Re:Wrong link- try this one

[bach37]

Here for 6.8.0.

Gentoo fans

[barcodez]

If you want to find out when it is available in portage without sync then check the portage database

Re:Gentoo fans

[Anonymous Coward]

Or go straight to the CVS!

Re:Gentoo fans

[Stevyn]

I guess you were trying to be informative, but I think any gentoo user who got their system up and running in the first place knows how to update xorg. However, as of right now 6.8 isn't in there. Only a hardmasked 6.7.99.904 version.

Re:Gentoo fans

[Anonymous Coward]

Er yea, but I imagine there's some Gentoo users who just sit there typing "emerge sync" waiting the ebuild to show up on their computer. His suggestion was to save them (and the servers) that trouble.

Re:Gentoo fans

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're an idiot.

However, as of right now 6.8 isn't in there. Only a hardmasked 6.7.99.904 version.

Durr, that couldn't be what the frikkin' post was telling you how to discover, could it? naaah.

Double standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsft releases SP2, apparently adversley affects a few computers, Slashdot readers claim WTF, typical M$ releasing buggy software.

X.Org release a piece of software that "works well for some people", Slashdot readers claim "Sounds like a nice release for me".

I claim, WTF, typical OS buggy software.

Re:Double standards

[955301]

No, there is no double standard. You're looking at the wrong metric. Microsoft charges for their software. I've never in my life cut a check to X.Org (although I shall soon - and decide how much myself).

When a company charges for a product or service and it is defective, you try to return it, report the bug, and complain about the problem on discussion groups.

When a volunteer gives you a product for free and it is defective, you let the person know what's wrong, offer to retest it if they try to fix it, and if you have any time & talent to draw on, you offer to fix the problem and send in a patch. You NEVER, EVER complain. The worst you have the right to say is "I hope they take care of it in the next release".

Other than that, in response to your last sentence, on behalf of everyone whose ever given software away for free, STFU.

Re:Double standards

[SnowZero]

SP2 is mostly needed pain to enable security by default, so I don't understand people's beef with it beyond download size. As far as double standards however: There's a difference between a new feature that doesn't always work, and breaking existing stuff. As far as has been reported there's nothing broken in the new X system unless you turn on experimental stuff yourself.

This is kind of how I wouldn't expect the longhorn betas to have a 100% functional Avalon or WinFS, but I'd be annoyed if a later patch caused random simple programs to stop running.

Re:Double standards

[elleomea]

"X.Org release a piece of software that "works well for some people", Slashdot readers claim "Sounds like a nice release for me"."

No. X.Org release a piece of software that includes some experimental extensions which may not work correctly for all users (hence them being experimental). Also, these extensions are switched off by default.

Re:Double standards

[Anonymous Coward]

By that logic, you can't complain to a virus author that his program wrecked your machine, because he gave it to you for free.

Re:Double standards

[Megaweapon]

When a volunteer gives you a product for free and it is defective, you let the person know what's wrong, offer to retest it if they try to fix it, and if you have any time & talent to draw on, you offer to fix the problem and send in a patch. You NEVER, EVER complain. The worst you have the right to say is "I hope they take care of it in the next release".

It depends on the software. I'm not pointing at X.Org, but with some software people certainly do have the right to complain if they are "promised" l33t code by some egotistical basement hacker to perform some task, and the code turns out to be shit. You're also limiting the userbase to those who know how to code, but this isn't reality. Face it, if you write and give away software that doesn't deliver what is promised you will hear complaints. I'm having various problems with a particular package (I won't name names), the developer is being a dick, and I'm too busy to go in and try to fix the problem myself. If anything I reserve every right to complain about said developer being an asshole. For all those who will throw out a "STFU" to the userbase you may get some "STFU"'s back. May or may not be fair, but that's reality.

Re:Double standards

[Jesus_666]

The worst you have the right to say is "I hope they take care of it in the next release".

No. You can hope that the next release will fix <insert bug/problem here>. If you can't patch the thing yourself that is all you can do, apart from reporting the bug/problem.
What you can't do is to expect them to fix it. They have no obligation to do so.

So, if you say "I hope they'll take care of it" and mean it like you said it, there's nothing wrong with that. If you actually mean "I expect those lazy bums to fix my problem, even though I never paid them for their product", yes, that justifies a big STFU.

Re:Double standards

[955301]

No, you're wrong on two fronts. First, the virus is working correctly by wrecking the machine, so my original response doesn't apply. Second, I didn't accept the virus, it was surrupticiously installed on my computer.

Stabbing me with a knife isn't the same as having a table of them and saying I can have one if I choose.

Re:Double standards

[huge colin]

Overruled. That isn't the same at all. A virus author is very clearly intending his software to be malicious (whereas the X.org developers are doing anything but that), and you also get viruses (virii?) by accident -- never intentionally.

I don't recall ever installing an X server by accident.

--Colin

Re:Double standards

[955301]

Take another look; I'm not limiting the userbase to those who code. I said "if you have any time & talent". It doesn't take programming skills to retest, i.e., rerun the app and see if the problem is still there.

You might not like how the developer is behaving under the pressure, and you might complain, but can you seriously say you are in the right to do so, since you haven't paid him a Peseta to work on the project? If you don't have time yourself, and you won't pay him for the feature, try saying this to yourself, "I hope he takes care of it in the next release".

Promises are broken all the time. Sourceforge is full of stalled projects which would have been very beneficial. Most of them are from people who had good intentions.

And the STFU was directed to one person, so don't take it personally unless you are one in the same.

Re:Double standards

[Megaweapon]

It doesn't take programming skills to retest, i.e., rerun the app and see if the problem is still there.

Depends on the user. Ever work on a helpdesk? Ever spend a solid 4 minutes trying to explain to a user that "to compose an email you need to click on the 'Compose' link" (web-based email). Not everyone can even grasp a general interface, much less have the foresight to do any sort of "testing" if they run into a problem.

You might not like how the developer is behaving under the pressure, and you might complain, but can you seriously say you are in the right to do so, since you haven't paid him a Peseta to work on the project?

Why not in some cases? Not all developers are working "under pressure". Like you mentioned there are plenty of dead SourceForge projects sitting out there. They may have had good "intentions" but it takes more than that. I'm simply saying that there are some hackers out there that turn into brazen assholes if you even dare suggest that there is either a design flaw or that their code isn't all that clean. BTW, since when does the right to complain only come with the exchange of money? Joe Hacker has just the same right to ignore Bob User as Bob User has the right to complain. Complaining is just vocalizing an opinion. Said opinion may be nothing but useless whining (I hear it at times as well), but I don't buy the notion that there is no "right" to do it until money is exchanged.

Re:Double standards

[Anonymous Coward]

good job repeating exactly what the parent said

Re:Double standards

[955301]

Please, please please go back and read what I wrote. I said "can you seriously say you are in the right", not "you don't have the right". Everyone can complain about anything, but only some people are right^H^H^H^H^Hcorrect in doing so. And it's not just exchange of money. It's money, time, talent or retesting.

Like I said. If you continue reading by keyword ("right", "money", "complain"), I expect your next response to say it's ridiculous to suggest that all development projects be compensated in Pesetas!

Re:Double standards

[Megaweapon]

What may not seem "correct" to the developer may seem correct to the user, and vice versa.

I expect your next response to say it's ridiculous to suggest that all development projects be compensated in Pesetas!

All compensation is voluntary unless required by contract. 'nuff said.

Great News, but...

[wackysootroom]

Wouldn't it be better to wait until X.org makes a press realease about this? That way, they can prepare for the onslaught of downloads. I seem to remember a version of FreeBSD being announced too early on /. that wasn't really a release.

How about waiting until X.org announces it? Until then, it's just a directory of files on an FTP server.

Re:Great News, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think Xorg should be afraid for this, 99% of the Xorg/XFree users will wait till their distro have a package for them or a whole newdistro release with it.

Screenshots

[makkverk]

Dropshadow screenshots
http://ruinaudio.com/Xorg-xcompmgr.png
http://jserv.sayya.org/misc/matchbox-gcin.png
http://jserv.sayya.org/misc/matchbox-xcomposite4.p ng
http://img3.exs.cx/img3/6458/screen_lynucs_1759409 500411796a9ba106_1.jpg

Translucency screenshots
http://freedesktop.org/~mallum/argb.png
http://freedesktop.org/~krh/Screenshot.png

Re:Screenshots

[mc_barron]

Man, I wish there was a way to identify all the components within a screenshot - too many times I see an amazing linux desktop but have no idea what applications are running to get it looking that way.

For instance, where did they get this kicker bar:
http://img38.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img38&image=screen_ lynucs_1759409500411796a9ba106_1.jpg

Also, will drop shadows and tranlucency work with any windows manager (i.e. XFCE4), or do I have to be running Gnome/KDE?

Re:Screenshots

[urmensch]

For instance, where did they get this kicker bar:

I'm not sure but I think that's engage for e17

Re:Screenshots

[WeiszNet]

I believe the kicker bar is a gdesklet applet. You can find it here

Re:Screenshots

[Anonytroll]

That is no Kickerbar, it is called "Engage" and part of E17, downloadable via their CVS as seperate project.

Re:Screenshots

[p3d0]

Isn't that transparency, rather than translucency? I can clearly see images beneath the windows in question.

Re:Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe they got it from Apple, or at least all the ideas and the graphics.

Re:Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want a MacOSX like replacement of KDE's Kicker, take a look at www.kde-look.org in the Karamba section. There are a lot of implementations, but none of them has all the functionality of the original kicker.

Re:Screenshots

[Jugalator]

I'd rather have the drop shadows directed than equal at all borders, like a light would be directly on top of the window. It makes them look more "sunk" into the desktop than having a drop shadow. But that's just a nitpick of course. :-)

Re:Screenshots

[archen]

You can get pretty close to this already in KDE 3.2 by default. Set kicker to the center, set the width to 0% (to scale with icons). Set the grab handles and other stuff to hide or remove them. Then set the panel transparency to whatever makes you happy. After that it's just a matter of icons.

Re:Screenshots

[xcomputer_man]

The window management is Enlightenment running the new default Winter theme.

The kicker bar is Engage, an OS X docker clone based on the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. It is NOT a gdesklet, and it performs a lot better and smoother than that one. As you can see, he is running Enlightenment and drop shadows work fine, so the answer to your last question is yes.

Re:Screenshots

[Huge Pi Removal]

Mods... that's not funny. It's true.

What they *don't* get from Apple (and what gives me a headache every time I use Windows) are the fonts. Beautiful windows and icons with crappy fonts in/under them makes for a hideous visual experience. Why does no-one get this?

Re:Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean more like http://www.student.itn.liu.se/~erisv779/xorg.jpg ?

I edited xcompmgr.c
Look for variabels "shadowRadius", "SHADOW_OFFSET_X" and "SHADOW_OFFSET_Y".

Re:Screenshots

[DAldredge]

It also looks kind of like a higly graphical CDE 'task/whatever it's called bar'.

Re:Screenshots

[gnu-generation-one]

"Translucency screenshots
http://freedesktop.org/~mallum/argb.p ng
http://freedesktop.org/~krh/Screenshot.png"

Presumably someone will be developing window decorations for the "nearly all transparent" windows so that you can control them without having max.min.close buttons lying around the edge of a transparent non-window?

(Yes I know this isn't an X problem, it will just make KDE, WindowMaker, etc. look weird if any of these transparent clocks and characters actually get used, with their fully-opaque titlebars hanging on the screen like a rolled window...)

Re:Screenshots

[Harry8]

Hmmm...
The way the words are used in computer graphics seems to be:

Transparency. This is what X presently does and I have with gnome-terminal. I can see my desktop wallpaper underneath my terminal. I put a terminal on top in the middle of my web browser, I can see my dekstop image.

Translucency: OSX has this, and now X.org. You can see another application beneath the one on top, not just your destop.

Is it English? Well, computerese rarely is...

Re:Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow - +5, Informative for reposting the exact same screenshot links that were in the ARTICLE SUMMARY in the previous XOrg article HERE ON SLASHDOT!

They're still on the front flipping page of developers.slashdot.org for crying out loud!

Mods. On. Crack.

Re:Screenshots

[Kethinov]

More screenshots I've seen:

http://home.centurytel.net/jacob002/xorg-mplayer.j pg
http://home.centurytel.net/jacob002/metacity-compo sitor.png
http://home.centurytel.net/jacob002/skippy-xd.jpg
http://albin.abo.fi/~jfors/images/saya-20040830-1. png
http://members.arstechnica.com/x/ioslipstream/milk shot.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~amsilveira/screenshots/08 -27-04bg.jpg
http://www.rpi.edu/~penwan/ss-20040829.png
http://home.pacbell.net/elomire/screenshot.png
http://thorin.battleaxe.net/~prototyped/kde33.png
http://members.arstechnica.com/x/treatment/Screens hot-14.jpg
http://home.centurytel.net/jacob002/xorg-glxgears. png
http://www.arslinux.com/~jorge/screenshots/xorg.pn g
http://home.centurytel.net/jacob002/xorg-transvide o.jpg

Re:Screenshots

[jovlinger]

There was this great window manager theme years ago, likely for an early enlightenment, which made all the windows look as if they were sunken into a surgical chrome desktop. Very pretty. Didn't work too well for overlapping windows, tho.

I've long since forgotten the name.

Re:Screenshots

[Curtman]

Also, will drop shadows and tranlucency work with any windows manager (i.e. XFCE4), or do I have to be running Gnome/KDE?

Yes, I'm using e16 and everything works as advertised. As far as I know, no window manager supports Xcomposite natively yet. There is a tiny application in Xorg CVS called transset that you can use to set transparency on windows in the meantime. But you also need xcompmgr to enable Xcomposite first, since its disabled by default until it is ready for prime time.

Re:Screenshots

[Curtman]

I'd rather have the drop shadows directed than equal at all borders, like a light would be directly on top of the window

That is just the simplistic way that they are enabled in the demo application. Xcomposite allows you to set the shadow's width, offset, and even its transparency as well. Right now it looks like xcompmgr has those values hard coded to

int shadowRadius = 12;
#define SHADOW_OPACITY 0.75
#define SHADOW_OFFSET_X (-shadowRadius * 5 / 4)
#define SHADOW_OFFSET_Y (-shadowRadius * 5 / 4)

But there's no reason they have to be. That will all be more configurable when window managers begin to support it themselves.

Re:Screenshots

[Ender Ryan]

From Mac OSX?

Thanks, I'll be here all week :)

how much of this is affecting X11 *the* protocol ?

[Gopal.V]

I'm all for innovation and all that, but I've been burned a couple of times with protocols moving around a bit too often (for example mysql protocol between 4.0 and 4.1).

