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Xorg and Desktop Eyecandy
BonoLeBonobo writes "Xorg is going to include a new acceleration architecture which will help desktops to have better eye-candy effects thanks to a better XRender, thus composite, acceleration. Developped by Zack Rusin, a KDE and Qt developper, this new feature should be present in Xorg in September. Porting the existing drivers to this new acceleration architecture should be easy."
Double dandy.
Even so,
No girls handy.
Fix your face,
Reveal you're randy.
Burma Shave.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
You will be accelerated. Resistance is futile.
so we added more eye candy !
open source in a nutshell
Start an X12 already. Why add all this crap to this ancient X11R--what--6? I really don't understand.
This will mean more than simply being able to easily take out possibly unwanted cruft out of X packages (stuff like xcalc, xterm, etc). It will be pretty easy to put just the X server libraries and binaries on one computer and the X protocol libraries and applications that use them on another.
I'm sure you could do that now, but it would require a lot of work.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
I've been looking to change the font on my command line.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
I am less inclined to care about the look of it, and more inclined to care about reliability. At home, yes I want a nice looking gui, but at work, i just want it to run.
Speaking of eye candy and reliablity/faithfullness- reminds me of my wife, although she is neither...
Sort of like my cell phone- I don't care about features, I just want one that actually gets good reception when used as a phone....
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
An article about Desktop Eye Candy which has no screen shots to show off said, "Eye Candy"....
Some one find some screen shots or we will have nothing to talk about.
Because that's what any linux desktop really needs -- more useless eye candy.
Don't worry man, all the artists use Windows.
Porting the existing drivers to this new acceleration architecture should be easy.
<sarchasm>
Except for NVidia!
</sarchasm>
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
I don't want to judge, but based on the page layout, this server is about to get fried. Article in question:
:) ) along a document on how to implement composite acceleration sometime next week. All the cards which don't currently have a maintainer but are using XAA will be ported by me, as soon as I get the respective hardware in my hands.
As some of you know I've been working on bringing in KAA to X.Org to replace XAA.
XAA is nowhere near being enough for the modern desktop usage. It's plagued by being rather complex and incapable of properly accelerating XRender.
The two main goals of our new acceleration architecture were:
1) properly accelerating XRender,
2) being as simple as possible.
The first one is aimed at making sure that people can run composite manager on very low end hardware for as long as Xgl isn't ready to go mainstream. The second was set to make the transition as simple as possible for driver developers.
That's exactly what the new architecture achieves. For the purpose of this email lets call the new acceleration architecture Exa. It's heavily based on KAA. It incorporated the memory manager from KDrive which does wonders for the common desktop usage.
So lets get to the question everyone wants to ask and that is: how do I get a usable xcompmgr with the new architecture?
1) include "exa.h" in your driver and load exa,
2) use the code from XAA primitives for solid-fills and screentoscreen copies to implement Exa's Solid and Copy hooks. So no real changes at this point.
3) create an ExaDriverRec structure and fill in the accel hooks.
4) call exaCardInit(exaDriver, memory_base, off_screen_base, memory_size, offscreen_byte_align, offscreen_pitch, flags, max_x, max_y); to let the system know what are the capabilities of your card. This is really a convenience macro and you may fill in all those individually if you prefer that.
5) exaDriverInit(pScreen, exaDriver); once you connected yours hooks and setup your card.
6) replace xf86AllocateOffscreenArea with calls to ExaOffscreenAlloc
This should be enough to get a more less usable xcompmgr on your hardware.
Now if your hardware is below 1.5ghz you want to implement two more hooks:
- DownloadFromScreen,
- UploadToScreen,
this should be enough to get you happy with the basic composite manager on any hardware.
Now if the transparent windows aren't enough and you want things to be way more fancy, implement the last of Exa hooks meaning the Composite hooks. I'm planning to write a paper sometime early next week on how to implement composite acceleration and DownloadFromScreen/UploadToScreen
hooks in a simplest/best manner on typical hardware. So don't worry if you're not certain about how to do it quite yet.
All in all the code is available at:
http://ktown.kde.org/~zrusin/dev/exa-snapshot.tar. bz2
I'll be here to respond to any questions. If there's anything you think is silly, I'll be more than happy to change it.
I refuse to add acceleration hooks for low level primitives (e.g. lines). At this day and age it really just doesn't make any sense.
I will also provide a sample ATI R200 driver implementation (didn't feel like cleaning it up today
I want to make sure the following things are very clear:
1) Exa can coexist with XAA. You can keep code for both in your driver.
2) Exa doesn't depend on any changes to the Xserver. Once we'll feel it served its purpose we can simply remove the exa dir and the relevant driver code and we'll be sure that no cruft has been left in the server.
3) As everyone can see adding Exa support to a driver which already has XAA support is trivial.
4) Following the 7 steps I outlined above will speed up the common desktop usage by quite a bit. Note that you don't have to be a driver developer to switch any of those drivers. Note that this also means that we can easily give the u
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
Can we expect the typical bloat that comes with other KDE/QT applications?
I think its great that X is getting a universal architecture for this sort of stuff, but I'll be disapointed if Rastermann and others dont have some sort of input in this, mainly because DR17 is showing me how *fast* this sort of thing can be (faster than KDE in the case of DR17 and a 2 second boot-time on my AMD 2600+).
