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Rasterman Responds To Seth And Havoc
An anonymous reader writes "Rasterman, of Enlightenment fame, has responded to Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington's blog entries, which were in reference to this previous article. about Next gen X rendering. Raster says: 'Well it seems the XDevConf has produced some interesting blogs and discussion. I'm a bit sad I was not able to attend (no funding at all), as there seems to have begin a lot of discussion and moves in directions we in Enlightenment land have been going for years, and are likely far ahead in. I guess this means we haven't been able to share our experience in this. Maybe next year. Anyway the point is that this has started up some musings from Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington related to this. This is great - finally people are beginning to take seriously what the Enlightenment crowd have been talking about for years.'" (Note: the previous post was about Nickell's post, not the other way around.)
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=9791
has alot of responces from raster on this subject so its worth a read and there also seems to be some progress on the whole debate
Is this going to be the final straw? Is Gnome really going to tank like Enlightenment did?
The writeup had no link to Rasterman's response. Unless the writeup WAS Rasterman's response, but that seems a bit weak to me. I'd like to know more about what Rasterman felt on these topics. A blog entry with some meat on it, some details about WHAT is "the right direction" and "what we've been saying." If this is all there is, well, (yawn).
[
Seth's proposed improvements over the current X11/Xorg server sound very nice, but what about the core speed issue in X. X has come leaps and bounds over the past 5 years or so but still "feels" extremely sluggish compared to a similarly equipped Windows XP machine. I know it's comparing apples to oranges since X is network-based but still...
Anyone have any ideas if he plans to address performace as well?
- Cary
--Fairfax Underground: Where Fairfax County comes out to play
I read rasterman's post expecting to find whining about how enlightenment isn't getting enough attention, blah, blah, blah....
Instead I want to go install it when I get home. Weird. I suppose I could try something new... :-)
philcrissman.com.
He's right. Enlightenment has been blazing new
trails as far as desktop graphics.
But..
what is this story about?
It is just a link to the previous blog entries,
then Rasterman saying "Wow, wish I could've
been there. All that stuff they are talking about,
Enlightenment is ahead in, but it is neat that
they are thinking in that direction."
I'm not one to usually whine about "this is news??", but.. um..
Well, I'll just assume somebody forgot to link
somewhere.
So, good luck to Havok and Seth, and good
work Rasterman. I look forward to
seeing a news story with information
and hopefully delicious screenshots.
Note: the previous post was about Nickell's post, not the other way around.
Ah, thanks for qualifying this. Now it is about as clear as a galaxy full of dark matter.
... are there any screenshots?
Don't call me a cowboy, and don't tell me to slow down!
Must be tough on the ol' ego to be a casualty of the VA Linux days. Heady time, heady times.
i had no idea all the stuff going on with Enlightenment (haven't used it for years), but after reading what Rasterman had to say, i think i'll begin checking Enlightenment out again. Does it play well with Fedora?
It's not enough that people don't read the articles? Now Slashdot is actively discouraging them from reading the summaries?
Anyone else think this article sounded a bit more superhero than it turned out to be?
"Rasterman Responds To Seth And Havoc"
RasterMan, defender of good finally reengages his age old enemies Seth, and his evil master Havoc.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Just because you write open code doesn't mean you have chosen poverty.
There are plenty of organizations that sponsor open source development as well as several large companies that hire and pay people exclusively to write open source code.
My employer is one of them. (Starts with 'Red', ends with 'Hat')
Tuesday, 22 February 2005
:) He mentions "A sophisticated drawing layer" (read his blog for the full text). We have that - Evas. it can accelerate via OpenGL, it's got a FAST software renderer. It can render to the Linux Framebuffer. It can render to memory. It can render using DirectFB. It can render using *GASP* ... Cairo! It can display in Qtopia. We can add new engines for new targets with little effort. Evas scales down to rendering at usable speeds on embedded devices (100-600Mhz ARM CPU's, limited RAM etc.). He discusses a toolkit that aggressively takes advantage of this - we have been working on EWL and Edje. Edje is a lower layer theme/layout system, with EWL being a full widget set on top of this, giving you whiz-bang themes with widget layout built on top of an Evas canvas with everything punting down to the rendering layer at the bottom there. We are doing our own Window Manager - and the day Xrender stops sucking, we will add compositing to it too - re-using all the layers we already have to do this. We have a low level acceleration mechanism (OpenGL) but its too unstable for use IMHO. This is a problem that needs fixing and is something that needs to be addressed.
:) Hundreds of snowflakes driving down the screen... E17 has a toy module for just this... and flames to burn them up as they hit the bottom of the screen. All with glorious alpha blending. He speaks of animated background desktops with things like grass blowing in the breeze - We do that already in E17. The desktop BG is an Edje file - and thus is capable of all the animation and effects Edje and Evas offer. In fact take a look at the following 2 video files (they are jerky because xvidcap is jerky and thats just how it is - in real life they are smooth as a babies bottom - you just have to see these things "live" to believe it. Also note - this has NO hardware acceleration. I am hoping one day to have acceleration available that is good enough for production use).
Enlightenment the experimental toolkit
Well it seems the XDevConf has produced some interesting blogs and discussion. I'm a bit sad I was not able to attend (no funding at all), as there seems to have begin a lot of discussion and moves in directions we in Enlightenment land have been going for years, and are likely far ahead in. I guess this means we haven't been able to share our experience in this. Maybe next year. Anyway the point is that this has started up some musings from Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington related to this. This is great - finally people are beginning to take seriously what the Enlightenment crowd have been talking about for years.