How much is XDAMAGE changing the original X11 protocol on wire ?. I have beed using something called WierdX, which is deployed as a JNLP in our project's webserver . Do these new extensions change something fundamental or is it just not applicable for remote X11 ?.

Hmm.. I just wish X11 would use my Video card instead of hogging CPU for those purty gradients and translucent windows.

Progress

[littlem]

This release brings real translucency and allows one to set values on different windows. Also Niffty drop shadows...

Ah, so now the developers will start moving away from XFree86 in droves!

Re:Progress

[christoph_s]

i think the parent was hoping for "funny", not "informative" ;-)

NO T JUST EYE CANDY!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that this improves much more then just adding real tranpsarencies!

X is a networking protocol not a gui!

Stuff like XDamage makes it easier to use over slower connections, for example.

The move to more and more extensions and reducing the monolythic nature of X is great. But it's slow and a evolutionary manner. But as you get more and more modular, stability will increase as will speed of developement. Each section can make changes and not worry about the impact on other parts of the X server.

Unlike the monolythic model of lumping everything into Xlibs and making it difficult to program for and adding new features while retiring obsolete ones.

Look forward to things like pure OpenGL enviroment! Now you have to have 2 drivers for every 1 video card... one for 2-d and one for 3-d.

Currently each application must deal with 3-dness independantly of each other. They must deal with the hardware independantly. Does Quake3 work over a network? No! But it can if they move everything to the X server. Each window then would automaticly be hardware accelerated, even if it was originally designed for the old way of doing things. Windows and items can be 3-d straight from the desktop.

That and dozens of other improvements are coming. This XDamage and Composite stuff is just laying the groundwork for more stuff, more progress.

Re:NO T JUST EYE CANDY!!!

[Sidicas]

Does Quake3 work over a network?

Sure it does! My XP box can run it off of my dad's computer (Win98) without installing it on my XP box.. Just double click the executable in the Network Neighborhood and it runs locally. Why stream it through X?

Re:NO T JUST EYE CANDY!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

quake3 works just fine over the network. I've screwed around playing it over a 10mbit ssh tunnel.

Re:NO T JUST EYE CANDY!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I do this with Unreal Tournament. Start it on my brothers computer with a fast CPU, and run in on my own with a fast GPU.
The X protocol _does_ already stream OpenGL commands, so I get best of both worlds. A fast CPU and GPU.
Quake3 doesnt work, because it expects som OpenGL commands that X doesnt stream. When this is fixed in X (or libopengl.so), Quake3 will also work over network. I really doubt this will happen on purpose, and I therefore dont think we will see this functionality in the first 5 years.

But try it with other games, UT, Savage and the like - wonderfully to run from other computers :)

Re:NO T JUST EYE CANDY!!!

[renoX]

>Now you have to have 2 drivers for every 1 video card... one for 2-d and one for 3-d.

Well at least this allow bug reports to the kernel!

As recent videocard have all closed-source drivers for 3D, if X becomes dependent of OpenGL maybe this will be difficult to have an 'untainted' kernel to report bug, no?

Re:NO T JUST EYE CANDY!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Quake 3 uses GLX, though, so the OpenGL rendering commands are being sent over the network, too. (Of course, that's still not going to be as fast as direct rendering where the client and the server share the same box, but it should still be usable.) Those take much less bandwidth to remotely display than, say, playing a full screen video without scaling. Not that this is a bad thing; far from it. But using Quake 3 as a test isn't stressing the connection as much as possible. Realistically, you should have at least 100 Mbps of bandwidth for rapid full screen redraws, preferably more.

Re:NO T JUST EYE CANDY!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably just your setup. Quake 3 works fine for at least one other poster here, and I don't imagine it would still be broken. NVIDIA drivers have had some problems with Quake 3 and thread local storage in the past, but that should be all fixed by now.

Re:NO T JUST EYE CANDY!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

pretty interesting.
just let me point that it is GLX extension who streams OpenGL commands through X protocol. In this way it is important that the app you are remotely displaying be designed efficiently for remote visualization purposes (extensively use of display lists that reside on the X-server side, etc. etc.) otherwise you could have low performance.

Re:NO T JUST EYE CANDY!!!

[kiniry]

Actually, Quake3 works just fine over a network. I have run it to demonstrate OpenGL over X11 for non-UNIX-aware new students at my university several times.

Re:NO T JUST EYE CANDY!!!

[sffubs]

Indeed, the poster is correct; I've run RTCW over the network a couple of times.

NVIDIA (nv) driver enhancements

[Anonymous Coward]

This is awesome! From section 3.3 of Release Notes:

The nv driver for NVIDIA cards has been updated as follows:

* Support added to the nv driver for the GeForce FX 5700, which didn't work with XFree86 4.3.
* The driver now does a much better job of auto-detecting which connector of dual output cards the monitor is attached to, and this should reduce or eliminate the need for manual xorg.conf overrides.
* The 2D acceleration for TNT and GeForce has been completely rewritten and its performance should be substantially improved.
* TNT and GeForce cards have a new Xv PutImage adaptor which does scaled YUV bit blits.

http://freedesktop.org/~xorg/X11R6.7.0/doc/RELNOTE S3.html#3

Re:NVIDIA (nv) driver enhancements

[peter_gzowski]

Has anyone tried this out? I'm using the "nvidia" driver right now solely because of its speed, but it gives me problems every kernel upgrade. Can the new "nv" keep up?

Re:NVIDIA (nv) driver enhancements

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you aware of that you are quoting the 6.7.0 release notes while the new release is 6.8.0 ? //fatal

Re:NVIDIA (nv) driver enhancements

[jlp2097]

http://freedesktop.org/~xorg/X11R 6.7.0/doc/RELNO TE S3.html#3

Welcome to 2004 Mr. Anonymous Coward ;-)

Re:NVIDIA (nv) driver enhancements

[jrcamp]

If you're using the nvidia driver because of the vastly superior 3d acceleration, then I doubt that you'll be able to replace that soon. Due to how nVidia develops its drivers (ie, they're basically the same from platform to platform) there is a lot of work already put into those, along with the fact that they have the specifications to do it.

I've used the nv driver before, and the 2d performance wasn't that bad.

Re:NVIDIA (nv) driver enhancements

[arkanes]

On my machine, the nv drivers 2d performance is better than nvidia by a factor of 10, at least. It was pretty suprising.

Re:NVIDIA (nv) driver enhancements

[MasterOfMagic]

Are you using the RenderAccel option in your xorg.conf file? I have that installed, and it seems to work well for me.

yum?

[Whispers_in_the_dark]

Anyone know when this will get released via yum repositories or is there a repository that has more current stuff for Fedora?

Re:yum?

[LiENUS]

www.fedorafaq.com has a yum.conf replacement that is faster than the main repository and has the updated stuff.

Re:yum?

[Anonymous Coward]

try Development - I'm on that and if you can live with things being a little broken at times, then it has all the newest shit.

I have GNOME 2.8 and Xorg 6.8.0 (well release candidates of them.. frozen for test2, but still)

Re:yum?

[kosmosik]

If you want binaries you can grab it from developement branch (check FTP server near you). You can also grab SRPM and recompile it. But right now in developement it is only 6.7.99 version, but is not much (if any) different from so called "release". There are probably some cosmetic changes...

Don't expect third party packagers to package this as it would be waste of resources (it is already in core system packages so no need for third party).

rofl

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty weird for a duplicate story :-)

6.8 or 6.7

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a big fan of X or anything, but is this 6.8 or RC 6.7 as the link says?

Re:6.8 or 6.7

[AchilleTalon]

6.8. However, seems /. staff has taken seriously various complains from the last days about the fact some news, even if for nerds, were no longer news. So, on this one, they decided to annonce it before X.org itself!

I am not kidding at all, if you try: http://freedesktop.org/~xorg/X11R6.8.0, you will get a short message about the annoncement not already made at current time, but due later today and be redirected to the X.org site at http://www.x.org

So, Cowboy Neal finally waked up after this lazy summer...

Translucency

[heffrey]

Anyone know how many years ago Windows did translucency?

Re:Translucency

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but transperancy is mainly usless, look up any good Human computer Interaction textbook

Re:Translucency

[heffrey]

Well why are X.org wasting time on it then?

Re:Translucency

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know how many years ago Windows did Network Transparency?

Hmmm...

You know how I check my e-mail when I am on my laptop or away from home?

ssh my.desktop's.address evolution

Then it opens up on my laptop, just the same as if I was sitting in front of my computer.

You know I also have multiple X servers.
on my Debian machine:
ctrl-alt-F7 takes me to my Gnome desktop.
ctrl-alt-F8 takes me to my KDE desktop... running from my laptop.
ctrl-alt-F9 takes me to a Fluxbox running quake3 fullscreen on a server.

That's network transparency. I can run multiple X servers running from multiple machines. If I had a Redhat server to admin, I could open up the Redhat desktop on my Debian administration machine. All secure thru ssh tunnels, much better then VNC or Window's remote desktop.

No special software, no special software. Any and all Linux, Unix, or BSD machine running X windows can do this.

I can also have virtual desktops were I can move windows back and forth between them. You can get that with some add-on software in Windows, but it's nothing compared to what I can do.

Eventually I'll be able to do stuff like close out a X server session on one computer, move to another computer and re-open it. Thanks to improvements in X.org.

Stuff like XDamage is going to make this more efficient network-wise, and new tunneling technology will replace the generic tunnelling with OpenSSH with something more geared specificly towards X windows. Newer compression technics and data types will make it even faster ontop of that.

You Windows guys don't know what your missing by not using a OS that has REAL multiuser support (having sudo and actually having it MORE conveinent to be a user rather then logged in as administrator.) with powerfull network technology, in a stable and SECURE enviroment.

X Windows rocks. XFree86 and politics held it back, but now with X.org it is beginning to have the same rate of developement that the rest of Free software enjoys.

Fedora and OpenBSD have new releases every 6 months. Using stuff like apt-get and ports it's EASY and CONVIENENT to keep up to date and patched. All the software gets up to date, not just the core system like in MS.

How often do you Windows guys get to play around with new stuff? Every 6 years, now?

Re:Translucency

[Anonymous Coward]

Eventually I'll be able to do stuff like close out a X server session on one computer, move to another computer and re-open it. Thanks to improvements in X.org.

hopefully sooner then later. i'd also like to see this in a per window capacity, like screen does for shells.

Re:Translucency

[julesh]

Because some geeks like transparent terminal windows.

Simple, really.

Re:Translucency

[bcs_metacon.ca]

Eventually I'll be able to do stuff like close out a X server session on one computer, move to another computer and re-open it. Thanks to improvements in X.org.

I already do this every day, using a SunRay. Thanks to X, of course, not X.org.

Re:Translucency

[IamTheRealMike]

There's no way to apply the Windows alpha support to the entire desktop systematically - for instance, window management in windows is done in-process by a DLL rather than by an external process co-ordinating things. That makes it rather harder to do stuff like drop shadows if you're not Microsoft and they are not apparently in any hurry.

Windows alpha support is basically "Make this window sorta transparent". The Windows desktop isn't actually composited: only when a translucent window is over another window is the contents of that window buffered. The rest of the time you're still in flicker-land.

I guess back in 2001 when XP was released average machine didn't have enough RAM to make it doable. Many perhaps still don't, but nonetheless Windows is last in the composited desktop arena.

Re:Translucency

[polyp2000]

Thats really funny ! ROTFL ... Id mod you up for comic timing but unfortunately i dont have mod points at the moment!

Way to go matey! Nothing better than the truth ;)

Re:Translucency

[hey]

I tired it with Win2000 and it crashed more than usual.

Re:Translucency

[m1chael]

Hopefully it leads to per pixel transparency...

Re:Translucency

[Anonymous Coward]

Eventually I'll be able to do stuff like close out a X server session on one computer, move to another computer and re-open it. Thanks to improvements in X.org.

You can do this in X today with the help of NX (1.4 version required, which is in beta.)

Re:Translucency

[jsebrech]

I can run multiple X servers running from multiple machines.

X lets you do amazing stuff that is impossible in windows. For example, you can take two different machines running on the same network sitting next to eachother, and use x2x tunneled through ssh to connect together their screens securely into one large desktop. I have a setup with one machine that's always on detecting when the machine right next to it boots up and automatically sharing its desktop with it. The only criticism I can give it is that it's not possible to redirect windows automatically from one X desktop to another.

Re:Translucency

[heffrey]

Moderation Troll? It was just a simple question. Anyone out there understand why this is classed as a troll?

Re:Translucency

[Deraj DeZine]

Thanks, Mr. X.org spokesman!

Re:Translucency

[gg3po]

*I* already do this every day, using a GNU screen. Thanks to GNU, of course, not X, or X.org. :-)

Re:Translucency

[GreyWolf3000]

Say I have one x server that can do XComposite, and has a hardware accelerated graphics card. The other cannot do XComposite, and has no such acceleration.

Ok, if I run glxgears on server A, will it have dropshadows drawn around it's border, and run with hardware acceleration enabled? If I move that window over to the other screen, will it lose the hardware acceleration/dropshadows?

What if I move the window in between the two screens so half of it is on one screen, half is on the other?

Re:how much of this is affecting X11 *the* protoco

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the new stuff is in *EXTENSIONS* the core X11 protocol is NOT affected at all. The new extensions have their own protocols, there are facilities in the core X11 protocol to ask the X server whether these extensions are present or not. This is the same for all X11 extensions.

For what just happened

[cybrthng]

I don't find this comment interesting, funny or even worthy of a mod point.

There is a time to be funny, and a time to just shut your trap.

Re:For what just happened

[W32.Klez.A]

Let's be gay together baby.

[OT] Re:Great News, but...

[repvik]

I hate you for your sig...
There is a reason. It's for fucking US residents only. Now will everyone that has that shit in their .sig PLEASE freaking stop?

Re:[OT] Re:Great News, but...

[jpmkm]

Hey dude, I thought you might like this:

Free Ipods!

Re:[OT] Re:Great News, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought he had a valid complaint. Isn't there enough room in your .sig to put US Residents only?

Re:[OT] Re:Great News, but...

[repvik]

Had I had any modpoints and postet anonymously, I'd mod you Funny ;)

Re:[OT] Re:Great News, but...

[Mr Guy]

fucking US residents

Close, but not quite right. It's for SCREWING US residents.

Re:[OT] Re:Great News, but...

[Mr_Dyqik]

Including it his sig means that he's broken the terms and conditions, so he's already not eligible for one.

Re:[OT] Re:Great News, but...

[DAldredge]

I hate your sig because people in china will not get the same results as everyone else.

See how stupid that sounds? If you don't like it fscking ignore it.

Re:[OT] Re:Great News, but...

[joeljkp]

Where does it say that? I just read the Terms & Conditions, and saw nothing of the sort.