As for applications made using the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries.... wow...! Entice is absolutely amazing, totally dynamic and animated, as well as mainly transparent, perfect for an image viewer.
The point is that you don't realise how USEFUL these sort of features are. Why shouldn't menus in an image viewer fade in and out and be semi-transparent? When you use it, it makes perfect sense.
I know there will be people who consider this sort of tech a waste of resources, and it can certainly be abused. However, if it's done properly this type of environment can add a LOT to your user experience.
I suggest you try DR17 to see exactly how impressive this sort of tech can be!
Joseph Farthing
http://josephfarthing.com
Well, anyway, the messages are plain text. I think only the opensource community can get away with this. Try to present your plans and execute them in a business without a decent (=lots of graphics) presentation.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
... a firefox which would take less than 160 MB of RAM, an Openoffice.org which would take less than 150 MB, an X.org which would take less than 100 MB.
And so on.
developpers, developpers, developpers!
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
I had thought that eye candy was something that a lot of X11 users were averse to as a loss of resources? Not that you could say that about KDE, Gnome and a few other window managers. But I've heard people term the aforementioned big two as 'bloatware'.
I like the sound of it and fully support any software which gets better usage out of existing resources (OS X, any Linux or Unix). Oh wait, that just means I'm against Windows asshattery of just increasing system requirements for no damn return!
I built my own http//gentoo.org/ desktop, and it works great for what I need. I use a dual head nvidia with nvidia drivers. Gnome works pretty damn well if you ask me. I have no complaints that resemble anything that sucks. I can do everything and more than I could in Windows.
New antislashdotting strategy: flirt with disaster with a Slashdot front-page "desktop eyecandy" story at 10:30AM EST (global coffeebreak). Dodge the bullet with an all-text target page.
Really, do we trust people to have delicious eyecandy, when all they show us in their rendering announcement is text? They probably like to chew ballpoint pens, too.
--
make install -not war
.. with hardware acceleration, the NVidia drivers will probably be the first available with the support. Meanwhile the ATI and other FLOSS drivers will implement it about 8 months later.
There are some situations in which sponsored closed software wins every time, and one of those is hardware drivers. When a new API is released, a team of paid developers that know your hardware inside and out (because they work for the company that design it) will do a better job of porting their code quickly, and will be able t o do it much faster.
I don't really care how much slashdot fanboys rant about NVidia, the people who actually use high-end video cards in Linux know the truth - NVidia is and has always been oders of magnitude above the rest.
They can keep the drivers closed till hell freezes over for all I care - they work, they work great, they have more frequent stable updates with bugfixes and new features than any FLOSS drivers I know of.
guess people have weird priorities in the linux world. adding bloat and gimmicks isnt fixing the user friendliness problems.
I thought they used Macs...
Most exciting phrase in science: not "Eureka!" but "Hmm... That's funny..." -Asimov (abridged for \. limits)
misbehave
grunt and grumble
rant and rave?
shoot the brute some
Burma-Shave
... or just shoot him, period.
While you're at it, keep in mind that in Soviet Xorg, desktop displays you!
To hell with the eye candy, why don't they worry about making dual monitor support as easy as it currently is in M$ OS's.
I would much perfer that over more "eyecandy"
You fail it.
Burma Shave.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Its not just pure eye candy , Though Eye candy really does help in the home market.If they have improved the composite rendering engine i would hope that the desktop environments will take less resources. ,KDE can be a great working environment and gnome also (depends on your tastes , i can set up KDE to feel slightly more like OS X so i mainly stick with KDE)
I never understood why people find DEs like Gnome or KDE hard to use anyway or even poor , if set up properly
All you need to do is to Burma shave some of the options and your flying , KDE for me is a far better working environment than windows .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Actually I'd be satisfied with a Firefox that doesn't leak all over the place... I've got plenty of memory, but that doesn't help much when Firefox keeps growing until everything grinds to a halt swapping, so I have to restart it every day or so.
I want to see xcompmgr code stabilized first if they must do eye candy. It doesn't matter whether I use KDE or Gnome, transparency and shadows crash my managers and cause my system to go back to initial login and that's if I pare down the config file to minimal settings to get it working. Most of those commonly recommended to make it work cause the system to hang during startup of either KDE or Gnome.
Eye candy isn't as needed as solidifying the basics so that 3D graphics apps and games can be written which run stably and uniformly across distros. Then the eye candy can be gotten working. I know some people point at things like Object Desktop on Windows, but that is a third party, not Microsoft wasting time on eye candy. And it has been worked on for far longer than this stuff on Linux.
The Linux world needs to center on basics right now. A unified cross-Linux architecture for graphics would be nice.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
To be fair to X, most of it's memory usage isn't it's own, but pixbufs from applications that X is managing.
Inconceivable!
that, as X developers said, this is only a temporary solution, so that while Xgl matures we will have hardware alpha compositing in hardware. The final solution will be pushing the entire hardware abstaction layer (OpenGL) under the Xserver, in order to take advantage of the 3D hardware on the desktop too.
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
Are those counts of the actual memory in use? or their "allocated" memory?