What I'll go into is some of the things Seth and Havoc talk about that we have already done and are well under way or very mature. Things we have advocated for years and have already solved - quite optimally. Our designs are forward-looking and just WAITING for drivers to catch up and stop "sucking". I could write essays about the many ways to address this issue alone (XRender), but I won't go there this time. I've been there before.
First let me talk about Seth's blog. He discusses "Next-Generation Rendering For the Free Desktop". This is great. this is just what we need... oh wait. it's just what we've been DOING for years!
Now he goes on to say what this will enable: "Toolkit themes that draw with layer blending effects" - Done. EWL, Evas, Edje. "Indiana Jones buttons that puff out smoothly and animated clouds of smoke when you click on them". OK - we don't have the smoke - but we have all the animation, glinting in the light, fading, glowing, sliding, etc. etc. etc. We have an entire engine devoted to just this (Edje), a theme description language, compiler, scripting engine, compressed theme format usable "live" without installation etc. He goes on to talk of "Alpha transparency whenever you want" - Done. Evas. Live window thumbnails - XRender has to improve something WICKED for this to be sane.
files/e17_movie-02.avi
files/e17_mov
A full release of enlightenment is something I dearly look forward to. DR16 is, for my purposes, the best wm available for linux. I cannot live without the drag bar! That is, of course, when I'm not using my mac...
I would like to see some of enlightenment's features integrated with my aqua mac. Any suggestions?
I can see where he is coming from, but for all the hype the E team generate over their amazing new libraries, how many apps actually use them? As far as I can tell, basically none. I don't know why that is though.
If people expect him to be somewhere, and he can't, maybe he owes them a good explaination?
I suppose he could just say, "I'm Batman," vanish inot the shadows, and activate his lurking device, but that might lack a certain something.
If you choose to write open source code, you are chosing to have no money.
Hello? Free software != software for no money. Free software == software without restrictions.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
the vids on his site are amazing! the theme he's got on there is ugly as sin, but seeing through that and looking at the tech behined the whole thing, and you see what the future could be.
all the nice effects that mac and longhorn will be doing next year could be tied into xorg/gnome within 6 months.
all rasters stuff is on freedesktop.org, so it's all open.
in a perfect world, someone like novell would hire raster to work with the gnome xorg devs. get evas+cairo into the desktop stack, and have gnome 2.12 running with some amazing eyecandy.
i wish i was but oh well
You, sir, are a magnificent bastard and a glorious ass.
It only sounds resentful if you are looking for resentment. It is a simple matter of fact -- he could not afford it as he and his project are not funded.
Another fact: his lack of funding is contrasted by the fact that others, who are only now investingating issues he has already implemented are well funded.
It is what it is -- factual. So keep your "you got what you asked for" attitude to yourself, thank-you very much.
...out of control. That is beautiful. Yeah, yeah, on my for-fun desktop only, but hey, that really is beautiful.
He was probably disappointed he could go... but nowhere did I see him being resentful. I think you're reading too much into his statements.
Do you have some kind of agenda against people with no money?
And in other news:
e17 to ship with Duke Nukem Forever!
Rasterman, you're brilliant; but in the immortal words of Guillermo Díaz :
Wrap it up B!
put the what in the where?
Which makes it, in essence, software for no money. When was the last time you paid someone for free software?
I'm happy, hope you're happy too...
sulli
RTFJ.
Since when were Rasta's avid Gen-X'ers?
Yeah, there were a lot of issues there and a lot of unhappiness all around.
One of them was that North Carolina just sucks, which is why we now have an office in Westford, MA.
So take the Pepsi challenge -- check out E17 for yourself and see if he's full of shit.
Because they change the APIs and do complete rewrites all of the time. E is not a serious desktop environment for people who want to get things done or develop software
The last time someone paid for OSS? Oh, I don't know, maybe the last time someone purchased a Red Hat commercial OS?
I could make my code open source by including it in packages users have purchased from me. That way the code is open, the software is unrestricted, and I get paid for it.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
The OSNews story has a link to a FC2 yum repo in one of the coments, but I haven't found a source repo for those packages (I'm on PPC, so I need to rebuild the packages :().
about letting other developers know that he and the project exists.
I mean to most people his next-gen enlightenment desktop shell is going to come out around the same time that Duke Nukem Forever game comes out.
Maybe, I don't know, be nice and try to get the attention of other developers. I understand that they are doing cool stuff, and tried it out myself a couple months ago.
but I get the impression that enlightenment just likes operating out of a vaccum.
A few weeks back when I "bought" a copy of Azureus. A few weeks before that, when I "bought" a copy of hotwayd. In fact, I've spent more on OSS than I have "commercial" software! (excepting games, that is)
If someone makes a good piece of software that helps me out a lot, I like to reward their efforts. I value the "Free" aspect more than the "free".
If you choose to write open source code, you are chosing to have no money. That's your choice. But dont complain about it.
Open source is not an end itself. With some celebrity exceptions, open source exists because someone solved a problem--often a business problem--and released the solution to the public.
Why would they give it away? Because they have no interest in trying to sell it. Selling shrinkwrap software is a tough business, most people would rather focus on whatever it is they're better at. They stand to gain much more by open sourcing it than they would keeping it in a vault, or trying to sell it.
That's part of the problem. While Raster's done a magnificent job -- and frankly, it's pretty mind-blowing -- he's completely not concerned about backwards compatibility regarding toolsets. Again, what he's done is amazing but it's basically a canvas, not a traditional toolkit.
The OSS GUI world is so deeply rooted in Qt/KDE and GTK+/Gnome that there's no chance at *all* that people will adopt his APIs for the next gen display system.
Red Hat's people are concerned with achieving this kind of stuff without too deeply breaking source compatibility. If they can pull that off, my hat's off to them.