Re:[OT] Re:Great News, but...

[Brandybuck]

Wow! Someone is having a bad day. If you don't like his rather innocuous sig, just ignore it. What's nuts is people going nuts over iPod sigs. Get a life.

Re:how much of this is affecting X11 *the* protoco

[sxpert]

well, XDamage is an extension, which means, it doesn't modify the existing protocol, but adds more request/response types to said protocol, via a well defined extension protocol.

But have they fixed...

[ProudClod]

the Xpixmap issue with the ATI drivers, where Xv refuses to work very often :(

Re:But have they fixed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re:But have they fixed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Add:
Option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps"

To your /etc/X11/xorg.conf (in the "Device" section for your video card), it will work around the problem.

Having both both "nvidia" and "nv" in xorg.conf?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will future versions of x.org allow me to specify an alterntive backup graphic card driver in my xorg.conf?

Use "nvidia", but if that fails use "nv".

This feature would be worth a thousand dropshadow effects :)

does it work with wine?

[datadriven]

I had to use Xfree 4.4 to get photoshop working with wine because of some bug in X.org 6.7, does anyone know if this has been fixed?

Goodbye to XFree forever

[lrandall]

I think that this release, just (about) 9 months after the fork from XFree, shows what talented X developers we have, who were being stifled by the XFree politics.

I am glad to see the amount of progress that is being made, and can only imagine what time will bring now that there is a way to actually contribute code to the X codebase again.

Kudos to KP, JG et al...

Re:Goodbye to XFree forever

[Anonymous Coward]

People fail to realize that a lot of this work has been going on for years. I mean, sure we are making significant progress, but Keith has been investigating a possible "X translucency extension" since a paper he wrote in 2000 demonstrating its feasibility. Remember that because of his grand ideas and the fact that he wasn't sharing information with the incompetent XF86 board of directors, he was exiled from the group.

So these extensions didn't happen in the last 9 months. They have been brewing for a while and are a lot further along than you might think. There is a ways to go, and Keith said that we are going halfway there on xserver (I think he means that we have opengl rendering and other backend tweaks to do in the future). But X is definitely getting a facelift.

Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers...

[dom1234]

Could somebody clarify it all ?

There's http://xfree.org and there's http://x.org . What's the difference between both ? And about the version numbers ? What do they stand for ? I have X11R6, v. 4.3 or something like that installed on my computer, and now they announce X version 6.8.0 ?! What does the 6 mean ? The 11 ? The 6.8.0 ? (And where the hell does the X come from ?)

Thanks in advance !

Screw the eye candy, where is the integration?

[cybrthng]

When can we see a trusted computing environment? (gui down) When will we see fully improved network/remote access?

When will we see some innovation instead of eye candy? Why does something have to be invented on OSX or Windows instead of pioneered on linux?

The hooks for modular gui plugins should be there - just as with any gui. OS/2 had the object based interface, windows has the pretty indepth theme integration and OSX has the PDF display..

Why not work on something to compete against microsofts new gui/api interffaces based upon 3d rendering instead of pixel rendering? why not kill 2d before the competition and work on an graphical interface that is competitive instead of intriguing.

Quick release cycles don't do anything for corporate adoption. Give us the "killer app" - in this case a desktop/windowing system that delivers everything we seem to bash in other systems as insecure or proprietary.

Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration?

[dabadab]

"When will we see fully improved network/remote access?"

What's wrong with ssh (besides the occasional "oops, wrong machine" moments :) )?

"When will we see some innovation instead of eye candy?"

In case you missed the point, this is about innovation, eye candy is just a nice side-effect. For example, XDamage improves X over slower network connections.

"The hooks for modular gui plugins should be there"

You mean something like the extensions for X?

"Why not work on something to compete against microsofts new gui/api interffaces based upon 3d rendering instead of pixel rendering? why not kill 2d before the competition and work on an graphical interface that is competitive instead of intriguing."

Well, it would be time to make up your mind on eye-candy.
3D desktops so far were nothing but neat eye-candy, from a usability point of view they have added nothing (one can argue that in fact they are worse than 2D ones). But anyway, I had the impression that the people of X.org are working on something like that.
If you want something to change, help them - but first, please, get your facts right, because spewing uninformed bullshit on slashdot does not help anyone.

Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration?

[l3v1]

When can we see a trusted computing environment? (gui down) When will we see fully improved network/remote access? When will we see some innovation instead of eye candy? Why does something have to be invented on OSX or Windows instead of pioneered on linux?

When someone writes - without smileyes or indication of joking of course - things like these above, I cannot in my life understand how in hell or heaven can it be moderated to Interesting.

Oh yeah, right, interesting in the way it shows linux&*nix ingorance.

Nothing to see here.

Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration?

[IamTheRealMike]

This is an amusing troll. If it isn't a deliberate troll then you need to learn how to express yourself more clearly instead of in vague buzzwords.

When can we see a trusted computing environment?

SELinux integration with the X server (SE-X) to allow you to lock applications down tighter is being worked on in a branch of Xorg CVS. It's not done yet AFAIK. The idea here is that you can take the features of "trusted" military-strength windowing systems where it's possible to have secure windows such that you cannot screenshot them, other apps cannot send events to them and so on.

When will we see fully improved network/remote access?

This statement is meaningless but NX compression is clearly the way forward here.

When will we see some innovation instead of eye candy?

Again, totally useless statement. Nowhere do you define "innovation" or even show that it's a good thing (hint: I'll take an efficient and usable desktop over and pointlessly innovative one any day).

The hooks for modular gui plugins should be there - just as with any gui. OS/2 had the object based interface, windows has the pretty indepth theme integration and OSX has the PDF display..

Again a meaningless statement. There are actually some pretty convincing arguments out there that DPDF/DPS type systems are the wrong way to implement a graphics system, and that XRENDER type trapezoid rendering is the right way. I suggest you investigate first.

Windows XP has themes - great. You realise that Linux has pioneered the way when it comes to theming? It was the first to have a totally themable desktop (I think this is true even if you include gross hacks like WindowBlinds), still the only OS to have systematic icon theming, the only one I know of that has mouse cursor theming etc.

Why not work on something to compete against microsofts new gui/api interffaces based upon 3d rendering instead of pixel rendering?

I think you've misunderstood what Avalon is. It's not about 3D GUIs, it may include using 3D acceleration to speed up rendering on machines that support it but this doesn't affect the APIs.

Quick release cycles don't do anything for corporate adoption. Give us the "killer app" - in this case a desktop/windowing system that delivers everything we seem to bash in other systems as insecure or proprietary.

I don't know of any other open, standardised windowing system with the security features X has. If you can show me one, I'd be interested.

Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration?

[Anonymous Coward]

When will we see fully improved network/remote access?

"Fully improved"? Please explain what you want in English. You appear to be using English words, but when you put them together, they make no sense.

When will we see some innovation instead of eye candy? Why does something have to be invented on OSX or Windows instead of pioneered on linux?

Since when do Microsoft invent stuff?

Why not work on something to compete against microsofts new gui/api interffaces based upon 3d rendering instead of pixel rendering?

Project Looking Glass. And, to answer your question "why not", because input and output is still 2D, so a 3D GUI is much more awkward to use than current GUIs.

Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration?

[DrWhizBang]

When can we see a trusted computing environment? (gui down) When will we see fully improved network/remote access?

there was in issue around ownership of tmp file fixed in this release, and integration with selinux should be not far behind.

When will we see some innovation instead of eye candy? Why does something have to be invented on OSX or Windows instead of pioneered on linux?

do you have any idea how this stuff was done? completely network transparent window rendering and compositing? windows and mac can't do that!

The hooks for modular gui plugins should be there - just as with any gui. OS/2 had the object based interface, windows has the pretty indepth theme integration and OSX has the PDF display..

and render and and composite are extensions to the X protocol (i.e. plugins). Gnome and KDE have object based UIs and indepth theme integration, and render is a Porter-Duff based compositing model that can be hooked into Cairo for a PDF like API. I'm starting to think I have just bitten into a troll here...

Why not work on something to compete against microsofts new gui/api interffaces based upon 3d rendering instead of pixel rendering? why not kill 2d before the competition and work on an graphical interface that is competitive instead of intriguing.

that was the whole point. or maybe you haven't been paying attention?

Quick release cycles don't do anything for corporate adoption. Give us the "killer app" - in this case a desktop/windowing system that delivers everything we seem to bash in other systems as insecure or proprietary.

The time based realease plans now being used by Gnome and X.org have given us some pretty cool stuff in a short period of time. I'm really not sure what you're complaining about.

Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration?

[tarsi210]

When will we see some innovation instead of eye candy? Why does something have to be invented on OSX or Windows instead of pioneered on linux?

Because for the most part, that is not, and will probably never be, the way Linux development has worked. UNIX, yes, but Linux, traditionally not.

Now, before you put gasoline underwear on me and get ready to strike a match, hear me out. For the most part, Linux has been an environment where the best ideas from surrounding computing environments have been taken, sythesized, sifted, reviewed, and eventually had the creme-de-la-creme added to the mix. It's like making chocolate chip cookies but you've reviewed every chocolate chip and grain of flour prior to inclusion.

Now, this being said, has nothing been invented on Linux, is it all a facsimile? Of course not -- lots of apps exist in Linux that are unique. However, think about how music is composed nowadays. Most music written is a combination of theory, heritage, culture, and style. There's nothing really groundbreaking about it; no one is out making music from the sound of tomatoes rotting. However, the music is still new -- it's just another rendering of the general mish-mash.

Hence is Linux and Linux development. It doesn't always have to follow a pioneering stance; indeed, it rarely has. Nor is there a need to start now. I think in a lot of ways, the community does better if it takes the best of the already-field-tested and manipulates that into a successful product. Let the others take the heat and trials of something new and potentially groundbreaking (MS Bob, anyone?) and let us reap the goods.

Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration?

[Sleuth]

Windows XP has themes - great. You realise that Linux ...(snip)... the only one I know of that has mouse cursor theming etc.

Linux is the only one to support mouse cursor theme'ing? Now I'm a Linux fan, but maybe you could explain this a little more. The last time I made a cursor theme for enlightenment, I used some samples from a Windows animated cursor theme pack...

Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration?

[FooBarWidget]

Windows 95 had mouse cursor themes. I remember that years and years ago I used to use Sonic the Hedgehog animated and colored cursors.
If I remember correctly, GTK 1.2 is the first toolkit that's fully themable. But I think WindowsBlinds predates GTK 1.2 (though I also heard that WB is awfully slow).

Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration?

[IamTheRealMike]

Oops, OK. I never encountered these, mea culpa.

WindowBlinds is a pretty old app but it's not exactly a shining advert for Windows. Yes it was slow but more problematically it destabilised the system quite significantly. It worked by overriding and hooking *large* parts of the Windows API, changing the semantics and behaviour of those APIs out from underneath the apps. Windows provided no native support for this until XP, and even then applications have to opt in to it. Adding theming to Windows was a breaking change, that's why some apps on XP are themed and some aren't.

Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration?

[l3v1]

Great, no I'm flamebait.
Great indeed.
I'm right anyways.

Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration?

[Coryoth]

But I think WindowsBlinds predates GTK 1.2 (though I also heard that WB is awfully slow).

Early versions of WB weren't fully themeable anyway I don't think. I seem to recall being frustrated with WB because there were a few widgets I couldn't theme.

Jedidiah.

Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration?

[LocalH]

Old my ass.

It runs MUCH better with XP than it did back in the 98 days. I currently use it on one of my logins to get a true OSX Panther window-look (uxtheme doesn't allow moving the buttons).

Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, MUI was fully themable on the Amiga before GTK existed.

Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration?

[IamTheRealMike]

Old as in "been around a long time".

Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration?

[LocalH]

Ah, I parsed that as "not been updated in eons". My bad.

Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration?

[Hatta]

"When will we see fully improved network/remote access?"

What's wrong with ssh (besides the occasional "oops, wrong machine" moments :) )?

I can't take a firefox, openoffice, etc, session that I've been working on in the living room, detatch it from that X server, and attach it to the one in the bedroom. That's what's wrong.

What?!

[doob]

From the release notes:

"OpenGL is now supported for printing"

Anyone care to explain this bizarre concept? Can I now connect my graphics card directly to my printer? :)

Re:What?!

[l3v1]

More about being able to print directly the contents of an opengl-rendered scene window. I mean without using like GL2PS or alike.

Re:What?!

[chrish]

Perhaps to "print" something to an OpenGL texture?

Re:What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

As you probably saw here, this new version of Xorg has the ability to use a printer as its output device (which can be seen just like a screen that can do 2-4 frames per minute).

OpenGL lets you render 2d and 3d scenes to a window. Now, if that window belongs to a Xorg server attached to a printer, then the rendered scene will appear on paper.

That's what I think it means.

Re:What?!

[CaptnMArk]

It requires a very fast printer to run glxgears.

Re:What?!

[diegocgteleline.es]

When you want to print something you want to print what the X server really has in the screen (not a "copy" made by the software) so I guess it has sense somewhere...

Re:What?!

[GeekDork]

Actually, OpenGL can be set to output a set of "simple" drawing commands instead of drawing to a display context, that can be converted to pretty much any required output format like PostScript. So theoretically, it's easy to create high-resolution output from any OGL surface.

Re:What?!

[doob]

Time to upgrade to a fast colour laser printer, might hit that magic 1 fps mark! Or will we start seeing 1337 l1nux gamerz comparing framerates measured in ppm? Overclocked watercooled printers with windows in the side anyone?

Re:What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get small business printers that can hit 120 ppm already, which translates to 2 fps. There are some monsters used by the publishing industry for proofing which can hit 1000s of ppm. Ignoring the issue of how incredibly wasteful this is of paper (and what a giant stack would accumulate), it would be kinda a cool art installation to have a series of first person shooter snapshots. However, most printers I've used don't print at a uniform rate, due to varying rendering times required by different complexity images, so the image would be jerky. :)

Re:What?!

[clacke]

Actually, it's quite useful. The xprint server allows you to print using standard X protocol, so your program won't have to know about Postscript and so forth. And now it supports GLX, so even 3D programs won't have to do much extra work to support printing.

Re:What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're thinking of OpenGL as used for animated 3D graphics. But remember - all OpenGL is is a library for drawing 2D and 3D graphics, and that applies to printed media just as well as it does to the screen.

Say you want to print a screen capture of a game. Some of your options:
1. Render to the screen and capture the finished result as a bitmap, then print the bitmap.
2. Render directly to a bitmap, then print the bitmap.
3. Render to a bitmap that fronts for a printer device.

Afterall, that's how most print systems work - the print device is a graphics context just like the one used to draw to the screen. Some allowances need to be made for stuff like paging, but for the most part, the code used for printing should be the same as that used for screen render.