The desktop eyecandy story links to a bunch of text email pages. And the Slashdot X topic icon is broken. Is it Monday again already?
--
make install -not war
Start an X12 already. Why add all this crap to this ancient X11R--what--6? I really don't understand.
I agree. I don't understand all those idiots who have stereos with volume controls that only go up to "10"
Mine goes up to "11", for when I need that extra umph.
On a serious note, X11 remains X11 because its core hasn't changed (or needed to change) in many years. R7 will add some nice features, features some of us have been waiting a long time for, but none of those features requires a redesign of X11 (which goes to show how flexible and well designed X11 is), so there is no need to increment X11 to X12 . . . unless you really are just looking to turn the volume up to "11", or in this case, "12".
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Actually X.org uses very little memory: it was designed to run in 16MB (or was it 8MB ?).
The memory you see being taken up by the X server can be attributed to several things: a mmaped framebuffer (if you have a 256MB videocard, the reported memory usage of X will include that), and server side shared pixmaps. It is really the applications' fault if this gets out of control.
--
The world is divided in two categories:
those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.
if it's any consolation, the new render acceleration architecture will accelerate desktops with little to no eyecandy, too.
Inconceivable!
Honestly the "linux" world isn't aimed at making a "better" product...they just work on projects they like, making things they enjoy. It just so happens that these programs are useful to other people. X11 is perfectly capable of more than 60Hz, it's just that most people don't think that writing an optimal-refresh calculation algorithm for a Linux livecd distribution would be interesting...nor is it that important (try setting up linux on the hard drive rather than running off of a generic CD distro if you want something other than very basic hardware support). Linux was never meant to be user friendly (though I do agree that it is more complicated than it could be, the nature of the beast prevents a nice cohesive solution to most of these problems)
X.org isn't very user friendly, in fact all you get is an 'X' on a blank screen you can move around. What would you prefer, an 'o'?
it's all in your head..... or so everyone else tells me when i complain about it leaking :\
take out possibly unwanted cruft out of X packages (stuff like xcalc, xterm, etc).
Xterm is great! It just pops right up, unlike kterm or gterm or eterm which require eternal disk grinding before they appear on your screen.
And w3m can display images in xterm! Why would you need any other window of any kind?
Some people like it - some don't. That's why modular is good.
Na we all use Solaris...
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Try the new edible display from apple - the iCandy!
Some settling may occur during posting.
That was one of the worst movies of all time.
Before adding further acceleration, how about fix the current problems? Many people have problems with X locking up when using nvidia and RenderAccel (which give a huge speed boost before lock up). When I ask if there is a fix for it, the answer I get is "You shouldn't use it, it's experimental".
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
I hope the developers also add an easily-found centralized button to turn this stuff off. Maybe it could be labeled "I just want to get work done" or something.
How are they doing on making transparency widows so I can see code behind the terminal? (just like OSX?)
X is a protocol, not a piece of software, so there is no such thing as a "distribution of X". XFree86 and X.org are both servers that implement the X protocol (version 11), but they are far from the only ones. There have been dozens of different implementations of the X protocol since it was created 20 years ago. Some of them run in a few hundred kbytes. Furthermore, the X server and the X client libraries are already pretty much independent. Traditionally, with the MIT X distribution, all you needed to run the server was the X server binary (a statically linked executable), the "fixed" font, and a bunch of configuration files. I believe under Debian, you can install one without the other if you like.
I don't know what you are doing, but I am able to run _three_ vnc kde desktops with firefox and openoffice open all the time. And this is on a P2 350MHz w/ 256/512 MB.
And if I took out the disk buffering, I use <256 Mb all together. After a few days (>5), firefox and openoffice expand and the total ends up ~500Mb. Then a quick restart of the app brings it back down.
And no, it isn't dead slow. _Relatively_, it is faster than my XP.
With what screen refresh rates do MS Windows Live CDs run?
You know why Linux is destined to fall to a distant third place against Apple and MS? Crappy marketing. I clicked through every link in the post, and searched around for about 10 minutes, and couldn't find a single screenshot of the so-called "eye candy".
You want to sell users on the eye candy? HOW ABOUT A PICTURE???
Meanwhile, I know exactly what a MacOSx desktop looks like, even though I've never used a mac, and I've seen the eye-candy in Longhorn screenshots, and that OS isn't coming out for another year at the earliest.
Transparent aterms on WindowMaker, can't get a much better combination of speed and eyecandy than that... :)
(Except, of course, with other lightweight window managers like xfce and icewm.)
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
I'd much rather see fonts that don't suck on LCD monitors than eye candy. I can do without shadows and showy effects, but not without clean, clear fonts.
I'm writing this from a machine with a 1600x1200 Dell 2001FP monitor, and an ATI Radeon 9200SE, connected with DVI running X.Org version 6.8.2. I have never, ever been able to get decent fonts with XFree86 or X.org. The fonts are either too jagged without antialiasing, or too blurry with it.
I have wasted hour after hour following various FAQs, playing with antialiasing, autohinting, and subpixel rendering in my ~/.fonts.conf. I have installed the Bitstream Vera fonts. I have sacrificed a goat and done a rain dance. And still, all those fonts look so blurry that I feel like I'm going blind.