That said, red hat's people can learn a *lot* by working with Raster. Clearly, his code is fast, and his technical design's good. But the model is likely inapplicable to traditional widget toolkits.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
E17 is a window manager. Can it replace metacity and run in the Gnome Desktop Environment?
More like infamy - at least to anyone that's followed E's development for any significant period of time.
Get something working, then throw it out and start over. Repeat constantly until any semblance to the original working copy is destroyed and all their dedicated beta (alpha/cvs) users are alienated to the point of not even using the "stable" (beta) E release.
That said, the Enlightenment team has turned out some amazing work (imlib2, etc.), and it's a shame to see the recycling destruction that takes place. If they were to be lest "artistic" and concentrate more on getting something working for the masses "out the door", E would still be an incredible and highly-advanced wm. We'd likely also have a slew of 3rd party apps built with imlib2 (et al), all on top of technology which would blow away gtk and qt. It's really too bad nobody forked the project and took what was good from E as they went along to create something perminant.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Well, a lot of e16 libraries are widely used on *NIX. ImLib2 is the top example. If the e17 core libraries are half as good as promised, you can bet you'll see them used a lot aswell.
;)
Yesterday, just for the sake of it, i emerged (installed on Gentoo) Evidence, e17's to-be file manager. I was hoping to get a glimpse of the e's login manager (Entrance), but for some reason i typed Evidence. It looks great, and even silly things like clicking on an icon and see it zooming transparently in the background makes you see what these guys can do with e's core libraries. Rasterman is right, what the X team is talking about as "next gen rendering", they can do now. He's well entitled to want to make it public.
And yes, one has to give kudos to Rasterman and the whole e17 team for that matter. They are putting a lot of work into e17, and it shows. I just hope they just finish it someday
Frankly, I don't think there _is_ a speed issue with X11. There are performance issues on XFree86/XOrg with some (many) drivers, AFAIK mostly due to limited developer time and limited access to hardware. The fact that the current software RENDER implementation is not signficantly optimised, and few drivers implement RENDER hardware acceleration, does not help.
Working on my NVidia equpped box here (GeForce Ti, nvidia drivers, but for 2D 'nv' is almost as good) X is much snappier than I usually find WinXP to be. Turning on RENDER acceleration has helped a lot.
I'm sure folks will bring up the "because of the network" myth up here, so let's get this straight - any slowness in X is not because of network support. Go ask Keith Packard, I'm pretty sure he's been rather clear on the matter more than once. My personal, very much non-expert understanding is that most performance issues peope experience are due to limited hardware acceleration and inferior drivers.
If you don't believe me about how much difference the hardware and drivers make, go find an S3 based system, preferably S3 Trio32/S3 Trio64, and compare it to a PCI-based (to keep it fair) NVidia GeForce 4 MX on the same hardware. It's like they're two totally different computers - the change is jaw-dropping. I use thin clients a lot, so I care strongly about video performance and tend to notice these things.
It's also worth noting that hopefully many of these plans will lead indirectly to performance improvements, by making RENDER acceleration and RENDER optimisation pretty much mandatory.
If they develop Linux for long enough, they will end up with Windows.
The same is true in reverse.
In other words.. STFU.
Last Fall, I had a serious focus bug in Enlightenment (e16) that would lock my mouse to a particular region of the screen and require X server restarts. It would usually happen at the worst time, when I was working fast (busy!).
I worked with e-team member Kim Woelders on the problem and he produced a couple of patches after I sent him some good reproducible test cases. We exchanged a total of 39 email messages and it was finally fixed. I'd usually have a patch within 24 hours of sending him a test case.
All of that while they are busy trying to get e17 out. The work that the team does is amazing and I am very grateful.
To say that I am a fan is an understatement!
About --> Enlightenment...
...and a dialog box pops up that says "version 0.16.999.001". I've never used E, so maybe the version number isn't funny in Rasterman's world...but it's funny in mine.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
but this is why i switched to mac os x. one, i had the cash to drop on a powerbook. and two, i love the beautification that apple decided to do to the desktop.
when i use linux i use enlightenment because of the same reason. when it comes down to it, i surf, read email, listen to music, and use terminals to connect to the boxes i work on. so any OS will do.
that given, i want my sh!t to look good. i want my apps to work happily together like the brady bunch. and they should look better than than the skanks off of OC or whatever wo/men float your boat.
and as for raster saying he has no funding, i took that to mean he didn't go not out of spite or not wanting to take part, but that he didn't have the cash to spare on that.
Ok, I know that the Enlightment project is more about creating a graphic toolkit that a complete environment for end user. But having the technology doesn't mean that you could use it.
For what I've seen the window manager "experience" is far away from something pleasable, after the Wow factor is over. I've never been a fan of wallpaper drop-down menus, in WM nor in other "1st generation" window managers (those that have been on Linux for a long, long time without major usability revisions). Just how many times does he open a two level menu just to check/uncheck the gadgets "edit" mode?
Also I remember that the E desktop had to be configured through hand-editing the text files. Although they promise that "It will provide nicely integrated GUI elements for managing your desktop elements, both files and windows", if this elements are as annoying to use as the dropdown menu then the environment will not have a good workflow.
It's great to have a wonderful platform to build upon. But until something that I can use is actually built, I'm not downloading this.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
someone can put torrents of the videos?
Rasterman left Redhat because he felt noone there really followed his vision of an X desktop. Here we are years later and we've come full circle. Now, many (if not most) users in the community are looking for highly customizable desktop eyecandy and Gnome, KDE, and Xorg are all out there trying to deliver on what Rasterman was doing 3 years ago.