This just links OpenGL to that mechanism.

Again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me, or are we hearing about this *again*? Port it to Solaris already.

MICROSOFT...

[Anonymous Coward]

Has been able to do this fucking shit since Windows 3.xx

Re:Having both both "nvidia" and "nv" in xorg.conf

[Anonymous Coward]

You could have mutliple layouts.

That way you could switch between drivers without having to edit your xorg.conf file. That's been possible for a while.

you'd specify a default layout and a alternative layout (call it unaccl for example) and go like this:

startx

if that doesn't work then go:

startx -- -layout unaccl

there are examples on the web if you look around. I use one setup for my dual screen, but some games don't like that, so I have a second layout for just one screen.

Drop Shadows?

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, welcome our new drop shadowed overlords. That way, we can tell who the overloards actually are.

Re:Drop Shadows?

[escher]

Or at least which overlord is in front.

Re:Drop Shadows?

[Anonymous Coward]

And remember position is 9/10's of the desktop!

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[mikael_j]

They are different projects, X.org split from XFree86 since they didn't like how it was being run, so 4.3 means you are most likely running XFree86..

/Mikael

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[Alioth]

X is the protocol. X11 is the 11th version of the X protocol (the first version of the X protocol I saw was X10, and that was some time ago on an already ancient machine). X11R6 means the X Window System, Version 11, Release 6 - that's the basic protocol level.

The .8.0 bit at the end is X.Org's specific version numbers for their implementation of the X11R6 protocol. (Other organizations implement X11R6, such as Sun - they call their version of X11R6 OpenWindows).

I believe there was a prototype windowing system called W that preceeded X, but that's now ancient history (the first X Window System implementation to run was in the mid 1980s).

Offtopic

[Anonymous Coward]

There is one reason not to get a free ipod: "US Only"

Re:how much of this is affecting X11 *the* protoco

[IamTheRealMike]

The new extensions are just that, protocol extensions. They haven't changed the wire format.

Having said that, the presence of the new ARGB visuals is known to confuse and break some programs. Worryingly, Mozilla+Flash and GTK 1.2 apps (like XMMS, VMware, etc) are amongst the things that have apparently broken.

To "unbreak" them you need to set a magic environment variable but as of yet there is no automatic blacklisting mechanism in place for userspace apps so .... you just have to be able to diagnose this breakage yourself.

Hence the fact that it's described as unstable.

Xorg roadmap

[dpilot]

ISTR that one of those things Xorg wanted to do was to separate the X client and server packaging. It's generally frowned on to install an X server on a server machine, but it would be nice to have X client software available there. The current Xorg/XFree packaging isn't friendly to splitting out the X client libs, or making the package control system recognize that so you could install X clients.

Looking at the Xorg release plan (closest I could find to a roadmap) at http://wiki.freedesktop.org/XOrg/XorgReleasePlan
I don't see anything about separation of client and server libs and packaging. They have some other projects listed elsewhere, but nothing terribly solid about client/server separation.

Anyone aware?

Another thing that would be neat to see is integration of the GLX/DRM work on the S3 Savage line of chips. According to the DRI page there's some work being done on this, though it's not ready for prime time. My laptop has a Savage, and my Mom's computer uses the Via KM133, which has an imbedded Savage. Of course this is an area where perhaps I *should* be trying to help.

Re:Xorg roadmap

[DrWhizBang]

I don't see anything about separation of client and server libs and packaging.

From what I understand from scouring the mailing list, the "debrix" tree contains the xorg code, but with an autotool build system. When this tree is ready, new work will be merged into that tree and it will become the main tree. From there, it will be much easier to break out the separate pieces than it is with the current imake build process. The intend to do this for the next release.

Re:Xorg roadmap

[dpilot]

I followed some of this on their pages. One of the other projects seemed to indicate the separation, but it was deprecated in favor of "debrix". But the debrix project said nothing about the separation. To be fair, it looks like Xorg is spending a lot of much-needed time cleaning up the structure and making things so they even CAN work on the code. It has always sounded like the original code base was pretty arcane.

Maybe the next release won't contain API changes, but the simplified build process, repartitioning, and repackaging alone might be significant enough to spring for X11R7.

Re:Xorg roadmap

[4of12]

It's generally frowned on to install an X server on a server

But it gets done all the time for security and tunneling convenience on remote hosts.

localhost $ ssh -X me@remotehost
remotehost $ echo $DISPLAY
remotehost:10.0

In the old days of X terminals that strictly only ran an X server, it was soon noticed that the extra local CPU power could be put to good use running various X clients, particularly the window manager that could otherwise suffer from network latency. So in that situation, some of the X clients could be run on the same machine as the server. X adapts nicely to letting clients originate anywhere.

A network client/server model gives X an intrinsic ability to partition work that other windowing systems don't have built-in.

Unfortunately, networks change, and clients and servers change in their capability, and even the applications change in the level of graphics, latency requirements, need for prodigious disk I/O, etc. If you consider the hardware and software of the mid-1980's when X was invented, things have changed dramatically.

A static client server model helped X obtain a well-defined network protocol. But, dynamic client/server model might have provided better performance over a greater range of conditions. OTOH, a general purpose distributed object model would probably not be as robust as X.

Re:Xorg roadmap

[dpilot]

Yep.

I've also thought of just installing the full X package, then disabling the server. A few things like 'chown nobody X' and 'chmod *-rwx X' would probably be sufficient to "secure" the X server, but I'd have to do that every time an emerge updated X, too. (mumble) I need to check the documentation on Portage, because I could probably protect the defanged server and keep it from getting updated.

Since you're bringing up basic models, what's your opinion on Fresco/Berlin/GGI, etc?

Re:Xorg roadmap

[DrWhizBang]

Maybe the next release won't contain API changes, but the simplified build process, repartitioning, and repackaging alone might be significant enough to spring for X11R7

Maybe. I suspect we will also see more optimisation/accelleration for Render so that XComposite can be usable when it exits the "experimental" stage. Expect the next releases of assorted window managers and DEs to add a bunch of special effects like "Exposé" and the "Genie" effect in anticipation.

If I had to guess (since I'm not in the know) I would say the next release will be X11R6.9, with version 7 being used for the new X-over-OpenGL stuff that is being worked on (no more X drivers! Yay!).

Re:Xorg roadmap

[entrigant]

I am pretty sure they are doing this. I do not remember where exactly I read this, but it was in an interview linked to by slashdot. If you do some searching I'm sure you can find exact details.

Re:Xorg roadmap

[Jerf]

I think you missed the point. OP is aware that X servers are installed all the time so you can access X clients remotely. (It is not clear to me whether you realize that you set up a tunnel for X clients remotely; SSH does not allow access to the remote machine's X-Server. The rest of your message seems to get it right, but that's an important point.)

OP's (correct) point is that it is hard to install said clients without the server. In source, it is effectively impossible (though I think an "rm" on the final server binaries would be effective and harmless). It would be nice to be able to compile/install Mozilla by downloading just the necessary headers and protocol code without the rest of the server. Right now that's hard. It is a good and even necessary seperation.

Re:Xorg roadmap

[anholt]

Integration of the Savage (and Mach64, and VIA) DRI as on-by-default requires that they get fixed for the security requirements that we have accepted for the DRI. All of those drivers currently let any user authorized for DRI read/write arbitrary memory. Meeting those requirements is a lot of work, but it would be great to see someone working on those.

Now, one option, and one I want to look into for the next release, is some "InsecureIsOK" "YES" for those drivers, so we can build and install them by default and users make the choice at runtime. This is slightly different meaning than the Section "DRI" because Section "DRI" authorizes users for the DRI security model, which only allows users to hang the machine. (due to the complexity of hardware, the checking required to avoid hanging is simply too difficult to do for direct rendering, and that's why you have to turn it on for non-root)

MOD PARENT UP -- Its NOT FLAMEBAIT!!

[blahbooboo2]

mod parent up, it was not flamebait. Geesh. God forgive you mention a legitimate flaw in linux...

Re:MOD PARENT UP -- Its NOT FLAMEBAIT!!

[lewp]

Wow. Telling people to mod your own post up. Desperate, much?

I for one welcome

[Anonymous Coward]

our new translucent overlords.

Seriously, I've now been using an RC for some time now and the work the xorg guys did is just amazing.

And when you look at freedesktop.org you'll notice that this is only the begin. Cairo and glitz anyone? Or what about xcb/xcl?

Thanks to all those involved for putting X development back on track and a lot of fun back on my computer. ;-D

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[julesh]

Sun [calls] their version of X11R6 OpenWindows

I've always thought this was a daft name. Open windows aren't particuarly useful -- they're just like a hole, really, whereas a closed window keeps the wind and rain out while you can still see through it.

Just a thought.

To All The "Drop Shadow Nay-Sayers" (Again)

[Lethyos]

I think it needs to be made clear (no pun) yet again, that all this work is not just about drop shadows (they are just one thing you can do with it) or "useless" eye-candy (sometimes beautification is critical to the user). This work is about new options in enhancing usability and improving performance. These new extentions do far more than just add shadows and transparency (no, not translucency, that is something else).

Off-screen compositing allows new effects that can add emphasis to certain user interface elements. They allow for windows with arbitrary shapes that do not appear "jagged" and "rough". Better performance means we can create more fluid effects in windowing systems. For instance, users are much more comfortable with things that slide around or fade smoothly rather than just snapping into position. It allows the eye to keep track of what's changing. Tools like Exposé are now possible. Overall, there are more possibilities for open source user interface developers to add significantly more polish to the desktop without resorting to cheap hacks (such as the static transparency found in KDE, Eterm, and Aterm).

And just to reinforce the classic uses of this: drop shadows really do add emphasis to the current focused window (I write this on an OSX box). Also, it can be really convenient to have window transparency in many cases (for example, when I have multiple Terminals open I can read a man page behind the console I'm currently typing in). Again, keep in mind that these features are not the goal but simply benefits of the new extentions.

The future of the F/OSS desktop is really looking up thanks to new technology like this. Eventually these things will be hardware accelerated (like Quartz Extreme) and then some really cool things will be possible.

So, in conclusion, don't knock or belittle the work that's going into X.org these days. In the future, most of you will appreciate them the same way you appreciate the flexibility you have now with choosing how to configure your window managers to your liking. No doubt a lot of people will take this stuff and produce a lot of crap, but we'll definitely see a lot of excellent work that will use it to improve the user experience.

Re:To All The "Drop Shadow Nay-Sayers" (Again)

[hyperstation]

quick! someone write an XPosé extension!

(seriously!)

Re:To All The "Drop Shadow Nay-Sayers" (Again)

[mrchaotica]

Skippy, desktop-neutral
Expocity, for GNOME (more accurately, Metacity)
Komposé, for KDE

Re:To All The "Drop Shadow Nay-Sayers" (Again)

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm, Expose already exists for Linux. Sortoff. Check out Skippy and its other related software.. at.. http://www.thegraveyard.org

Re:To All The "Drop Shadow Nay-Sayers" (Again)

[Mornelithe]

That's not really the same thing. It doesn't do the smooth image scaling and such. In its previous form, it just took screenshots, slowly, and eventually showed a picture of them all.

However, if you want skippy to work better, you need to get skippyXD, which uses the XDamage extension, new in 6.8. That allows for live updates of windows while they're being displayed by skippy.

In other words, you can't do it well without things like composite and damage.

Re:To All The "Drop Shadow Nay-Sayers" (Again)

[Brandybuck]

Eventually these things will be hardware accelerated ...

Hopefully by then we'll have some decent Open Source drivers for them.

REAL Transparency Screenshots

[xiando]

Check out the X.org 6.8 Screenshots at LinuxReviews, showing off the new real transparency and drop shadow technology. These things may not increase your shareholder value, but it will allow you to impress people in a big way.

Re:REAL Transparency Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

but it will allow you to impress people in a big way.

Cool dewd!! Transparency and drop shadows!?!? I'm way impressed. I've never seen that on as OS before!!

How could this dumb shit be modded insightful

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry for the foul language, but I'm really getting tired of stupid mods modding up even stupider posts just because we are oh so critical.

Please look again at parent, it's nothing but a stupid incoherent rant and the only time it is criticizing something directly one look at freedesktop.org would have been sufficient to see that parent is talking bullshit.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[dpilot]

As for the ".8.0" bit, some time back, someone at the old X oversight group (the name escapes me, now) decided that X11R6 was going to be the *last* X release. So I guess that meant that there wasn't going to be any X11R7, so we started into X11R6.1, X11R6.3, etc. ISTR X11R6.2 had limited enhancements/features, and never really made it to prime-time before X11R6.3 was out.

Somewhere in there the XFree86 project was off on its own numbering scheme. I particularly remember helping beta GLX stuff on 3.3.6, and then we into the 4.x stuff, 4.3 being the last before the license change. ISTR there was some sort of correspondence between the 3.x/4.x numbering and the X11R6.y numbering.

In all of this, the group that said that X11R6 is the *last* X has faded into de-facto insignificance, but we've all apparently stuck by their decision.

Maybe Xorg will get really gutsy at some point, and give us X11R7.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Frustrating

[tSade]

I found it slightly frustrating that no one has created an APT repository for any x.org release that I can find. I know I could do it, but I have neither the resources or energy to actually figure out how to make up that rather... impressive package.

Compatibility and Remote X?

[scorp1us]

I use a Cygwin/X window ot login (via XDCMP) to a unix host. this is fine for local network. But sometimes I want to ssh in to my home box and run mozilla. Being over a cable modem, it is quite slow. I'd like to use the XDamage extension to reduce the data over the wire.

Where do I have to install X.org? Remotely? Do I have to upgrade mt Cygwin/X?

Re:Compatibility and Remote X?

[Anonymous Coward]

For low bandwidth situations it is better to use tightVNC either using Xvnc (new x display) or x11vnc (same way vnc works on windows).

Xvnc is really quite fast compared to VNC on windows (not using the mirror driver) as it knows more about what is going on, then it does on windows.

Plus you can be funky and have the x client, x server/vnc server and vnc client on different hosts.

I use tightVNC over a 56K modem to my desktop at work, and it is usable.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[dom1234]

Thanks for the clear answers. But why do we talk about a "protocol" ? Isn't X a program for displaying stuff ? I know we can use remote display on a network with X, but why isn't it only a feature ? Why is X so focused on network terminology ? And how about differences between XFree.org and X.org ? And OpenWindows ? Are they three implementations of functions (same ".h"s) for displaying windows and drawing things ?

Already has...

[twoslice]

I am now running Debian unstable unstable. The second unstable is for when I install alpha and beta code onto a Debian unstable - which for some odd reason is surprisingly ... well... stable.

Try vncserver and low-bandwidth X proxy

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have to throw a window a long way, try using vnc - I like TightVNC.