Thinking that it was something about the Radeon, I tried an NVidia 5200 with the commercial NVidia drivers. No joy. I've also tried the ATI fglrx drivers for the Radeon. No joy.
Yet when I plug in my Apple Powerbook, OSX makes the fonts clear and legible, so it must be possible to drive the LCD monitor correctly.
I really hope they think about fully replacing the current system. I remember trying to get the transparency and shadowing working when I got Gnome 2.8. It worked all right...except for crashing every 15 mins and leaving the desktop unusuable...oh and fucking up mplayer (tried every vo option and still ran into some...interesting problems)
It's sad that Windows does transparency painlessly and yet we still struggle with it in X. X is such a piece of crap.
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips#oth_me mcache
// Specify the amount of memory cache: // -1 = determine dynamically (default), 0 = none, n = memory capacity in kilobytest y", 4096);
// Disable memory cache:
This MAY help
Specify the memory cache usage
Normally, Firefox determines the memory cache usage dynamically based on the amount of available memory. To specify a specific amount of memory cache, add the following code to your user.js file:
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capaci
To disable the memory cache completely, add the following code:
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.enable", false);
POST: I wish feature XYZ would work on my machine...
RESPONSE: Works fine for me, you idiot...
Some settling may occur during posting.
Because we like:
1. Fonts.
2. Decent colours.
3. Configurability (that doesn't involve typing in command-line options).
4. Settings that actually stick between sessions.
5. Tabs.
6. Backgrounds.
7. Transparency.
8. All sorts of features which are missing in the abortion known as 'xterm'.
But seriously, using xterm is like going back in time twenty years.
How about a real *working* clipboard? Don't get me wrong, I'm not the MS Fanboy my first sentence makes me out to be, but there's still much work to be done with the base architecture for common components -- Work that should begin before we start focusing any further on alpha blending doodads..
-A
There should be less "should be"s in the article before I take it too seriously.
Will the glitz happen? Should.
Will the current stuff be easy to port? Hah, not going there.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
if they are going to be modded -1,flamebait by uninformed moderators. In my previous post i wrote that Exa is a temporary solution before Xgl (as it is http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xorg/2005-J une/008356.html), please think before modding.
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
I've seen other posts out there...mostly on the gentoo forums...and no one seems to be able to find the problem with this...has been happening to me almost a year now...
Affects nvidia cards, ppc, x86, ATI cards....etc
Long Thread 1
Long Thread 2
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Please, Mr. Troll, get lost. Your idiocy isn't wanted.
"Clicking install"
So, you fire up KDE and click "install" to install X, right? Unless your talking about an ugly ncurses enviroment. I'm sure your average user would be less scared by command line then some ugly ncurses dialog box. Anyway, if your worried about having x and kde preinstalled, use mandrake, or some other n00b distro, don't try and install gentoo.
I don't know what idiot modded you as flamebait, but you should get "Insightful" or "Informative".
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
(Score:1, Offtopic)
Perhaps we should shoot the moderators, too. That was funny!
New species? The enlightenment-as-be-all-,-end-all posts have been around since at least '98.
When are they going to make it modular like they said they would, so that those of us that don't want the fancy accelerations can still have a relatively 'modern' desktop using modern software without the tremendous bloat? I want to use my memory for applications, not to draw graphics.
It's getting to the point where 512Mb isn't even enough for a GNOME desktop. That's partially GNOME's fault, but for chrisake! Xorg is huge.
They said they were going to prune the tree; why haven't they?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
So my question is how much "hardware" acceleration does KAA get out of the modern cards? Are the 2d specs given out? Or is this just a better software implementation of the existing reverse-engineered (known register level specs) that already exist?
Whichever refresh rate you want. Building an XP Live cd is trivial these days, and including the relevant Catalyst or nVidia drivers is just as easy.
This happens when you don't use the native resolution of the screen in your X server (1600x1200 in your case), because the screen has to resize the image before displaying.
I found why we went to X11 -- I tried reverting to X10 and kept getting pop-up ads for voyeur cameras.
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
what does that have to do with hardware acceleration....
oh yeah you are an idiotic troll
X could run in way less than 8MB. I once used an HP machine over a decade ago that was a news server, mail server, DNS server and ran X well. It had 4MB of ram and dual 330MB hard drives.
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips#oth_me mcache [mozilla.org]
// Specify the amount of memory cache: // -1 = determine dynamically (default), 0 = none, n = memory capacity in kilobytest y", 4096);
// Disable memory cache:
This MAY help
Specify the memory cache usage
Normally, Firefox determines the memory cache usage dynamically based on the amount of available memory. To specify a specific amount of memory cache, add the following code to your user.js file:
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capaci
To disable the memory cache completely, add the following code:
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.enable", false);
--
The GPL isn't the only definition of Freedom or Free.
Nonsense.
NVidia is one of the biggest usability hurdles on the open source desktop. When you tell someone that after doing their security updates (kernel), they will have to reconfigure their graphics driver, they simply don't understand it. Of course, kernel updates don't happen that often and the nvidia installer is quite good, but it is a royal pain in the ass.
Meanwhile, most ATI cards now have open source drivers with 3D acceleration and that presents a much better overall usability picture for the average user. They just do their updates and get the latest and greatest with no effort on their part.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
What's wrong with the clipboard?