As suggested in this previous comment...
What about starting from an API that's already got OpenGL bindings and acceleration, and using GNUstep instead of inventing a new library?
he is just calling you a cheap bastard. cause you are one.
when doing your taxes, is a number other than 0 in the charitable donations box?
i doubt it
You don't make money by selling "free" software. You make money by providing services using free software.
Which is as it should be, instead of insisting that people give you money for something which can be copied for pennies.
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=9762&off set=60&rows=75#337521
[ Rayiner Hashem (IP: ---.dc.dc.cox.net)]
"I think the "sad" part refers to the fact that this sort of technology has been ripe for the picking for years now, but only know are people getting around to looking at it, and only then because they are following Microsoft's lead. Interviews, and its successor, Fresco, have always belonged to the "free" camp, unlike competitors like Motif. Yet, the modern Open Source projects have catagorically refused to look at the technology until Microsoft pointed it out to them."
So once again, directly or indirectly, the OSS crowd is chasing tailights.
...copy of Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month so he can figure out why the code he wrote years ago isn't being used.
Hint: Get the payroll sheet of an established software product company. Count up the number of programmers on the sheet. Also ask the programmers how much of their time is spent typing code. Put your findings into the context of the overall company. Solve for X.
But isnt Rasterman the guy that wrote UltraHLE?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
"Just because you write open code doesn't mean you have chosen poverty.
There are plenty of organizations that sponsor open source development as well as several large companies that hire and pay people exclusively to write open source code."
The total number that needs to eat, outnumber the total number in the last catagory.
I' reading these posts, and I'm confused, probably because they're addressing different issues than I'm focused on when I think of X. And because I don't know enough about X.
I think the problem with X is not features, and libraries on top of it, but rather that the basic core concept in an X display is a bitmap.
The problems with this are: slow communications, and lack of scalability on different displays. The classic cure for this was display Postscript, which had problems of A. Copyright, B. Bloat, C. Large blocks files of code to do small things, D. Arcane syntax.
There has to be a better way. But what I'm seeing here is all applications and libraries for use by applications on top of the bitmap based rendering. There are some things mentioned which I recall being replacements for this engine, but certainly Enlightentment DR17 is all on top of the X bitmap system, right?
Any movement on chucking that in favor of a bitmap independant system?
When was the last time you paid someone for commercial software?
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
"Which is as it should be, instead of insisting that people give you money for something which can be copied for pennies."
That's assuming that the costs of software development are solely contained in the distribution, and duplication aspect.
some demo videos from mirrordot:
here and here
Does anyone know whether there are actual DR17 packages downloadable other than building it CVS?
my blog
"Open source is not an end itself. With some celebrity exceptions, open source exists because someone solved a problem--often a business problem--and released the solution to the public."
A fine aspect as long as society doesn't make it a condition of living within it's purvey.
Kind of funny considering he works for VA these days. VA Japan to be exact
"The OSS GUI world is so deeply rooted in Qt/KDE and GTK+/Gnome that there's no chance at *all* that people will adopt his APIs for the next gen display system."
So the OSS community pissed away their window of opportunity, and then complain about the bed they have to lie in?
The other day I was playing a video through VNC with tight's Java applet (just for fun) and was getting maybe 10-15 fps and goofing around and noticed something amazing: the Java applet was much faster than the native exe (like twice the fps with no pauses). So that got me thinking, why isn't the X server written in Java?
If you think about it, Java is perfect for the X server: it's a long-running process so start-up time is not an issue, and dynamic inlining of the code would be a great performance advantage. There's only one instance running so the memory hog-ness is not a problem. Since the cards do all the major work, the main job is managing lots of little bits of information (thousands of tiny windows, strings, events, clipping regions, etc). That's the kind of thing Java is great at doing.
I mean, despite there being maybe a 1.25-2x performance loss on actually decompressing the tight-encoding, the Java VNC viewer was still faster (I presume) because Java lets you focus on better algorithms and data structures rather than all the piddly details that don't amount to much in the end. About the only drawback would be the garbage collector, but normally this runs in using the X server would basically take 1 instruction, which is much faster than malloc.
Enlightenment is BSD. Let's keep it that way!
First of all, did I just read a story that gave all the background to Rasterman's response, but left out the actual response itself? Nice.
I've always liked the Enlightenment project, and I try to keep up-to-date with what's going on (which is not easy), but it seems pretty clear to me that it will not be the future of the Linux desktop.
E is not really a valid option for the OSS world - I wouldn't be surprised if more people were using XFce or Rox than E at this point. Sure, Linux itself has proven that if something new and amazing comes around and blows everything away by a large margin it may have a *hope* of shifting the momentum, but as great as E is, I doubt it is that impressive.
The reason why the framework Seth+Havoc describe will win over the E stack is because it is integrative, whereas E is not. When the next-generation X rendering system is in place, it will be available to everyone who uses those extensions. Probably by the time Damage + Composite are enabled by default on X, the latest KDE + gnome desktops will have support for them. And all the applications in those respective desktops will quickly (if not instantly) gain those advantages. Remember when the same thing happened with anti-aliased fonts a few years ago?
Yes, you can get the E magic right now, but you have to go through E. As long as they remain the sole gatekeepers, you can expect them to have the same extremely limited influence they have now. At this point in the game, I seriously doubt they can beat the inertia from the other desktops. Honestly, if you're developing a new application, are you going to develop for the mature and distributed kde or gnome desktop environments, or will you use E, which is available now with some ephemeral advantages but some serious disadvantages?
It's also true that by using E you're not committed to using _only_ E, but then, what's the point? If you use E + some random GTK application, you're not going to get the consistent graphical features until GTK itself gets those features... but at that point all gnome applications will have them.