Or you can use lbxproxy.

I use both of them to throw windows quite some distance - even across dial-up connections sometimes. Dial-ups are still slow, but not interminable. Cable or DSL, while not as snappy as local access, are still well within acceptable limits.

Oh, and Citrix sucks. The Citrix X server has got to be the worst one I've ever used. Constantly crashing, can't handle lots of applications like some versions of Mozilla. All in all, Citrix is a giant, stinking turd.

Re:Try vncserver and low-bandwidth X proxy

[afd8856]

Ltsp users recomand against lbxproxy. It is considered deprecated and inefective. (I believe the technology was incorporated in the regular X server as well)

Re:Try vncserver and low-bandwidth X proxy

[Trolling4Dollars]

I use VNC to good effect for the "goofy full desktop" mode of operation by doing this. It works sell especailly when sent over an SSH tunnel. In fact, I'm doing it right now at work controlling my application server at home. :)

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[strider44]

I'm not satisfied with the above answers, so I'm going to try one myself.

The X Windowing System was originally an MIT project for unix (not linux specifically, it works with linux because linux carries on with the unix specification) that was made open source and turned into open source. X is just the name of the system, the 11 is the current version of the specification. 11 has been active since 1988.

The XFree86 organization managed the X-Window-System until version v4.3. Earlier this year, though, they released v4.4 under a license that was thought incompatible with the GPL, which caused a split. Alot of politics went on and alot of people got angry, which caused the birth of the X.Org foundation, which is now industry backed and also backed now by most major distributions such as Slackware (I think they were the first?) and Mandrake, Redhat, Gentoo. Others such as Debian still use XFree86 v4.3 instead of updating to 4.4.

The first version of X.Org was version 6.7 (which carried on the MIT X versioning system), which was released on March 31 this year. Now X11R6.8 has been released, carrying along again with the numbering system.

I hope that explains it for you.

mandrake releases

[checkup21]

http://ftp.sh.cvut.cz/MIRRORS/Mandrake/people/svet ljo/mandrake

xorg_6.8_rc4 can be found there for 10.0 and cooker (use "probably_broken" dir). i think 6.8 final will get there soon.

this is running here fine.

Modularity and Stability

[RAMMS EIN]

``But as you get more and more modular, stability will increase as will speed of developement.''

I keep hearing this argument. However, I am not all that convinced that modularity will improve stability. After all, things tend to break around the edges. More modules means more edges, thus more opportunities to break.

Also, modules only work by virtue of well-defined interfaces. What if some of the interfaces turn out to be suboptimal? Retaining the interface can severely burden development and innovation. Changing the interface can require massive code changes.

I am all for modularity, but I can't assume that it will lead to more stability and productivity.

Re:Modularity and Stability

[Jerf]

More modules means more edges, thus more opportunities to break.

The entire point of modularity is that modules decrease edges. I'm going to have to say that if you don't get that, you don't get modularity.

(Remember to compare it correctly to the alternative, the N^2 complexity "everything connects directly to everything else"; I think you're mentally comparing it to a "nothing connects to anything else" model, which isn't even possible, since that is the only model simpler, albeit impossible, than good modularity, at a constant 0 interconnect instead of "as-close-to-linear-as-possible" modular system.)

Re:Modularity and Stability

[RAMMS EIN]

``Remember to compare it correctly to the alternative, the N^2 complexity "everything connects directly to everything else"; I think you're mentally comparing it to a "nothing connects to anything else" model, which isn't even possible''

Hmm, can't really say I agree. Sure, without modules, everything *could* connect to everything, but that wouldn't happen in practice. And if you break anything, it will show up at compile time.

In a modular system, you may not even be able to test with the current versions of all components that interact with the one you changed. Also, a modular system has its own layer of glue, beyond what the compiler toolchain provides. All this leads to more complexity and possible breakage.

Re:Modularity and Stability

[grmoc]

Ok. Modularity decreases the number of edges.

Why?

Because the edges are now -explicit- instead of -implicit-.

Without modules, it is easy to 'cheat' by peeking at the internals of a structure that you have no business peeking into. If you're in a module, that kind of 'cheat' often becomes more work than just doing it right in the first place.

Also, modules VASTLY increase ease-of-testing.

Re:Modularity and Stability

[quasi_steller]

After all, things tend to break around the edges.

I'm not sure I agree with this statement. Are you sure "things tend to break around the edges"? I would argue that correctly written modules only break internally (correctly written in terms of the interface, not that the internal code of the module is correct).

The idea that modularity lends to more stability comes from the idea that smaller pieces of code are easier to debug. Modular code allows the developers to focus on the module they are working on decreasing the likelyhood that a developer will make an error. During testing the module is tested to make sure that given certian inputs, it returns the right outputs. If there is an error, you have the error already narrowed down to the module your testing. For programs with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, reducing work to modules with ~500 lines of code helps a lot. As long as the modules are well written things should work fairly well when they are tied together. Think in terms of mathematical functions: only input and output. There is no mucking with global variables. This is what makes functional languages so cool.

Unfortunatly things don't always turn out that way. Sometimes global variables are needed to simplify the code thus breaking the mathematical function model and causing things to sometimes break unexpectedly.

Re:Modularity and Stability

[Jerf]

You don't program big programs, do you? Because what you're spouting off is so stupid one doesn't even know where to begin correcting you. I wouldn't have bothered except you took in a moderator or two also.

You obviously have no clue about what modules are, and what the alternative (spaghetti code) is. The proof of this is your cited evidence that applies to non-modular code, only more so by a full polynomial factor. (How the hell do you test a non-modular sub-system on its own? Again, you're showing no comprehension of the very meaning of modular!)

Why don't you hold spouting off about programming practices until you understand them? Because the reality is that I'm not "asking" you to agree, I'm not debating, I'm explaining how modules work. If you don't agree, fine, but that just means you're wrong. (I get to say this because this isn't a political discussion or whatever where everybody is entitled to an opinion; this is a matter of simple vocabulary.)

Re:Modularity and Stability

[Minna Kirai]

More modules means more edges, thus more opportunities to break.

Backwards. Modules actually mean fewer edges. This is an easy point to get wrong- people hear that modules define how things are connected, and imagine they add more connections. But in reality, the fact that they DISALLOW some kinds of connections is actually more important.

If you take a million line software project that is non-modular, any programmer who edits a line could concievably jump to any other line, giving you a million*million level of total complexity.

Upgrading to a language without "goto" statements will provide a degree of modularity- now each statment can't jump to every other line, but only other functions. Assuming functions average 35 lines, then complexity is reduced to million*(million/35). A decent gain.

Going beyond choice of programming language and imposing some firmer rules on the modularity of the project can improve things even more. Break it up into 10 modules, each with 100,000 LOC, and with only a very limited way each module is allowed to communicate with any other. Now you can test modules independently (either by experimental test-cases, or by reading the code carefully, which is more managable to do in 1/10th chunks). The complexity of each modules is down to (100,000*100,000), and once those are verified, the project as a whole is only 10*10.

Re:Modularity and Stability

[Minna Kirai]

everything *could* connect to everything, but that wouldn't happen in practice.

Because in practice, everyone who's not insane or evil uses at least a little modularity.

In a modular system, you may not even be able to test with the current versions of all components that interact with the one you changed.

Now you're changing the subject. You've brought up the issue of forward compatiblity with unforseen 3rd party code. That can be a problem, but it's actually an argument FOR modularity.

You can choose to compare a modular vs non-modular design where all code is controlled by one authority, but it's not fair to put unknown code into the modular case, unless the non-modular system also has to handle it. And when you do that, the advantages of modularity become even greater. (I could theoretically write a binary patch to add new features to program which doesn't support plugin modules, but that would be difficult and dangerous)

Re:Modularity and Stability

[Minna Kirai]

You obviously have no clue about what modules are, and what the alternative (spaghetti code) is.

"Modular" is an overloaded word, even in the field of software programming.

There is "modular vs spagetti" (a), yes. But there's also "modular vs monolithic" (b). The latter factor isn't involved so much with how the code interacts, but how it's distributed. In a non-modular, monolithic program, the source code is all in 1 big directory tree, and any person acquiring a copy of the code will be pretty assured to have gotten a self-consistent version. Whereas with modules there is a possibility that the code will be distributed separately, creating the opportunity for version mismatch errors impossible with a self-contained, monolithic codebase.

Think about the problems one can cross trying to compile software like Ephiphany, which requires specifically correct versions of mozilla, gnome, gtk2, pango, fribidi, glibc, and gcc. Any one of those being off could sabotage the build process.

One might argue that that with good modular design, interfaces will be stable and precise version matchup won't be important... but that presupposes "goodness" beyond what modularity can guarantee.

Re:Modularity and Stability

[Piquan]

I keep hearing this argument. However, I am not all that convinced that modularity will improve stability. After all, things tend to break around the edges. More modules means more edges, thus more opportunities to break.

Okay, if we're using this metaphor...

I disagree. When you look at the structure of most bigmonolithic software, it's not like the monolith in 2001. It's more like a Koch curve, with lots of twists and turns everywhere filling the space we call the monolith. You end up with edges all over the place.

But with a Koch curve, when you locate a spot that you need to fix, you have a hard time telling where it is along the whole curve. The space is filled with one very twisty curve, so all you can say is, "It's part of the monolith".

On the other hand, with modules, everything you can point to is identifiable, so it's easier to maintain.

Also, modules only work by virtue of well-defined interfaces. What if some of the interfaces turn out to be suboptimal? Retaining the interface can severely burden development and innovation. Changing the interface can require massive code changes.

The alternative is poorly-defined interfaces within the program, and those end up being much harder to change. When you modify the meaning of a flag here, it breaks five things over there because there was no rule saying they couldn't use it. The interrelationships of a monolith become very hard to track.

You still have to maintain interfaces in a monolith, it's just that everything you do becomes part of the interface, so you can't change anything.

+1 Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

weird thought it is

Archaic build

[Sunspire]

Man I can't wait for the autotooled X.org releases sometime in the future (debrix or whatever the branch name is called).

Building this beast is a trip down memory lane to the bad old days. Half way trough it bombs out on me because it can't find bison (now there's a program I haven't yet needed this century). So you install the program and continue on with "make World". What follows is the longest "clean" operation I've ever seen. Forget about just picking up compiling where it left. You're better of deleting the whole tree and unpacking the sources again, trust me, you'll save time.

Imake was a piece of shit when it was new and unsuprisingly it still holds true in 2004. However if it wasn't for X.org and Freedesktop I bet we'd still be compiling XFree86 5.0 with this pos a few years from now, at least someone at X.org is working on moving to the autotools for the next release.

Re:Archaic build

[Progman3K]

Agreed Imake is very difficult to understand and use.

But it IS brilliant.

If your environment files are set properly, you can install packages MUCH faster than using Auto*

The reason is that for EVERY package you install with the auto-tools, the SAME checks will be performed each time: Does the compiler support yadda yadda yadda and other tests that are already processed and stored in your local Imake configuration files.

The cool thing about Imake is that you are able to specify targets very simply, and in a portable way. when you move to a different machine, no need to change the Imakefiles.

Once you've got the hang of it, it makes for an uncluttered development environment.

Of course, the best solution would be to use Imake for its strengths and Auto* for ITS strengths, together, even!

Imake was necessary because X became so big and got ported to so many different computing platforms. The X development team really tried to solve the problems of moving source from machine to machine without it being to much of a hassle. Kudos.

I think it's brilliant.

Re:Archaic build

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about the rest of your comments, but to continue the build you only do a "make", not a "make World". :) Then it continues without the clear-thing. (I just did it myself.)

Re:Archaic build

[entrager]

I found a patch that makes it really easy to install. Download it here.

Sorry, I couldn't resist...

Re:Archaic build

[theCoder]

Another poster mentioned that you could use a simple "make" instead of "make World" to restart the build. IIRC, "make World" is the same something like "make Makefile Makefiles includes depends all" or something like that, so if you already got to the compiling (the "all"), redoing all the others would be wasteful.

I don't understand, however, why you think Imake is so bad. The project I'm on at work uses Imake to build the Makefiles, and it works wonderfully on 4 different platforms (Sun, SGI, Linux, and win32). We've probably tweaked it a lot, but for our purposes, it works very well. Realistically, Imake and autoconf try to solve the same problem (making Makefiles), but through different means. Imake uses a system of def files setup by the user to describe their platform and autoconf tries to guess by trying different things. As someone who uses Gentoo, I know that a great deal of time spent emerging (especially on smaller packages) is spent configuring. Sometimes, it can take longer to configure than it actually does to compile! It would be great if somehow that information could be captured (say in a def file) for use in all packages. Unfortunately, that's just not feasible, since it would require way too much cooperation between packages.

However, Imake can be extremely useful if you know how to use it. The project I mentioned before has thousands of Imakefiles, each of which are small and easy to manage. The Makefiles that are produced are at least 30K in size, and provide numerous make targets for different purposes. Since our systems are setup consistently (and make extensive use of NFS mounts, so common applications are always in the same place), Imake def files work great for the minimal time we spent setting them up.

Imake may not work great for open source projects since the target platforms can be extremely varied, but that doesn't mean it's a "piece of shit". It's a useful tool that unfortunately doesn't quite fit the requirements of the open source world.

Re:Wrong link- try this one

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you mirror it? It doesn't work anymore

X is slow? (Re:composite rules!)

[pdc]

There's also the overhead of X's network transparency: all communication between client and server is network traffic rather than the simpler, less-flexible system that Windows uses. The X protocol is also fairly verbose.

Re:X is slow? (Re:composite rules!)

[IamTheRealMike]

No, the overhead of the X protocol is negligable. When doing profiling runs the bottlenecks are nearly always either in the serverhardware link or inside the toolkit. The applicationserver link doesn't really slow much down at all.

Re:X is slow? (Re:composite rules!)

[GreyWolf3000]

When running locally, X11 uses UNIX sockets which are not a bottleneck.

Re:X is slow? (Re:composite rules!)

[chez69]

that really is not as bad as people think. on linux it all goes over local domain sockets - a memcpy() operation

Re:X is slow? (Re:composite rules!)

[Trelane]

X11 uses UNIX sockets which are not a bottleneck.

Additionally, for more data, apps can use shared memory locally.

Does Quake3 work over a network?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Does Quake3 work over a network? No!

Just tested again, but my memory was right: Of course it works over a network! With hardware acceleration.

I played both via ssh-forwarding (which is a bit slow, because of the compression, but is otherwise perfect) and via normal X protocol (only the XF86VidModeClientNotLocal calls failed (which is a _security_ thing apparently), so it was in a frameless window and not gamma corrected, but really fast enough).