Select text, middle-click where you want to paste it. Does this not work for everyone?
You don't know what you are talking about.
I already have a lot of these features via Enlightenment DR17.
The "features" in question are improvements to the way the X server operates. It's all under the hood stuff that users don't see. Would you care to explain how Enlightenment improves the way the X server it runs on top of operates?
I realise that you are an Enlightenment fanboy who would like to take every opportunity to promote your favourite toy, but in this case, it's absolutely nonsensical. Enlightenment simply can't do what this improvement does because it happens at a layer beneath Enlightenment. You might as well say "I already have the improvements in Linux 2.8 because I run Enlightenment!"
More like "people have many different capabilities in the linux world; some are skilled at analysing usability, some good at optimising and accelerating drivers/ architectures. These people work in the area of their expertise". And the current trend is to simplify X which amounts to stripping cruft and bloat out of it. Granted, these new features are also being added, but sometimes you can get great "gimmicks" for a minimal increase in size, so the net effect is to reduce the bloat of xorg.
I can install every installable package on my Linux by clicking on it in the file manger. If you don't want to use "./configure; make; make install" don't bloody use LFS. This is 2005, you only have to use a modern distribution. Stating otherwise are either FUD or a lame attempt on trolling, like the "the tedium of poring through manpages and configuring text files" part of your comment. All the modern distributions have configuration tools for this, but like everything else with computers you need to have some knowledge to use them correctly. In that regard Linux does not differ from any other system.
Make sure hinting is on in your /etc/fonts.conf or ~/.fonts.conf. Medium works the best and you might as well get the windows TTF fonts while you're at.
Fonts is still a pain to get working good on X and LCDs, but you can look decent looking fonts (not as good as cleartype) if you mess around with it.
You know you are behind-the-times when a "Dr. Square" tells you that you are outdated.
There are problems with what happens when you select Copy and then close the app you are copying from before you Paste - the contents of the clipboard (which could have been html, or a portion of a OO.o document) are reduced to plain text; this may be what the OP was talking about as, as you say, the other bits seem to work fine for me. If this is the case, then this should be tackled at the desktop level (rather than at the X level) - I think freedesktop.org are working on a solution to this at the moment.
This is going worst as Deer Park won't accept GTK without XFT. It's too slow, too ugly, too illisible and ... http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=1510 011 ... people in forums have just bogus responses like "upgrade upgrade upgrade". They don't want to understand that anti-aliased fonts are completely bogus in normal sizes. Raster fonts are better at "small" sizes, they matches exactly what it should look at, how the artist think it.
When I look at vector fonts with or without AA, I just believe that my mobile phone has BETTER LISIBILITY that my pc... it's... irrationnal !
If Qt/GTK could have an option "prefer raster that vector", I will be soooooooooo happy.
This is also impacting speed and comfort.
(Sorry my bad French) Je fais parler les Guignols de l'Info. Le pied, quoi.
You should be modded up for that comment. Fonts on LCD do suck on X. I have also tried different subpixel renderings, all the rgb alignments, etc on digital and analog flatpanels with no luck.
The only real solution for me had been to turn off subpixel rendering entirely and use fonts from Windows. Best I've been able to find so far is Tahoma 12/10, and Courier New for terminal window; it's tolerable although fairly jaggy with no aliasing. But blurry is much worse.
who's bright idea was it to post a story about eyecandy with NO EYE CANDY attached??
Yea, I do prefer eye-candiness than functionality... who cares about speed and efficiency when you can have 3D-transparency and ultra cool l33t special effects while chatting with your friends!
This is where computing goes (or comes from... backward).
swap?
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I don't remember how much swap it had. About 5 years after we stopped using the machine, HP asked for the drives back (the machine was a loaner). They valued them at $17,000 each!
Funniest explanation ever!!
Kudos!
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
I agree halfway. AA fonts in Linux _are_ blurry, but they're blurry in Windows too (there's some tweak I turned on once). Using Tahoma/Andale Mono with no-AA works perfectly, provided it's not some olde-tyme widget displaying fonts. Moving to Tahoma makes Evolution usable.
1. Analog inputs + refresh rate != 60 will cause display problems. If you're using analog inputs, set your refresh rate to 60.
2. When using analog inputs and an LCD screen you have to set the screen up right to make sure the pixels fall on the appropriate boundaries. (It sounds like you've done this since OSX can drive it correctly.)
3. If your video card supports digital DVI-I out, use DVI-I to feed your LCD screen.
4. Don't run at any other resolution than the maximum resolution of your LCD screen (or multiples of it) or things will look funny because pixels cannot be mapped 1:1 (or 1:2) - generated pixels to real pixels. You say you have a 1600x1200 LCD screen...so you should only be using 1600x1200 or 800x600 (not that you'd want to use the latter, but at least you'd get crisp pixels)
You maybe already know all this (and your complaint is really about the fonts), but I know otherwise-intelligent people who either don't know the above or simply prefer to punish their eyes.
Then, in KDE, I went to Control Center -> Appearance & Themes -> Fonts -> Use antialising: true, then Configure -> Use sub-pixel hinting: as appropriate and Hinting style: medium. Voila! Beautiful subpixel antialiased fonts on my Linux and FreeBSD, each with different LCD monitor models.