The example of the Cathedral and the Bazaar is a good metaphor for these differing stacks. It seems to me the E project has always been fiercly exclusive in the way it does things - the whole Enlightenment Foundation Libraries are the best example of reinventing the wheel with E technologies. But the cost they've paid is limited deployment, slower releases, less interest and a rather narrow development strategy. Certainly that may suite some people fine. However, with that in mind I don't know how reasonable it is for Raster to be calling sour grapes.
http://www.talknerdy.org
"It's really too bad nobody forked the project and took what was good from E as they went along to create something perminant."
That depends on were the value of E lies. Is it in the code, or is it in the E team and their vision? The former can be forked easily. the later is much harder.
Xfree (and derivatives, X.org incl) is optimized for throughput, not interactivity. IOW welcome to the world of high latency. Even Linus has complained about this on numerous occasions, and it's not going to be fixed without a total rewrite.
Also note that Xfree is single-threaded, so it's bound to suck at serving up multiple window GUIs no matter how it's 'fixed'. see here for more on the official kludgy way of improving X interactivity...
He's completely correct about E and all the cool stuff it does NOW, and will do. The problem is that the project lives its entire life on the CVS and dev-list. They need a PR person on the dev-team that will let people in on what's going on.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Hmmmmm.... I'd love to see the wxWidgets toolkit ported to Enlightment. Don't know if it has been done, or if it is possible at all.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
"They need a PR person on the dev-team that will let people in on what's going on."
And what does the above mean, when placed in the "the code is the documentation" and "use the source, luke" context?
I know this is hard to understand for some, but eye candy isn't the primary purpose of a desktop, usability is. A desktop using just black-and-white pixels can be far more usable than one with shadows, transparency, and all those other features.
Also, people should remember that neither Apple nor Rasterman invented features such as the use of translucency, blurring, shadows, etc.--they go back many years in the academic literature as visual clues.
Furthermore, support for translucency itself has been discussed in the X community pretty much since the day X11 was released, and the reason for not adding it has been a high cost/benefit ratio. It's only now that hardware has gotten cheap and good enough that many people can use this, and that toolkits are starting to use it, and that people have the software engineering side under control that people are getting around to adding this feature to X11. From a practical point of view, that's probably about the right time.
This guy is just sick based on his motd, and his X11 xdm setup found here.
A) Bowie rocks
B) Go team Venture!
It got slashdotted before I could check them out, does anyone have a mirror or a torrent?
I have it compiled and working on Gentoo. Works well for beta code. I haven't run into to many problems.
;)
First Impressions: It's FAST and has some nice eye candy.
This may be the first Window Manager to get me to move away from WindowMaker
Can't we have some more hints on whats in between the two ?
TCAP-Abort
writing a desktop manager from scratch ? Lately E17 has been getting a lot of my attention, and as of today, the media. I used to love enlightenment (0.16). I used it in everything, after the project died a couple of years ago, and just stopped using it. A year or so, the proyect got revived. I tried it again, it was cool, since none of the Linux Desktops seems to implement anything that enlightenment used to have. I dumped it again, it was unsuable for me, since I'm competly used to gnome, and the compatibility with gnome sucked also. E17 is getting usable, at least for most people, and I read the blogs from Seth Nickel, Havoc pennington and Rasterman. I read what they have to say, and I agree with Seth and Havoc; in order to compete we need to begin creating innovation in the graphics department for linux. I believe Rasterman's has a point also, For all I can see on the videos, Enlightenment has most of the things Seth and havoc propose. The problem is not exactly the features, but the way the features are provided. I read on some of the forums for the article on osnews, and some one said that those features would be really cool if they would be implemented on a lower layer, so that Gnome, Kde or even Enlightenment could use them. I think the problem with enlightenment is the fact that is focused on rewirting the wheel. I agree that the wheel is quite amazing, and it has cool features. But enlightenment is still moving to become a desktop manager. I understand that the nature of open source is to create software in different ways and implementations. But why is enlightenment a write from scratch dekstop manager ? Why not expand gnome or Kde ? This is the same case with the looking glass project. It is a really cool set of features, I agree. But they are also creating from scratch. Linux will not advance to peoples desktops if it is not consistent enough. I know some people will think, "Linux is full of options, and that is how it should be". The freedom to create from scratch. I understand all that stuff about freedom and I support it. But the idea that some Desktop manager implements some really cool features, and embeds it so deep into their framework, so that no one can reuse it, is definately a selfish view of open source. So this is what I think would solve the problem: Begin a project to incorporate most of the features in a lower layer, in fact borrowing from proyects like enlightenement, to make the features available through the X window system. And that project should be created by the freedesktop.org project. I think desktop managers should become users of features, instead of implementors, in order for Linux to get to the desktop faster. Gnome could use the features in some way, and Kde in another.
But I think the point that RasterMan was claiming is that innovation happens here. It is so fast, that it seems to be complete before it's even discovered.
Here's what Havoc et al are going to do. They are going to get a hold of RasterMan, or at least his code, and examine it thoroughly. Building upon his concepts, they will develop a better solution that will bring RasterMan's ideas into the mainstream world.
The E project may never be accessible to a large crowd. That's not the purpose of E, and you can see it in the tone of RasterMan's post. The E project is around to innovate and push the edge, and experiment. That's a very different goal from the Gnome, KDE, and FreeDesktop projects.
RasterMan should be very happy that his work is going to be used and spread around the entire community. I don't know what more he could've asked for.
This obliterates the concept that Open Source software is just copy-cat software. Yes, we have projects who copy-cat, because they are looking for stability and usability, not innovation. But we also have projects that are trend-setters and the research institutions of our community. While we won't use their software, we should still support them.
