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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.)
Anyone else think this article sounded a bit more superhero than it turned out to be?
No.
To me, it sounds like a man named Rasterman responded to some criticism by two men, one named Seth, another named Havoc.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
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.
Well, I run an Athlon64 3200+ with accelerated NVidia drivers but I can't drag or resize an opaque window smoothly. I can't do it under WindowMaker, KDE, GNOME or even E17, and the problems are in the X Server
Ah. There's your problem. The nVidia drivers blow goats for X. They are about 2MB of 3D drivers and "application specific" optimizations for 3D benchmarking programs. The don't care about some linux desktop user - they sell cards to run 3D benchmarks on gamer websites.
Their implementation of the Render extension is a little bit faster than a granny with a crayon. Oh, and the drivers crash my machine once every three weeks or so too, and seeing as they run in kernel space, they crash things very effectively. That's totally unacceptable - it was the only thing that took my machine down.
I can watch my screen redraw with the nVidia drivers. One version actually had a 2 second pause whenever I switched virtual terminals, for no apparent reason. Needless to say I reverted to an older version of the drivers.
I eventually had a sense of humour failure and got an old ATI card (9200) and use the open source X.org drivers. Suddenly I have a usable system again.
Try using an open source driver with known-good 2D acceleration, and make sure it is enabled. I was so badly burnt by the closed source nVidia drivers that I'll never run closed source drivers again.
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