I'm not even sure if I actually needed to edit local.conf, but it's been ages since I set it up and I don't remember the exact reasons for it.
In other words, it sounds like you have problems with the way your desktop of choice is configured for AA fonts. Understand that other desktops handle the job quite gracefully and with good results.
I am a
Linux was never meant to be user friendly (though I do agree that it is more complicated than it could be, the nature of the beast prevents a nice cohesive solution to most of these problems)
Word is, Linux was not specifically meant to be anything but a Minix clone.. Even so, it came to be known for its stability (other than licensing and IP questions of course) which is a pretty damn hard prerequisite for user-friendliness to get around.
OnT: naturally you'd want your livecd to run most everywhere, but rather than just go for bare mininum I guess one could at least use something like videogen early on in an installer (asking the user to provide max dot clock / horizontal / vertical frequencies) and pipe the output to an xorg.conf in progress, no?
Just implement the X windowing system on top of an OpenGL renderer. It's easy. Hell one guy in his spare time did it for the Looking Glass desktop and it looks and works a heck of a lot better than any other X eye candy. It's java + opengl + x11 interpreter, but if it's just Java that is the holdup then use freakin' python or mono; it doesn't have to be fast just to manage window bounding regions and script opengl native code.
Is the new 'modular' X server actually going to be written in C/C++? WTF for? The clear leader, Apple, uses a subset of PDF and the OSS guys' new achitecture is more structs of function pointers?
Snap out of it, red.
Get it to run on D@mn Sm@ll L!nux?
MadOgre.com
It took some non-trivial Googling to figure out what "illisible" meant. It seems to be a perfectly common French word, but it's rarely used in English. "Lisibility" seems to be technical English: Google finds only a thousand cites, no definitions, and m-w.com doesn't know it.
Is there a specfic technical meaning beyond "legible"?
Will this new architecture be extensible enough that the primitive drawing routines can be implemented as fragment programs (like Quartz 2D Extreme)? There was a huge speedup for those that enabled it on OS X and I'm sure X11 could reap the same benefits. It makes a lot of sense to offload drawing and compositing to the GPU, but I couldn't find any reference to it in the article.
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
When will the MAS (media application server) become a default part of the Xorg release? I for one can't wait for the network-centric MAS sound server to replace the both esd and aRts.
X.org isn't very user friendly, in fact all you get is an 'X' on a blank screen you can move around.
Shit, I can move it around?
But I am changing my mind after hearing from alot of kernel developers that Linux already is a huge monolithic kernel and adding graphics too would really cause stability problems.
Linux kernel should maybe go modular and also fix the reason why the screen blacks out when the graphics crash.
I think you need to swith to haiku os .
My reaction to this was "Huh?" so I went and looked it up. Apparently, WikiPedia is a...
I have tried enlightenment and was wowed not just by the eye candy but the speed. Everything just responded instantly.
How is this window manager doing this today without a change to X?
And why can't other wm gnome/kde do it today as well?
Oh and a feature I don't see mentioned much but I believe they are going to provide is vsync on the desktop. I've really always hated seeing windows tearing and such.
i'd just like to point out what happens to your gui when you have compositing effects:
http://www.qarl.com/menu/waterworks/dialog.mov
K.
"porting", "drivers", "new architecture", "easy"...
[blows pitchpipe, clears throat]
One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong...
Thank you, thank you - I love you all!
Tabs are a known leak and it's fixed in 1.1. Get the Alpha now, it's wonderful.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Just to confirm
1) I'm using DVI, not analog
2) Again, DVI
3) I'm running with DVI-I as confirmed by the the Xorg.0.log:
(II) RADEON(0): Primary:
Monitor -- TMDS
Connector -- DVI-I
4) I'm running at 1600x1200 as confirmed by xdpyinfo and xrandr.
But I'm not really sure if my complaint is about the fonts, or just how they are rendered. I could care less what the font is called, or where it came from if it is rendered sharply (like on OSX). I've also tried Windows ttf fonts, and they don't seem to be any better. So I guess my complaint is with the font rendering of modern, proportional fonts like those found on most web pages, and used in GNOME or KDE apps. Fixed fonts (like I used for xterms and xemacs) are fine.
Back in the bad-old-days, my CRT was never this blurry.
As long as I have my xteddy, I will be set.
--- What
What is your setup?
An Eniac, a Commodore 64, Color Computer, VIC20?
Thanks for sharing what is supported while suggesting your setup isn't supported, without sharing your setup.
You might as well hand someone a Bible with all the bits about that guy Jesus taken out...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
e17 vs Xorg...Who will win?
/. anyway)
Winner to be announced on April 1 (That's when new releases of enlightenment are usually announced on
How do I install this on my windows comp? :P
This guy makes a new acceleration architecture, and 90% of the comments here on what this guy is supposed to be doing instead.
He should be making X more stable, he should be making RenderExcel work correctly with the nvidia X server, he should be making the composit manager more stable, he should be making copy and paste work between gnome and KDE...
Well guess what? He doesn't work for Nvidia, so he can't help your RenderExcel problems. He decided instead to make a new acceleration architecture....