This is just like in the real world of science. There are research scientists (like RasterMan.) Nobody ends up using what they do directly. Then there are the engineers (like Havoc) that incorporate the best ideas into a working product that everyone uses. We build on each other's strengths.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
The last time someone paid for OSS? Oh, I don't know, maybe the last time someone purchased a Red Hat commercial OS
And you're buying the technical support when you do that. If all you want is Red Hat you can download it.
I could make my code open source by including it in packages users have purchased from me. That way the code is open, the software is unrestricted, and I get paid for it
Then you're not selling the free source software, you're just giving it away at the same time you're selling something else.
The point is that while at an abstract level free software doesn't have to mean you can't sell them, 99% of the time you're not going to sell them because you're taking away any inccentive to actually pay money for the stuff.
For those looking for a little more Meat check out the DOCS over at Enlightenment.org
I have installed the libraries and have been screwing around with it in my spare time for about two weeks. The docs are a little outdated but give you enough info, so that you can figure it out just by looking at the header files.
once more into the breach
Bongoman, don't give up!
Congoman, live up, yeah!
Binghi-man don't give up!
Keep your culture:
Don't be afraid of the vulture!
Grow your dreadlock:
Don't be afraid of the wolf pack!...
A friend of mine worked for RedHat for a while. From what he told me, the management seemed especially Dilbertesque, which is sort of surprising considering the sort of company it's supposed to be.
He ended up leaving and going back home
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
my god they are soooo much better that e in terms of usability. even KDE is better.
True, snowflakes and fire are not necessary. However, I have to say there is something about using a slick UI that makes me actually wanna work. I sometimes, depending on mood, have various desktop images or even none at all. At Apple - yes, I use OS X - they developed the whole Graphite 'theme' for people who work in the color industry as less color on the desktop distracts artists/image people less. So I completely believe UI has a big affect on a persons productivity.
The clock on the video reminds me of the new OS X Tiger Dashboard . They are pretty much a ripoff of Konfabulator which is something I've been using for a while now. But the way the Dashboard widgets work - flipping, spinning, etc - have some appeal for me. There's just something to be said for stuff that really looks cool and works just as well.
So when I see some kick ass eyecandy, that object get's my attention. And as long as I can turn it on or off at various levels or have enough control of it, then it starts to get my admiration for a sweet environment. And once it get's that, then it's a pleasure to work in. Once that happens, work is, er sometimes, fun and the actual process of being productive becomes less of a chore itself. This is why OS X excels - because it provides all kinds of eyecandy but also stays the hell outta the way.
I specifically stay away from Gnome/Metacity or XP desktops because I think those guis leave much to be desired (however, hats off to Gnome guys for at least making something with some kind of community behind it).
Gnome does remedy this a little by having better placement of buttons and things - human interface guidelines? - (more Mac like and opposite of XP, of course), but overall, they're just clones of the Windows95 space and frankly, quite uninspiring to use. Couple that with the more frequent use of Gtk# via C# via M$, and I don't see much of the Linux desktop innovating over the stuff that E already has.
Yes, maybe no one is writing anything based on much of the E libs, but there's something to be said about following or working with a project that inspires people to use it instead of the same old same old. But then again, if Gnome is positioning itself to be more friendly to those that will jump the Windows ship in the future, then I'm sure they don't lose much sleep at night over their decisions.
and why not buy a cabinet instead of building one yourself.
guess you dont have much interest in doing anything yourself. you do it yourself so it is how you want it, precisely. not just so that its good enough.
btw, even that theme in the article's movies, are far far prettier than OSX
And thank god they did because now we get the gorgeous usability of Gnome 2.8 instead of being stuck with stunningly beuatifyl, but nightmarish to use Enlightenment. Rasterman just doesnt get it when it comes to developing for users, not lett hax0rz
Rasterman's comment feels like he is reclaiming some lost honor. The blogs mentioned talks about stuff that Rasterman and the enlightenment team talked about 4 years back when OpenGL proposed a way to get nice hardware acceleration to the linux desktop. However, neither the X people nor the gnome people seemed interested then and so enlightenment went it's own way.
Today, enlightenment has implementations of these technologies while the X- and gnome-people are starting to realize the benefits of them.
While not all of E17's EFL would be appropriate for use in gnome, I feel that evas is spot on to what is needed and it would be a shame if the wheel was reinvented. A port of GTK+ that used evas as it's back-end would be great, and would open up a lot of oppourtunities.
I tlod rHat there years ago we neid to do this.
Wyh didnt thye undrestand!?!?!
--
Raster
But not everyone is fortunate enough to have one of those jobs.
Compare the number of open source developers in the world with the number of those who write it for a living. Then compare that number to how many write open source software they want to write and get paid for it as a vocation.
So when is RedHat going to step up, Mr. Nitehorse, and hire all those other developers? Hmmm?
We eagerly await your call.
Michael Jennings | HPC Systems Engineer, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab | Author, Eterm (eterm.org)
Unless you are running some WM like fresco
[http://www.fresco.org/; aka 'Berlin'], hardware acceleration is of little use; there is no (major) software using OpenGL as a backend to render a 2D GUI, thus repeat after me: this is not the acceleration I was looking for...
If the Xorg guys keep up their pace, you might soon be right; but for the moment moving windows around you desktop does not require this nasty binary-only piece-of-junk software from ATI/NVidia.
It's not up to us to hire everyone on the planet who writes open source code in their spare time, and that wasn't the point of my post.
The point of my post was to point out the logical fallacy in the parent post, which was the assumption that coding free software dooms you to a life of poverty.