One of the reasons SGI even invented OpenGL, was to get the network transparency right. Its predecessor gl had beed designed for local hardware data transfers and got network forwarding implanted in a somewhat ugly way.

Re:composite rules! - mod parent up

[blahbooboo2]

Thanks for taking my question as a serious question and not me whining etc.

This was very interesting:)

Since when did Microsoft *have* standards?

[Anonymous Coward]

Other than the "gold standard". E.g., "Give me all your gold."

Because really, that's the only standard they have.

I wonder...

[FullMetalAlchemist]

I wonder if it will make it into FreeBSD 5.3, according to the schedule the Ports where frozen on the 3:rd of September; it would be nice if they regarded this a fix for the one in the Ports, otherwise I will use the latest stable XFree86 release.

As long as the S3 drivers suck, I could pick either and not really care; without better drivers my laptop mostly runs a VT100 console with a bit higher resolution thanks to vidcontrol.

I can see you *failed* logic

[Anonymous Coward]

You've utterly failed to see the intent behind the release of the two different types of software - one is like helping a little old lady to cross the street, the other is like shoving her into traffic.

I'll leave it to your logic-addled brain to figure out which one matches up to the release of X11R6.8 and which one metches up with your hypothetical (I hope...) release of a virus.

"Single window" Citrix..

[nurb432]

Umm. they have had that for sometime now, its called 'seamless windows' in citrix-speak. And has been out for at least a couple of versions now.. ( we expiremented with it 5 years ago, might have been beta then.. dont remember now to be honest )

You simply "publish" a single application specify that its 'seamless', and run it as a single window.. no 'citrix desktop' required..

We do it every day now, with hundreds of clients...

Re:"Single window" Citrix..

[jwymanm]

Not only Citrix, but NX easily does this as well:

(UNIX)
1. Run nxclient
2. Select Configure
3. Under the General tab choose UNIX and Custom for Desktop
4. Select Settings
5. Choose run the following command
6. Type any X program you want to run (xterm for example)

Re:"Single window" Citrix..

[Abcd1234]

Umm, that's still sounds like a hack to me. "Publish an application"? Why should I have to "publish" anything? With X, I simply connect to a server and run an application, and everything works.

OOC, it sounds to me like Citrix implements this "seamless windows" feature by placing the application in a virtual desktop of it's own, and the client simply displays the whole thing as a single window. Does this sound right? Or do things like dialogs, etc, pop up as separate windows as well?

Re:"Single window" Citrix..

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you're wrong. The Citrix windows are seamlessly integrated. I.e. if you didn't know you were connected to the citrix server (by noticing the little icon in the notification area) you couldn't tell the difference if a particular Window was running on your local machine or on a Citrix server 4000 miles away. Dialogs and popups are the same way -- just as if the app was running locally.

http://www.itpro.no/images/shots/guide_metaframe4. gif

Solaris 9 x86 needs this desperately

[csoto]

I've been trying the Xf86 ports and vmware driver, but it's hell off wheels (hell on wheels would be fun, at least).

6.7.99 ~ 6.8 major changes?

[kosmosik]

I'am pulling http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux /core/development/SRPMS/xorg-x11-6.7.99.903-5.src. rpm right and will atempt to compile it. :-) But my question (as I cannot get to xorg servers to see ChangeLog) - has anything important changed since 6.7.99 -> 6.8? Or is it just cosmetic release number (with no changes behind it) with the same code as 6.7.99?

Re:6.7.99 ~ 6.8 major changes?

[Sunspire]

There's been some changes since that build, one xdamage fix in particular that's probably worthwhile. Otherwise it's mostly documentation changes.

New Fedora (S)RPMs should be available soon.

Re:6.7.99 ~ 6.8 major changes?

[kosmosik]

I've just finished the build. :-) But anyway thanks for info.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the clear answers. But why do we talk about a "protocol" ? Isn't X a program for displaying stuff ?

Evidently the answers weren't all that clear to you. X is a protocol, not a program. It was designed from the start as a client/server display protocol. The programs that implement X are called an X server and an X client.

(Somewhat confusingly, an X Server is a program that generally resides on a network client, and an X Client is an application that is often, but not necessarily, on a network server.)

At work, we run X Servers on our Windows desktops to run GUI apps that exist on our Solaris servers.

And how about differences between XFree.org and X.org ?

Two different implementations of the X protocol. Specifics have already been answered in this thread.

And OpenWindows ? Are they three implementations of functions (same ".h"s) for displaying windows and drawing things ?

Plain X, by itself, is pretty boring. The windows, for example, don't have any of the trim you expect from a modern GUI. This is where window managers come in. One of the nice things about X is that it is decoupled from the window manager and therefore you have many choices. OpenWindows is the window manager Solaris has used for years (personally, I've never liked it). More information on window managers can be found here.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[Alioth]

No, the X Server is the program for displaying stuff. X11R6 just specifies a standard protocol. The protocol doesn't need to be a network one (and on your local machine, none of the X clients talk over your TCP/IP stack).

Anyone can implement an X server that adheres to the X11R6 protocol (and several UNIX vendors have; in the closed-source UNIX world Sun has their own implementation, and I bet all the others have too, although they may be based on the reference implementation - the old X Consortium X server). In the open source world, we have two implementations (which are very similar but now diverging - the XFree server and the X.Org server)

I don't know the historic reasons for why X was designed because I was only a small child in 1986 (I dare say somewhere on the Internet has the story as to why it was made in the way it was), but separating the client and the server like they have is extremely useful - the client doesn't care where the X server is or what the X server is. It means the client is well decoupled from the implementation of the X server - an X client running on HP/UX will display correctly on an X.Org X server running on Linux and you don't need to worry about DLL hell to make it all work - it just works. It's a very clean design and that's one of the reasons it's lasted so long.

As for the different implementations, X clients (i.e your programs) aren't linked to the X server or its header files. OpenWindows could be a radically different internal design with no header files in common with X.Org's server. What the clients link to is not the X server's header files - but XLib. XLib implements the client part of the deal, including the header files a C programmer would use. And XLib isn't linked to the X Server - it implements the X protocol (and that's why a Linux program written with Vendor A's xlib will work fine with Vendor B's X server running on some completely different architecture).

!X

[RedLaggedTeut]

This is not what X can do. Under X, the servers CPU runs the program, and your GPU helps with graphics.

Under Win98, all the remote OS does is to act as a fileserver. But both the local CPU and GPU work on the program.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[ageitgey]

"But why do we talk about a "protocol" ? Isn't X a program for displaying stuff ? I know we can use remote display on a network with X, but why isn't it only a feature ? Why is X so focused on network terminology?"

The fundamental design of X is different than say, MS Windows. It is always network-based. We have to talk about a network protocol because that is how every X client program communicates, even locally. It's not just an optional feature. Its the entire design.

In MS Windows, you write a program that calls functions in a .h file to create windows, draw primitives, etc. Your program is compiled against some libraries that contain this drawing code directly. If you want to do remote displays across a network, you have to use some sort of add-on software or custom library. If you are coming from this paradigm, what you are asking is a very good question.

The difference is that every application that runs on X communicates over a "network". Whether you are opening Firefox on your own desktop or running an application on a remote server thousands of miles away, the application you are running connects to your X server and sends drawing commands over the "network". There is never any direct link to drawing code like there is in Windows - all commands pass over the "network". Of course if the application is local, optimizations are in place to make this communication very fast and not pass through the OS's networking stack.

This lets you do a very neat thing: Every graphical X-based program you have on your linux desktop can be run on any other X server. I'm not talking about just the few special ones that support it or link some special library. I mean every single program. Since you have to use the network even if you are running locally, to run on a remote server you just tell it to use a different IP address for the display. This is true network computing. The display is just an IP address and a port/desktop number.

Download an X server for your MS Windows desktop. Then log in to a Sun/Linux/BSD/etc box and you can run most any X application. There are a very small number of exceptions (like a program that requires an extention that your X server does not have, I.E. OpenGL for Quake3), but those are very rare.

In many ways, X is the most conceptually advanced and "network aware" desktop display system, despite being designed in the 1980s. Unfortunately, it is also painfully old in a lot of ways and painfully lacking in other, non-networking areas. The concept is really great and it works pretty well, but it would be nice to have a crack at redesigning the protocol based on other advances in computing. But failing that, I'm really glad that X.org is pushing things along and modernizing. The XFree86.org team had basically stalled out in a quagmire of politics and a need to cling to the past.

"just" an X proxy? No. X proxy plus ultra!

[leonbrooks]

NX uses the X protocol with the living daylights compressed out of it and the vast majority of roundtrip queries locally cached out of existence. NX also includes conversion from at least RDP and VNC and is roughly twice as fast as "native" implementations of those protocols. The basic pattern is:

[Client][Proxy][Application]

"Application" might be an X application, X server, VNC server, RDP (Terminal Services) server and potentially others as well.

Yes

[Sits]

Towards the end of the pixmap bug report you can see that one of the developers provided a fix that appears to have solved the problem.

According to the Changelog the fix went in on 2004-08-27 (Fix for XV memory allocation) and is in the branch for 6.8.0.

-ing slashdot and its -ing lame lameness filters!

[leonbrooks]

[NX Client]===nx=over=ssh===[NX Server]===native=protocol===[Application]

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[shadowcabbit]

OK, so let me see if I understand this correctly. An X "server" isn't a server in the traditional (UT2K3) sense, but rather a piece of software which controls the display. An X "client", then, is the software which tells the server what to draw. The server then figures out how to draw it. Is this close to being right? It's a bit confusing thinking that the server is the thing the user deals with directly and the client could be on a rackmount thousands of miles away, but it makes sense when you think about it for a few seconds.

Aside from advanced support for 3D accelerators, what's really missing out of X as it is now?

Re:Having both both "nvidia" and "nv" in xorg.conf

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people don't startx at all these days, gdm or kdm is launched from init!

The XF86Config file itself should "go" (well, it shouldn't, but it shouldn't be _necessary_) - X should autodetect and do something sane in the complete absence of a file, and allow on-the-fly dynamic tweaking of screen layout, color depth and basically all other parameters (see XRANDR, but do it for _everything_, except maybe actual card changes), then allow persisting the current settings to the Config file.

Edit text-file, restart x, edit text file, restart x is NOT ACCEPTABLE on the desktop. I didn't put up with it on my 1993 amiga, for feck's sake!.

Thank XFree for starting this

[Anonymous Coward]

So many people crap all over XFree. We should thank that group for getting us this far. X.org was not written from scratch. Thanks to open source, a new group was able to build upon their excellent work and create an even better product.
We stand on the shoulders of giants.

Re:Thank XFree for starting this

[Anonymous Coward]

It's appropriate to thank them for their past contributions. It's also appropriate to say "thank goodness we finally walked away from them" because their recent history hasn't been good.

I feel much the same way about Richard Stallman. We owe him a huge, huge debt... but his latest ideas are IMHO not good. (He considers any licence but GPL to be a "power play", where the arrogant source code author is imposing his wishes against the innocent rest of the world who are denied GPL code; he is in favor of the government collecting a tax and using that to fund free software development; he won't even say nice things about Debian, the distro that tries hardest to follow his vision of free software.)

Re:Thank XFree for starting this

[Per Abrahamsen]

Well x.org was there before XFree, so saying thanks for XFree for "starting all these" is inapropriate. However, we can thank them for "carrying the torch" during a long time where x.org where going nowhere.

A Guide to X Composite and its eye candy

[GweeDo]

I wrote up a guide to setting up Xorg 6.8RC4 + X Composite with shadows and transperency the other day. These steps should also hold true for 6.8 final of course. Enjoy.

Re:A Guide to X Composite and its eye candy

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, man.

OT: So what happened/will happen to XFree86?

[Leomania]

I've been reading about the XFree86 license issue from time to time, so I think I have that pretty well understood. But I haven't seen anything about what has happened or will happen to XFree86 now that fewer distros (perhaps none?) are shipping it. Did the project just die outright, or is it still chugging along somehow?

Just curious...

- Leo

Re:OT: So what happened/will happen to XFree86?

[kundor]

I noticed that they took down the parts of their website which desperately listed distros that were still shipping them, now that the list is only unmaintained distros.

The XFree86 website doesn't really reflect these issues either; if they are still working, nobody cares.

There is still activity on the mailing list

Re:OT: So what happened/will happen to XFree86?

[Leomania]

I thought as much.

Thanks for the reply!

- Leo

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[vadim_t]

There will be a protocol in any case. What people don't get is that for a program to communicate with a GUI some protocol has to exist. In both Windows or Linux there is a protocol, which is just the set of rules that say how do you ask the GUI to put a button where you want it.

A different issue is what medium you use to send this protocol. X is a separate process on the system, so you need to connect to it somehow to ask it to do something. On UNIX, the most elegant way is UNIX sockets, which work the same way as a TCP/IP connection, except they're faster because it's all done locally. You can easily use a TCP/IP socket instead and instantly get network transparency.

There are other IPC (Inter-Process Communication) ways on UNIX, but they're mostly less comfortable to use, and some just work in ways that would make things more complicated that they need to be. For example, you may have heard of mmap, but if you tried to only use mmap to send commands to the X server it'd almost certainly be much messier and slower than it currently is.

Its doubtful...

[Anonymous Coward]

cuz like XFree86, FreeBSD is dead.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[rakaz]

OK, so let me see if I understand this correctly. An X "server" isn't a server in the traditional (UT2K3) sense, but rather a piece of software which controls the display. An X "client", then, is the software which tells the server what to draw.

Correct. It is pretty confusing, because you have to look at it in a different way than what you are used to it. So, it is pretty easy to get these roles reversed.

Think of it like this: The side which is initiating the conversation is the client (just like a webbrowser). The one responding is the server (just like a webserver). When an application wants to draw something on the screen, it will initiate the conversation, so this is the client. The display is just quietly waiting for somebody to give him something to do.

"Extention"

[nial-in-a-box]

What exactly is an "extention?" Do you mean "extension?" If you did, why not go ahead and publicly make that correction, because a quick search of the comments for this post reveals that a handful of people are using your poor spelling. Don't tell me it's British either, because it isn't. There is only one way to spell the word in the English language.

Re:"Extention"

[tetabiate]

extent?

Re:"Extention"

[Anonymous Coward]

If a majority think extension is spelled "extention", then it's called "extention". That's how languages works.

Re:"Extention"

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Who cares? Get a life! So he mispelled something in a public forum. I know what he meant and so do you.

Re:"Extention"

[Anonymous Coward]

No it aren't.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[swillden]

But why do we talk about a "protocol" ? Isn't X a program for displaying stuff ?

Nope. X is a protocol for sending drawing requests. An X server is a program for displaying stuff.

I know we can use remote display on a network with X, but why isn't it only a feature? Why is X so focused on network terminology?