Just because YOU don't need more then a Pentium II 233 Mhz doesn't mean the REST OF US shouldn't be allowed to buy an Athlon FX-57 or whatever new thing is out. Just because YOU don't need more then 640K of memory (And really, who in their right mind would) doesn't mean the REST OF US aren't allowed to enjoy the greater then 4 gb a 64-bit architecture offers us.
Just because you DON'T LIKE eye candy, doesn't mean the rest of us aren't allowed to enjoy the computer hardware WE have.
You think this guy wasted his time? Learn to code, show him where his time is better spent. Don't jump down his throat for being gracious enough to release his work into the public domain for the REST OF US to enjoy.
Honestly, slashdot seems at first to be about innovation, true competition and letting the best technology win. Progress. Advancement. But every story that talks about a faster CPU, or multiple cores, more memory, expensive video cards, etc is met with "My 486 runs linux command prompt just fine, so only losers with more money then sense will waste either on this."
Clean your screen.
The available fonts are in a directory called consolefonts. The location of that directory is, I believe, distro-dependent.
No you didn't. You said that you tried a few things but completely left out how you tried to go about them. Maybe your attempts were misguided and you missed the obvious solution? If the grandparent used the same method to configure two different operating systems on two different pieces of hardware, maybe he's on to something that you're overlooking.
Just because you're less bad than 19/20 of entrants in a particular contest not related to the subject at hand doesn't mean that you're an expert on this topic.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Is 3D acceleration going to be supported for i810 in 7.0? 6.9 is pretty much a "modularization" release and there was no mention of i810 3D acceleration in those articles.
I'm more in favor of the Xgl method of modern linux desktop rendering. Currently a lot of work is being done on Xegl. Which is an extension of Xgl with the EGL API. There was a lengthy discussion over Xegl vs KAA on the freedesktop mailing-list. My impression is KAA is good for all basic hardware while Xgl/Xegl takes advantage of modern hardware.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
I do the same thing when I am faced with animated user interfaces.
I also think these changes raise the level of entry for people with lower end machines -- poor computer users, chiefly -- as more OSes (even free software and open source OSes) require fancier displays just to do things that don't strictly need to be there.
Digital Citizen
"And why can't other wm gnome/kde do it today as well?"
Because GNOME and KDE are bloated and over engineered, while Rasterman (Enlightenment lead coder) is an old-school Amiga coder who knows how to program graphical stuff properly.
All Linux users owe it to themselves to try out some of the alternatives to GNOME and KDE if they haven't already. You can continue to use your favourite GTK/qt apps and your user experience will improve considerably.
I wish Sun would open-source NeWS, then let the Berlin people add OpenGL primitives to it, and see about accelerating THAT. Screw Java, I want to be able to upload Postscript code to the GPU so all my apps get the magical raytraced flaming 3d delete dialogs.
OP: "Can we expect the typical bloat that comes with other KDE/QT applications?"
Hmm... it seems that the OP did originally make a comparison... not Gnome to KDE, but KDE to bloat. And the GP decided to rectify the misunderstanding about KDE.
Let's try to follow the GP's reasoning for a moment. Gnome tends to be a very efficient (if nothing else) desktop. Hence, the fact that KDE can out perform it speaks volumes about the amount of change it has undergone recently.
It wasn't a KDE vs. Gnome post, as you erroneously claim.
You also erred while reading the OP.
Q: "Could someone explain to me the bloat problems in KDE/QT?"
Is not the same question as
Can we expect the typical bloat that comes with other KDE/QT applications?
The first is a legitimate question, while the 2nd is a troll. (The first is your words, while the 2nd is the OP). It seems to me that the OP might have been better off without mentioning KDE, either.
oss flame wars are easier than pie and slashdot readers are arrogant and immature as hell
Speaking of arrogant and immature...
Fonts in linux do suck, even with Bitstream vera... No amount of tweaking I've ever seen will make it as good as an MS desktop. I think it's one of those things that linux people just can't see the problem. What they have works great, looks great to them and they don't understand what's wrong with you (But that _is_ how it's _supposed_ to look! Great isn't it?).
Best screenshots I've seen are using the microsoft fonts. I forget off the top of my head but there was maybe some hinting thing you tweak or a config option when you go to compile freetype or fontconfig. I can't remember exactly. In the immortal words of ButtHead, "Hey it was free asswipe."
I guess an artist can use whatever he can glue in an canvas.
Do you have your screen dimensions setup correctly in your xorg.conf?
In milimeters? This matters, a lot.
If you run SuSE, you can set it using the GUI, YaST2. Anything else, and you'll need to edit your xorg.conf. Respond to me if you need instructions.
I've found that this makes a *huge* difference in font quality.
Also, you can recompile freetype to include the (patented and illegal) TrueType Bytecode interpreter. Google for it, its actually very easy. If you use an RPM distribution, you can install the source RPM, make 1 change to the spec file, and get the bytecode interpreter working.
I actually prefer to have it off; on my Dell 1901FP, using the correct screen dimensions, my fonts are crystal clear.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Categorically: no. Fonts on your system suck. On my system, they look as good as they do on the nearby PCs and Macs. Whether because of
your situation is not universal. I'm not trying to be a jerk about it, but I can't stand people claiming that "Linux can't do $bar" when I personally use it to do $bar every day. Certain may have problems with $bar on their setup, but that doesn't mean that no one else can manage it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The article describes a replacement system for rendering. It will improve the rendering pipeline for COMPOSITE. For screenshots, you need to find a composite-oriented desktop.