But, getting back to your post... You remember that scene from Office Space, where Peter's talking about how he never had an answer for the stupid question about "What would you do if you had a million dollars and didn't have to work anymore?"
This is what I'd do. I'd contribute to open source projects and write code and fix build systems and play with this stuff, because it's what I did when I worked at other places and it's what I did when I didn't have a job. If you don't happen to have that kind of passion for it, that's ok, but don't expect a call from us anytime soon. (And I did this for about four or five years before I got hired at Red Hat.)
Your sig just made me spit coffee at my screen.
Well done sir.
after using e17 since the day it hit cvs (for probably the past month, it's been the default wm on my desktop machine and the *only* wm on my laptop), I've found it surprisingly beautiful and impressively stable (for cvs). There's a lot of magic coming up to e. It's also true that you have to use it to really understand what I mean about the beauty. Try some of the new apps built off the EFL (there's a file manager, image viewer, rss feeder, etc, etc), but cvs is very active, and I can't wait to see this wm armed and fully operational.
[ you and I are ugly ]
That's what I would do too. But that's not really the point.
While you may have been trying to make the statement "coding free software does not doom you to a life of poverty," your diction was such that the resultant message received came across as, "no one who codes free software has an excuse for being poor because I'm not."
Michael Jennings | HPC Systems Engineer, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab | Author, Eterm (eterm.org)
That's part of the problem. While Raster's done a magnificent job -- and frankly, it's pretty mind-blowing -- he's completely not concerned about backwards compatibility regarding toolsets.
This is fine, because Havoc's completely not concerned about backwards compatibility regarding user interfaces. X has NEVER brought windows to the front when they are clicked in until Havoc. All because a bunch of X Microsoft Windows people started using his WM and couldn't figure out the basics of mouse-focus with regard to cut-and-paste. They are used to clicking anywhere in a window to bring it to the front, and the mouse-focus doesn't do that, "It must be a bug." I can't figure out why you would want mouse focus AND the click to bring to the front feature. If you want that, use click focus. At the very least only do it for the primary button and even then only if a clickable item (button/url) isn't being clicked on. It is so very nerver wracking to have to cut-and-paste from a forground window to a hidden window, and have it keep popping to the front.
AAARRRGGGHHHH!!!!!
Sorry, I think Metacity has driven me insane.
it's pretty logical, really.... .66 or something where they decided to change it to 1.0.
enlightenment has always been one of those not-officially-final sorts of applications that never dips above the version 0.x stages; e users have come to accept by now that e-0.15 will be followed by e-0.16 and e-0.17 in succession. It's kind of like gaim used to be up until about
Anyway, the 999 was to symbolize the approach to e17, and it works well with things like portage's method of versioning as well, i think...but, the earlier versions of releases were also labeled with a _pre* suffix. This suffix got in the way, so recently the team dropped it and replaced it with the *.001, giving them plenty of room (999 releases) before they have to call it e17. All this, of course, barring a rewrite.
got it?
[ you and I are ugly ]
Why cant you scale a line/rectangle/bitmap?, how do you map a high res vector to a low res bt map display?
Is there any need for a "better desktop"
"These things important are not"
But where X goes beyond the desktop, where it's infrastructure will really be most use full, where transparency, layers, alpha, and 3D effects will be most important. When these are used in overlay with real world, real time display. The technology is already here for low power LED direct to retina projections. These thing are being developed and this is the next step.
to quote the man"Do you know what the man is saying? Do you? This is dialectics. It's very simple dialectics. One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions -- you can't blit vectors, you can't go out into bitmaps, you know, without, like, you know, with fractions -- what are you going to map on, one quarter, three-eighths -- what are you going to do when you go from here to vectors or something -- that's dialectic physics, OK? Dialectic logic is there's only love and hate, you either love something or you hate it."
"This is the way the fucking world ends! Look at this fucking shit we're in, man! Not with a bang, with a whimper. And with a whimper, I'm fucking splitting, jack!"
Soundproofing Acoustics noise
No, pixelisation only happens on pixel displays. If you had a true vector display, it would be (presumably) drawing natural lines, like with a pen, so you wouldn't have to antialias at all hopefully. Could work quite nicely... except I wonder how it would draw photos with decent performance and fidelity
Before the advent of 3D acceleration and OpenGL, there was... 2D acceleration. X can, in fact provide 2D acceleration if there is a driver for your display adapter's chipset. Trust me, there is a HUGE difference between using a generic X driver one that is specific to your chipset and it has nothing to do with 3D. Stop being an idiot Mr. Troll.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Rasterman has completely missed the idea of an interactive desktop with this version of E17. The project with its vast arrary of libraries is missing one component: a true physics engine.
Let me illustrate:
The desktop in one of the videos features a nice forest, full of trees and grass (things which easily catch fire). Suddenly, the bottom of his desktop catches fire. All at the same time some snow starts falling from the sky and some new trees suddenly "appear" on screen.
If there was a true interactive desktop, all the trees and grass would catch fire and the snow would slowly extinguish the fire. I'm disappointed. Until this is fixed, I refuse to use E17. I think it needs a physics engine.
has featutred window iconification for a few weeks now.
New feature development is progressing rapidly. If you fetch and compile from CVS ever few days you'll notice new features or bug fixes or tweaks.
That's what I love about open source!
You must be from the Mid-West..
You mean the prophet Emperor Haile Selassie I.
Well, a lot of e16 libraries are widely used on *NIX. ImLib2 is the top example. If the e17 core libraries are half as good as promised, you can bet you'll see them used a lot aswell.