Some features are just minor tweaks to a basic design that could exclude them, other features are fundamental to the design. Network transparency is fundamental to the design of X. Even when you're not using a remote display, you're always using the X protocol, but over UNIX sockets rather than TCP sockets.

And how about differences between XFree.org and X.org ? And OpenWindows ? Are they three implementations of functions (same ".h"s) for displaying windows and drawing things?

They're all programs that receive drawing requests in X protocol messages and then do their best to fulfill the requests by drawing stuff on a display. XFree86 and X.org are mostly the same codebase as well, but that's not really relevant to their functions as X servers. There are lots of other X servers around like OpenWindows, Hummingbird EXceed, MetroLink, Xi Graphics, XVision, and bunches more. Pretty much any X client application can use any of these X servers, locally or remotely, to display windows and draw things. Some X servers have more features than others, some have better performance than others, some support more graphics cards than others, but all implement the same standard protocol so they're all to some degree interchangeable.

But you asked about differences, not similarities.

• XFree86 and X.org are much the same programs, but XFree86 adopted a license that people didn't like, so much of the development focus shifted to X.org, and that seems to be the Free implementation that is going to be popular moving forward.
• OpenWindows is Sun's proprietary implementation that only runs on Solaris, AFAIK. It's decent but not as featureful as XFree86 and X.org.
• Hummingbird Exceed is a commercial product that runs on Windows, and exists primarily to make it possible to display on a Windows box the interface of apps running on remote UNIX boxes.
• Xi Graphics is a commercial, closed-source X server for Linux and UNIXes that focuses on providing good hardware acceleration and support for a wide variety of graphics cards. Since they get paid, and because their drivers are closed source, it's easier for them to negotiate with hardware vendors for specifications.
• Tarantella XVision Eclipse is another X server that runs on Windows and has some nifty features like the ability to suspend a session one place and resume it somewhere else.
• xnest is an X server that doesn't know how to draw anything itself, but instead sends all of the requests it gets to another X server for actual display. So you can nest an X "server" inside a window on a real X server (and you can do that as many layers deep as you like). This is a useful tool for development.
• vncserver is another X server that doesn't draw anything on physical displays. Instead, it does all of its drawing on a virtual screen, then it can send this virtual screen image over the network to VNC clients which run in a variety of windowing environments and display a copy of the virtual screen. You can even display the same virtual screen on multiple VNC clients on multiple physical screens at the same time.
• x2x is an X server that uses a pair of "real" X servers to do all of its drawing, creating a single virtual display that is made up of two physical displays on different machines. This allows the user to create a two-headed machine without a two-port graphics card, or two graphics cards in a single box.

Those are some examples of X servers and how they differ from one another. There are many, many more, particularly in the commercial X server space, but they all work with all X clients, locally or remotely, and the common thread that binds them all together is the X protocol.

Very simple

[leonbrooks]

The 3D drivers work better on MS-Windows out of the box because if they don't then the card manufacturer sells practically no cards. There has been no incentive for the card manufacturers to write drivers. A stupid, selfish, short-sighted attitude among businesses along the lines of "everything we hoard will make us money" means that very few card manufacturers release any specs at all. Now that Linux has maybe 5% real desktop share (as distinct from market share) and a few serious 3D games, and growing, this will change.

ATI has released some code (albeit only for older cards). XGI have released some code (albeit not for 3D). NVidia haven't released anything significant, but some FOSS people did a "clean room" reimplementation of their NForce ethernet driver and others have bullied their 2D hardware into working reasonably well. The first one to completely break ranks and GPL their drivers will pretty much completely own the Linux desktop market.

There is a thin sliver of the computing population who are bright enough to care but dumb enough to have trouble with manually tweaking stuff. Linux is not yet for them, although distros like Mandrake come close. In fact, MS-Windows is not really for them either, since you often have to do driver-tweaking (and/or registry tweaking) there to eke the last ghasp out of your hardware. Linux is for everyone else, those who don't care about getting 10 more FPS out of their graphics driver or those who give enough of a damn to tweak things to get it.

It may be deprecated, but it's not ineffective

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the time, when I use it I just use it for simple windows. Beats the heck out of waiting for a window on a dial-up connection.

And low-bandwidth X is an extension IIRC - and not all servers support it. Heck, I don't think all client-side implementations support low-bandwidth X. (Hint: Sun...)

Re:how much of this is affecting X11 *the* protoco

[Anonymous Coward]

"I just wish X11 would use my Video card instead of hogging CPU for those purty gradients and translucent windows."

A-friggan-men

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[Slayk]

Slackware was one of the last major distros to change over to X.Org.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[Alioth]

I dunno what you mean by 'advanced' support for 3D accelerators (I'm very impressed at how well RTCW:ET runs on FC2 running the X.Org X server - it's at least twice as fast as XFree86 on RH8.0 on the same machine) but the 3D support is getting better all the time; it's just a real shame the NVidia driver isn't open source.

Talking of games - the fundamental network design of X and the display program being the X server (essentially a daemon) means my Windows-using ET playing friends are envious of how I play the game in Linux. I simply start up a second X server. That's all there is to having two entirely separate desktops on one machine. Just start another desktop. The clients (such as my game) don't even have to be aware of this functionality - they just display to unix:1 instead of unix:0, as set in the DISPLAY environment variable. I can hot key between the two desktops with Ctrl-Alt-F7 and Ctrl-Alt-F8, so I can run ET in fullscreen and easily flick back to IRC.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[strider44]

Perhaps a better way of thinking about it is to embrace a traditional client-server sence instead of thinking about it as "just a piece of software". Imagine your computer was split up into several other computers. You had one computer controlling the graphics, which has a cool video card in it, another computer controlling the sound, and another computer controlling the internet stuff, etc. The computer that you use would transfer messages over the network saying, for example, "I want you do display this now", and it would display it on the screen. You would naturally say that the computer controlling the graphics is a graphics server, and the computer controlling the sound is the sound server, and the internet controller is the internet server.
Linux is modelled off networks, and that is where the server concept comes from. You are right in that the X server controls the display but it is actually a server in the traditional UT2K3 sense. All the programs actually send messages to it, but instead of sending them over the network like in the example before, they just send it through the system directly to the software. The cool part is that the server doesn't need to be on the computer, it can be over the network - the messages will be sent to the X Server along a different path, so instead of going directly there you'll go along wires and cables, but they're still just messages sent to the server, like the "Give me HTML" messages your browser is sending through the internet.
There is actually nothing really "missing" out of X. 3D accelerators are the driver manufacturer's problem, and so far NVIDIA are brilliant at supporting everything, while ATI are crap. It's just accepted now-a-days. X can probably do everything that Windows can, infact even more, though slightly slower in most cases. They're just now getting into the nitty-gritty eye candy like the shadowing and cool transparency, which incidentely I don't think is supported in Windows (Avalon will support it though I'm sure).

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[strider44]

really? I think I'm just getting mixed up with the hoo-haa cause Slackware is usually quite conservative and it was a surprise that they converted to X.Org. All I know is that my distro Debian still hasn't changed over!

Survey says...

[r4bb1t]

For those of you not keeping track of the mailing list, I present you with the following:

http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/xorg/2004-Septemb er/003013.html

For the lazy of you, I paraphrase: someone made an announcement without authorization from the x.org release team.

Re:Survey says...

[chocobot]

damn. I managed to download the first package, the rest were 404s. So they removed the tarballs while I was downloading them. Were they not the final ones? Or will we have to wait for some officials in the team to anounce it? First you get me hot, now I still have to wait...

Re:Survey says...

[ViXX0r]

I managed to download them all very early this morning, but I had an incredibly hard time to get it to compile... it didn't seem to have any idea where it's headers were. Hopefully this will be fixed for the announced release.

nothing found at x.org

[azatht]

I followed those links but I havn't found anything, is there anything I'm doing wrong?

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[jsebrech]

Maybe Xorg will get really gutsy at some point, and give us X11R7.

As I understand it, when they move to the kdrive-based driver framework, they'll bump it up to r7.

Re:Having both both "nvidia" and "nv" in xorg.conf

[Anonymous Coward]

Dunno. Perhaps the modularized version will solve this.

Drop Shadows

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm having my drop shadows tattooed on. Who's the 1337 mofo' h4X0r now bitch? Say my handle, say my handle...

When will XOrg appear in Debian GNU/Linux?

[fernique]

I have found the answer on this question here.

Why did it take FOUR years?

[formal_entity]

Windows 2000 had *true* translucent windows. Why did it take the open source community four years to implement it?

RPMs

[a3217055]

Now where can i get the RPMS for FC-2 for xrog. :)

Why not?

[metamatic]

The Xcomposite extention is still not stable, but it works well for some people. Why not give it a shot?

Because I run Debian, you insensitive clod!

Re:Having both both "nvidia" and "nv" in xorg.conf

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI's driver already drops back to 2D-only mode when it can't load the kernel driver. I think either the distro makers/driver programmers need to recompile these modules at boot-up whenever they become outdated, or NVIDIA should adopt ATI's approach. Granted, NVIDIA's Linux support still rocks ATI, but the 2D fallback feature is quite helpful.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[Vizzie]

Almost right.

At some point in the early 90's, MIT turned the X Window System over to the Open Group (which also owns the UNIX(tm) trademark and compliance tests). TOG has been providing the reference implementation all along, and is the keeper of the versioning scheme. In recent years, XFree86 has been the development center for the most popular implementation of X, based on TOG's reference implementation. For the most part, TOG hasn't coordinated any development effort, they've just occasionally released the Reference Implementation with patches from major contributors, including XFree86.

TOG, under the guise of x.org, still controls the reference implementation, and XFree86 still maintains their own implementation. The difference since the license change is that X.org, X developers and major contributors such as HP and Sun have joined forces to create the X.org foundation, which is coordinating development efforts for the x.org/TOG reference implementation.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[alecthomas]

Alot of politics went on and alot of people got angry, which caused the birth of the X.Org foundation, which is now industry backed and also backed now by most major distributions such as Slackware (I think they were the first?)

Actually, Slackware were among the last to switch to X.org.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[strider44]

Ah yes, you're right - though for the MIT thing I was meaning that they still use the MIT versioning system as opposed to MIT controlling what version releases what, which is true. That and the slackware thing. (/me fingers the hypothetical "edit" button)

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[dpilot]

Can you tell me more about kdrive? After a bit of searching and reading, I see that it's a rename of TinyX, and I get the impression that it's a bit of a RISC philosophy applied to Xlib. In other words, Xlib had lots of primitive capabilities that today are getting bypassed in favor of more sophisticated rendering. So they streamline/speed the render path, then move the old primitive capabilities on top of the new path, giving an overall simplification.

Is that close?

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[Blakey Rat]

X can probably do everything that Windows can ... except copy and paste correctly. ;)

And it's still years behind Aqua in OS X. But since Linux users mostly compare things to Windows and not Aqua, X11 needs to get its butt moving to compete with some of the advancements Microsoft is making in Longhorn.

hoax

[astrokid]

Apparently the announcement was a hoax:
more information will be released later today.

Announcement"

----
on Wed, 08 Sep 2004 13:34:10 +0100 Alan Cox wrote:
>
>On Mer, 2004-09-08 at 09:10, Linux Power wrote:
>> xorg 6.8.0 released
>>
>> http://freedesktop.org/~xorg/X11R6.8.0/src/
>
>Link missing from /~xorg btw (that still only has 6.7.0).
>
>Alan
>

we know.

someone made an announcement without authorization from the x.org release
team.

leon
----

Re:hoax

[chocobot]

it can't be a hoax because I mnanaged to download the first package from the adress. Then someone removed the packages while I was downloading them. So I guess they will be put back there later today. So keep refreshing....

VSync Support in X

[ikhalil]

Is it there any hope we can have VSync feature in the X server in the forseen future? (Like in MAC OSX)

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[iabervon]

What was just released was X11R6.8.0; this is the latest in a series going back to the original X. What this is is the X distribution, which includes a lot of things like clients, fonts, libraries, and so forth. For a long time, it didn't include an X server, because there wasn't an X server that they could distribute, because this distribution was supposed to be cross-platform, and there wasn't a portable X server.

What XFree86 would do is get the latest X distribution, add an X server for x86, and release the whole thing. XFree86 had its own version numbers, which were the version of the server. The version of the X distribution was reported in the release notes.

There was also some discussion of the X distribution changing license to something not compatible with the GPL, which meant that XFree86 took over from the X consortium as the trusted open source organization.

Three things happened: XFree86 started supporting non-x86 platforms, and became a reasonable thing to include in the portable distribution, the license-changing mumbling on the X distribution side ended (with a change of organization), and XFree86 had developer interaction problems and changed license. This meant that X.org, now in control of the X distribution, decided they had to take the standard back, took the XFree86 server, put it in the X distribution, and announced themselves open for development on the complete system, including the server and the libraries.

What you have is actually X11R6.6 with XFree86 4.3 added, packaged by the XFree86 folks. What was just releases was X11R6.8.0, which includes a new X server derived from the XFree86 one, but with further development at X.org.

X11R6 is the major version, which is to say that all X11R6 programs should be able to interoperate (although they may end up figuring out that they need unsupported features, and not actually work). X because they felt like it, 11 because that's when they got the protocol design down, R for "release", 6 is where they got the protocol contents down, and we're now up to .8.0 of things that didn't break X11R6.

Application Publishing

[nurb432]

The reason you publish today is to support their web based interface/portal, 'nfuse'...

This gives you the ability to launch any application from a secure web page, giving the appearance that its running on your local machine, with all the advantages of clustering of your applications on the 'big boxes' back in the server room. You also get a really low network profile, ICA/RDP is pretty network friendly. And the client is multiplatform ..

Before Nfuse, the admin would stick items in your start-menu for you.... you click on "word", and poof, word appears.. The user never knows the difference.. ( this can still be done, but they are pushing the 'portal product' like everyone else these days..

You can still publish a complete desktop for Winterm type users..

And yes, to answer your question, dialogs and pop ups are in separate windows.. this is NOT some 'desktop hack'..

You can also have stateless or statefull connections.. Something raw X is not too great about, you loose your connection, your app/desktop closes..

You might try to get a chance to take a look at their products, you might be pleasantly surprised.. they are however, really damned expensive... I only have worked with the windows based products, since 'winframe', but I guess they also have the same sort of product based on Solaris too..

Re:Application Publishing

[arkanes]

It's actually a _total_ hack, as the "local" app has no idea it's being displayed locally and obeys the servers concepts of things like screen geometry and decoration. Citrix is okay for what it does, and it's probably the best you can get out of Windows, and it certainly has features that X doesn't, but X provides a much stronger base for remoting, especially single applications.

It's a good hack, but still a hack.

hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/xorg/2004-Septemb er/003013.html

Vanity-thy name is drop shadows.