Really? What else uses them? Nothing comes to mind... Gnome used to use imlib in 1.x, but not for many years...
deb http://soulmachine.net/debian unstable/
Really? What else uses them? Nothing comes to mind... Gnome used to use imlib in 1.x, but not for many years...
./ won't let me post the whole list, but some highlights are:
,fluxbox, fvwm, icewm, pekwmm, waimea &
Well, this is from grepping the Gentoo's portage tree: linux packages that require imlib/imlib2 as a dependence, or can use it for extra functionality. Took a while - it might have errors, and i removed some stuff that doesn't count, like imlib bindings to different languages.
gkrellm (and all it's plugins), endeavour, entity
freeciv, kdegraphics (yes!), kuickshow
sylpheed & sylpheed-claws, balsa
gimageview, scrot, iv & qiv, feh
zphoto, digikam & gphoto
kakahai, qvwm
xzgv
scigraphica, frontline, epsilon
mplayer, ffmpeg
gnophone
amsn, bitchx
idesk, 3ddesktop
fluxspace
mlterm & eterm
qtpixmap
amaya
Hope that's enough. Imlib1/2 is not as common as it used to be, but it's still a very useful library, used in a lot of packages.
You may want to try my build script which I wrote.. http://xenon.conception.co.nz/~tmasky/e17build.sh Saves you a bit of time =)
http://lycos42.free.fr/e17/cvs/
1) backwards compatibility is a red herring; GTK+ 3.0 will be incompatible with the 2.x series, just as 2.x was incompatible with the 1.2.x series. they're going to rewrite anyway, so they have an opportunity to grab what they can use from EFL.
2) the OSS GUI world is deeply rooted in Qt/GTK+, but, again, GTK+ is going to have an incompatible rewrite. all apps will have to have large chunks rewritten for the new toolkit.
3) Red Hat != GNOME/X.org. Novell, Sun, Fluendo, HP, and many others have top GNOME and X.org hackers working for them.
your entire post is based around "it's incompatible", which is completely baseless. the next generation of toolkits is throwing away compatibility anyway, so it's the perfect time to adopt new ideas like this.
The folks that are doing desktop work for Novell and Red Hat will have this stuff released and integrated into major distros long before we ever see E17 in a released state.
E17 has been in the works for how long? And I can't even get the whole thing out of CVS yet, much less a release-quality tarball(/RPM/DEB)?
Maybe E17 is farther along than the website indicates. In that case, they need to get some people to talk publically about it. Coming out of the ol' basement once to bitch about what you have that isn't being used doesn't count.
2. I write open source code, and I have money. Not wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, but more than most people I know.
It seems that you're focused on the value of a single commodity rather than on the whole web of economically significant interactions that includes that commodity. And if you think that you can predict whether proprietary or free software will maximize the value of that larger web of interactions, you are delusional. My own guess is that it won't make all that much difference either way to the overall value created, but that free software will shift the benefits more to the consumers and away from the biggest producers. But unless you're a lot better economic modeler than anyone else out there, the best you can do at this stage is to guess.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
As everybody is going on about Enlightenment and how it's so great. I agree when Enlightenment came along it was great and I think in terms of vision Rasterman did the world a big favor. I don't think Enlightenment is the way to go. (Not becasue of the technology)
I think one of the strengths of the OpenSource community is to learn from projects. There is a reason why Enlightenment is not the default Windows Manager for Gnome. There is a reason that EVAS is not the default layer or imlib2 not the default image library. I think mostly politically.
The fact is Linus still controls the Kernel not because he is technically the best but because he can play the politics balance great new features with what is needed.
The Gnome team has done a great job and the value of what Raster has done is in learning what works and what not. But the politics still needs to be played on several levels and thats where the gnome team comes in.
yada yada yada
no resent. he just thought it was a bummer he didn't get funding to go. this is his HOBBY project!!! and he's kinda relaxed about it even ("maybe better luck next year" he writes)
honestly, you are being a prick. raster does great stuff in his spare time and releases it for the world to use, for nothing at all...
Reharding #1 and #2
I don't know how much GTK+ breaks with major revisions. I do recall, for what it's worth, being able to port non-trivial programs from Qt 1.x to 2.x and then to 3.x with ( in most cases ) no more than updates to the build system and a few one-liners.
Now, I'll be the first to say that GTK+ as an API is broken from the start -- I tried it and no sir I didn't like it. It is *not* a well designed API -- but that said, it does work and I imagine that if 2.x were completely incompatible with 1.x then nobody would have updated apps from 1.x, XMMS not-withstanding. People did port, and I recall many documents on gnome.org explaining how to transition code.
My understanding is that GTK 2.x, while not 100% source compatible with 1.x, was at the very least semantically compatible, which means it's not *that* hard to port.
Going from an API founded upon the notion of nested widgets with clear update rects and paint clipping to a scene-graph canvas approach would be a significant difference. It might even have a significant impact on event delegation. This would be non-trivial to squish into GTK or Qt, and if it weren't forced into their models, it would result in a new API that simply didn't *work* like the old one.
Regarding #3.. well, no shit. But the discussion was in part about Havoc and he works for redhat.
Regarding your final statement. Well, yes my argument is based on the notion of incompatibility and for good reason. I know I wouldn't want to rewrite nautilus or inkscape or whatever for an entirely new API, and neither would you or the people maintaining hundred kloc repositories. Your statement that the next gen toolkits thow away compatibility -- well, only at a superficial level ( and of course internally they change ) but the semantics of the interface will at the very least be similar to aid in porting.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
X has NEVER brought windows to the front when they are clicked in until Havoc.
Absolute and 100% pure BULLSHIT. _Many_ WM's have done raise&focus on click before Metacity.