[Anonymous Coward]

"They look good."

Well ray-traced graphics with photon-mapping look good too. When's that coming to a windowing environment? Gosh darn it! I want all that so I can be vain too.

Re:Vanity-thy name is drop shadows.

[orasio]

You bet that I will have real-time photon-mapping rendered 3d backgrounds as soon as I have the spare GPU (yes, GPU) cycles to do it!

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[jsebrech]

I'm not really up on things either, but as I understand it tinyx/kdrive/xserver was a rewrite from scratch, and has a vastly simplified architecture and a modern build environment.

Mod parent up, Quake 3 works over network X

[Sits]

The parent post is correct, Quake 3 DOES work over the network providing the "server" supports GLX extensions. It won't be super fast but it's better than you might expect.

It will certainly be interesting to see what the effect of using OpenGL surfaces for most windows would make... I wonder what effect limited texture memory would make.

Re:Having both both "nvidia" and "nv" in xorg.conf

[Rick and Roll]

Write a Perl script, that runs XFree86, checks the exit code, swaps in the nv file if it fails, and re-runs XFree86.

Or find someone else that has already done it.

Re:Having both both "nvidia" and "nv" in xorg.conf

[Risto]

make 2 layouts one callled 'nvidia' and the other 'nv' then run startx -- -layout nvidia || startx -- -layout nv easy, eh

screw you command line hippies

[slimyrubber]

I want my desktop to look sweeet.

I think cartman said that. Dont quote me though.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[kundor]

compete with some of the advancements Microsoft is making in Longhorn.

Methinks you've missed the news. ;-)

And copy and paste in any modern wm is much superior to the windows world.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[mce]

You got it.

It's not confusing at all, provided you start from the correct point of view. :-) Seriously: a server is an entity that offers a service, a client is an entity that requests to use the service. This actually is the only definition that logically holds up in all possible application areas of the client/server concept.

Whether or not the user directly deals with something is irrelevant. Besides: when I'm typing into an xterm, am I dealing with the xterm client, or with the X server program? Honestly, as a user, I don't care for one second about the answer to that question, but if I really want/have to answer it, I'd actually rather think of it as dealing with the xterm client, not with the X server.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not happy with this explaination either (in terms of XFree vs. X.Org). I think they were planning to break away from XFree86, even before the licensing change. There was planning of an x.org release on the old xdg-list back around November 2003).

There was a lot of acrimony between the two groups, as evidenced on the xfree-dev mailing list, even before the split.

ATI?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear all of this about how nvidia chips run X more smoothly with all the fancy driver options enabled and whatnot, but what about ATI? Are there speed-enchancements for ATI chips, or anything to get it running faster? I can recall the last time I used Linux and Xfree86 with an ATI card, and it wasn't exactly great.

Eccentric moderation

[fnj]

It was just a simple question. Anyone out there understand why this is classed as a troll?

Sorry, I don't. Seems eccentric to me. Too bad there's no system for moderators to attach short explanations so we would know what they were thinking.

Then again, since labeling a post "troll" is an ad hominem, there might not be terribly interesting to the moderators' line of thought in this case. See Troll

But growing towards what?

[jbn-o]

Now that Linux has maybe 5% real desktop share (as distinct from market share) and a few serious 3D games, and growing, this will change.

Perhaps, but if the drivers are proprietary then we stand to gain virtually nothing. Our community doesn't benefit from being treated as a market. If the card manufacturers are willing to work with us and release complete specs that can be developed into free software drivers or license code to us under a free software license, I think many would be willing to enthusiastically encourage the purchase of those cards.

If the GNU/Linux OS grows toward popularity and gives up software freedom this OS will never become popular enough to compete in the way that will make Microsoft Windows a less attractive option. But if GNU/Linux popularity increases on the basis of keeping software freedom then we will have something to offer which no proprietor can compete with -- something which will constitute a genuine contribution to society.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[Brandybuck]

There are a very small number of exceptions

Now there are. But wait until all of these new server extensions become expected functionality for the clients. You mentioned OpenGL, but what about all of these posts under this story hoping for the 100% OpenGL based GUI? What happens when the desktop itself demands OpenGL?

I'm thinking that the traditional X client/server model is going to collide head on with the everything-is-local model people from Windows and Mac expect. Applications are going to be written expecting the server to be local. If the application expects and assumes XComposite to draw the widgets, and the server doesn't have it, what happens? The application may very well be running, but it's not going to be very usable.

Think I'm crazy? You get this right now with certain fonts. A font that looks good antialiased but crappy when it's not, is going to look crappy when its displayed on a non-XFree/Xorg server, such as OpenWindows. Now imagine that every translucent composited region on an application's display were rendered as solid black...

I really don't want to see a world where Xorg clients are only usable on Xorg servers.

Not exactly released

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol Slashdot got also pulled in this mess.
Just a clarification of the posting. 6.8 is actually not released yet. Someone on the development team jumped the gun and the the trickle down effect took its place. The *official* anouncement is now taken down and the stable release is still to come.

Sorry for the disappointment.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[jimfulton]

Here's some ancient history:

X11R6 just specifies a standard protocol.

Nit: X11 is shorthand for "Version 11 of the X Window System protocol," which was released in September 1987 (X10 had been in use from late 85 until then). The Rx originally indicated the X Consortium's release of the X software (X11R2 was the Consortium's first release in February 1988; R3 was October of 1988).

I don't know the historic reasons for why X was designed [with clients separated from servers]

The network-transparency was designed in from the start due to a confluence of needs. Bob Scheifler of the Argus Group in the MIT Lab for Computer Science wanted to have a system for developing and debugging networked systems. MIT Project Athena (from which X, Kerberos, Zephyr, Hesiod and various other systems sprang) was looking at how to create a common environment across a variety of types of workstations donated by Digital and IBM; allowing applications to run large computers on the network and display on different flavors of workstations was a way to keep people's sanity.

So, Bob took a copy of a Unix port of the "W" window system (written for the V kernel) that Chris Kent had done with Paul Asente at Stanford, changed it from be synchronous to asynchronous, and dubbed it "X" (from then on, we teased him that we'd never let him name anything again :-).

The early version of the X protocol (up through X10) were focused on fixing various things that came up as the system was ported to different architectures. Initially, the design center was referred to as "3M": 1 megapixel, 1 MIPS, and 1 megabyte.

The X server was quickly ported to a variety of workstations, to DOS, and to terminals. At the time, it was one of the few places where warring companies came together to bring a little bit of unity.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[David Gerard]

X.org has learnt this the hard way when they encountered the exact problem you describe: Xft wouldn't work properly if the right font stuff wasn't on the server, so adoption was poor; so Xft2 will drop back to blasting a bitmap across if the right extension isn't present on the server.

Remember that Jim Gettys was one of the original designers of X from its inception; he's REALLY BIG on backward compatibility, and wants to still be able to proudly declare that 2004's X clients will still display properly on a 1987 MicroVAX running the same protocol.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing that confused me when I first encountered X was people telling me "oh, it's the opposite way round to the way you think" - and it certainly wasn't, in my case!

This is cool-A Blend(er) GUI.

[Anonymous Coward]

"X.org is a good thing....yeah...bring on the Aqua-like eye candy I say."

Blender does it's GUI using OpenGL.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[triso]

"They're just now getting into the nitty-gritty eye candy like the shadowing and cool transparency, which incidentely I don't think is supported in Windows"

Support for this eye-candy was added in XP and it has been provided by the nvidia driver since 2002. I don't know about ATI cards.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[be-fan]

Let me try to put things simply.

X is the name of the windowing-system project invented at MIT in the 1980's. It was the successor to 'W' (stood for 'Window').

X.org, formerly the X Consortium, a bunch of industry-types (HP, Dell, DEC, IBM), tasked with developing X.

XFree86.org started as a port of the X code to PCs, and for much of the late 1990's and early 2000's, was the standard-bearer of X development.

Freedesktop.org is an umbrella project for *NIX GUI development.

At MIT, X went through several incompatible protocol versions, culminating at X11. Version 11 of the X protocol is what most servers speak today. MIT then formed the X consortium, which continued to develop X.

At some point in the early 1990s, what would become XFree86 forked from the X Consortium code, and was intended as a distribution for PCs.

The X Consortium and XFree86 continued make releases, and merged code between them periodically. At some point, the X Consortium was renamed X.org. X.org releases went up to X11R6.6. XFree86 releases, which maintained their own version number, went up to XFree86 4.4 (4.3 corresponded roughly to the X11R6.6 code). During this time, XFree86 was the primary developer of X11.

After a license change at XFree86, and concerns about it's slow pace of development, X.org and freedesktop.org forked the XFree86 4.4 code (just prior to the license change), and released X11R6.7. X11R6.8 is the latest release from X.org/freedesktop.org

There is a great, detailed history here.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[be-fan]

X11 itself is just a protocol. It specifies a byte-stream for getting programs to do things. This same byte-stream can be sent over fast IPC on a local machine, or over a network link. XFree86, X.org, and Sun have particular implementations of servers that support the X11 protocol.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[be-fan]

Even if you got to a 100% OpenGL GUI, you'll still have network transparency. OpenGL has a couple of quite good network protocols. The older one is GLX (which is what most people support now), and the newer one is called Chromium. OpenGL, like X, was designed from the beginning to allow network transparency.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[be-fan]

You've got the general setup correct. It helps to think of the X server providing "display services" to all the client applications that want to display something.

X supports advanced 3D accelerators about as well as Windows does, though not quite as well as MacOS X does. A lot of the work after 6.8 will be on getting X to support 2D on OpenGL like Longhorn will.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[be-fan]

Well, with X11R6.8, it's about caught up with OS X. Work is already underway to get X on OpenGL (like Longhorn), and the Cairo 2D graphics library already has good OpenGL-based acceleration.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[be-fan]

You're conflating a couple of things.

kdrive is Keith Packard's X server, a rename of TinyX. It's not a complete rewrite, but is based on XFree86's (and now X.org's), device-independent code (DIX), coupled with it's own device-dependent code (DDX).

The Xlib replacement you're talking about is XCB, which is a library designed to simplify access to the X protocol from sophisticated clients like Qt/GTK+.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[dpilot]

Thanks for the clarification.

It's good to see this kind of progress happening on X, again.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[Anonymous Coward]

An X "server" isn't a server in the traditional (UT2K3) sense,

On the contrary, it *is* a server in the usual sense - a program that manages a resource (the screen, input devices), accepts requests from clients (e.g xterm) to do something with that resource (e.g paint a window), and communicates back to the client.

Anti-Aliasing in Server

[Anonymous Coward]

> This release brings real translucency and allows
> one to set values on different windows...

What is the state of adding anti-alias font support
in the server? I tried to find some 6.8 release
notes but didn't have any luck. I assume it didn't
make it in. Any info?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

To add to the others replies

[Joe Tie.]

Keep in mind too that a linux distro is very up to date with the latest technologies. WindowsXP is pretty long in the tooth at this point, and even that wasn't all 'that' much different than Windows 2000. I imagine a linux distro from back then would run at a pretty swift speed as well.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[Brandybuck]

But what good if OpenGL network transparency when my local system still doesn't have a decent OpenGL implementation. Besides the commercial Unix systems like Solaris, I'm also thinking of my laptop which has a "mobile" video chip that doesn't have a 3D engine.

The real reason the release isn't there yet is...

[lesterchakyn]

Maybe the 6.8 hiding thing was because of Bug 1060
http://freedesktop.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10 60

It's basically a "problem" that causes a library not to be built (libXp.so.6) by default, and this library is used by several programs (both the blackdown and sun java runtime binaries for starters, so these won't run, crashing your browser).

I sincerely hope that this library gets built by default, it doesn't hurt anyone...

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[be-fan]

Well, obviously, if your implementation doesn't have a good 3D engine, you won't be able to use the new apps that require one. X.org will continue to support non-3D systems, of course, and if the apps draw through Cairo, the X server will use software-emulated RENDER instead of OpenGL. If software-emulated RENDER isn't fast enough, and you don't have OpenGL acceleration, then you probably shouldn't be trying to run such a graphically-rich application on your machine.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[strider44]

I'm talking about software transparency. Hardware transparency has been available through the NVIDIA drivers for just as long. In fact, I use it with XFree86 v4.3 on Debian.

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[Anonymous Coward]

xnest is an X server that doesn't know how to draw anything itself, but instead sends all of the requests it gets to another X server for actual display. So you can nest an X "server" inside a window on a real X server (and you can do that as many layers deep as you like). This is a useful tool for development.

It's also a useful tool to keep Gimp windows inside another window. Something that refugees from Windows Photoshop seem to want.

Working mirrors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone have working mirrors??? Does it need magic to compile, or is it easy to get working?

Better yet, anyone can point me to suse 9.0 rpms :)

Re:Working mirrors?

[num42]

At the moment the only working mirror i found was ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/X11/X.org/X11R6.8.0/tars/ . I downloaded and made a torrent of the tar.gz's: http://zaphods.net/~zaphodb/torrent/xorg.X11R6.8.0 -sources.torrent happy seeding, ZaphodB

Torrent file for X.org 6.8.0 sources

[Anonymous Coward]

http://irom.homelinux.net:6969/torrents/Xorg.torre nt?67AA3979FC740EA715382F7775F4C6A19A8DA37C

Our community does benefit from market share

[leonbrooks]

Once the manufacturers get used to the idea that we'll turn specs into gold code at no charge, and they'll sell more boards as a consequence (which is why it's as important to us to have visible market share as to have real desktop share) they'll kick themselves for not having boarded this particular bandwagon sooner.

They've got to overcome decades of negative "take it or leave it... and die" conditioning from Microsoft to reach that point, though.

panel/monitor

[Hayl]

anyone know what the panel/monitor in the top right corner of this screenshot is? http://img38.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img38&image=screen_ lynucs_1759409500411796a9ba106_1.jpg

Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers.

[Brandybuck]

and you don't have OpenGL acceleration, then you probably shouldn't be trying to run such a graphically-rich application on your machine.

The problem is that everyone and their uncle on Slashdot is advocating doing EVERYTHING in OpenGL. While I personally think this is ridiculous, they are serious about it. I have no illusions about runnning 3D applications on my laptop. But the future may be requiring a 3D engine to render every 2D X11 primitive.

Everything in the near future might be a graphically-rich application, rendering them unusable on most laptops, thin client, or anything with a non-Xorg server like Solaris, Exceed, ReflectionsX, etc.

Do I need a monster graphics card for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got an old Matrox G450, which has decent (but not terribly fast) 3d capabiities. Can I still take advantage of this?

Apple's Quartz Extreme requires a graphics card, for example, with 16MB of RAM and the ability to draw textures of non-power-of-2 sizes. Does this require that, too?