KDE, and possibly Gnome are good examples. As composite rendering is still experimental, screen shots may not be available.
Linux pwnz j00 serves as a functionary of the Linux Centralized Command Center (LC3). It is the leading informant of ill-informed users. Many of which don't know how to read.
Me: Here's a hint: when people say they've tried damn near everything
/. not aol.
JustSomeGuy: No you didn't. You said that you tried a few things but completely left out how you tried to go about them.
Original post: I have wasted hour after hour following various FAQs, playing with antialiasing, autohinting, and subpixel rendering in my ~/.fonts.conf. I have installed the Bitstream Vera fonts. I have sacrificed a goat and done a rain dance. And still, all those fonts look so blurry that I feel like I'm going blind.
What, you think people have gone to all those lengths but nobody thought to try the freakin' subpixel rendering button in preferences? This is
Read the context for christ sake! When I say "yes, I agree, I have also done those things" and you say "but you just said 'those things' not what they were" without reading the post I was replying to, that makes you a 'tard. One with +4 moderation, but still a tard.
And here I hoped that I would never be making this kind of comment.
I'd wager my own dear pants that that AC hasn't written a damned line of X code in his life.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
So post your system specs then... I want to see good fonts on Linux, and the other poster sounds like they would try a different distro if the fonts would work on it.
Distro: ?
KDE version: ?
X.11 verson: ?
Font: ?, Size: ?
Monitor: ?
Graphics card: ?
Man, that's harsh. At least the Gentoo people were responsive, even if some of them were unhelpful and/or rude. Do any bugs get worked on over there?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Distro: Gentoo (before that: Debian, with same results)
KDE version: 3.{4.1,4.0,3.x,2.x,1.x}
X11 version: X.org 6.{8.2, 8.1, 8.0} and XFree86 4.x before that
Font: Bitstream *, MSTT (Arial, TNR, etc.) sizes 13 and up (for normal text like reading web pages, text editing, etc. Smaller than that for icon labels and so on).
Monitor: Viewsonic VA721
Graphics card: Onboard nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8x] rev 162 (according to Xorg.0.log)
Home system:
Distro: FreeBSD 5-STABLE
KDE version: 3.4.0
X11 version: X.org 6.8.2
Font: same as above
Monitor: Samsung something or another
Graphics card: nVidia something or another
One critical note that another poster mentioned: you have to make sure that your DisplaySize is exactly correct! I added this to the Monitor section of my xorg.conf:
That magically upgraded my display from "looks awful" to "Cleartype? Bah!"
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
So why won't ATI get off their ass and better develop their Linux drivers? Last I checked, the drivers for anything 9000+ (give or take 500 maybe) or newer don't have support for the features Xorg uses, and open source drivers don't exist for those chips. I'd like to think they will get support before it gets big, but at this rate, it may still be a while until they release drivers with the features it needs.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
...we're seeing visual enhancements to linux from other devs - and without the bloat!
An article about eye cany with no screenshots ? ... bah!
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
quartz extreme. The technology that gives osx it's eye candy.
It's "developer", you fuckwit submitter, D-E-V-E-L-O-P-E-R. Editors, huh? WTF are those?
I use mainly Linux, but have dabbled with OS X and its word processing and DTP applications as well. In comparison, fonts on Linux do suck.
Compared to the situation before gtk2 and the likes, the fonts in Linux are certainly good. It's a far cry from OS X's font support however. The first, practical problem with fonts and Linux is that Linux is shipped with a small selection of fonts. Installing more helps, but is tedious, and a major failing of the default desktop environment.
Once you have a decent font selection installed, you'll find that they are not rendered quite as intended. Frequently spacing between characters appears random; kerning doesn't work as intended. Or the bottoms of characters don't align, as in Helvetica on my system. In word, it doesn't look good.
Then there is the lack of support for advanced font features of OpenType fonts, for example. Forget ligatures, forget "stylistic alternatives", forget intuitive grouping of fonts with more than normal and bold weight variants. This, granted, is more issue of application support, but nonetheless a fact of life with Linux and fonts.
When I need good typography, I must go to OS X. (Windows might do, too, but not even good typography is reason enough to dabble with _that_ OS.)
I don't know: if the name brand guys screw up something, then it means that the majority of users will find that it suck, so yes in this case "Linux's something" will suck.
That said, *I* don't find that fonts on Linux really suck (it used to!), I use both WindowsXP and Linux and don't find much difference.
But on the other hand I've seen a comparison on fonts on the web between Linux and OS-X (don't remember where, sorry) and OS-X was much, much better than Linux..
Now of course, I don't really trust a few screenshot seen on the web (didn't really care as I'm not going to buy a PPC: I like games), but if it is true, then fonts on Linux do suck compared to OS-X.
Maybe we'll see more comparison with the 'MacPCs' when they'll arrive..
Yay! Someone else finally picked up on it!
This is why SuSE bugs you if it detects that the display size *might* be miss configured.
With my displaysized configured correctly X.org blows away both OS X and Windows in terms of font rendering. One of my good friends is an engineer from IBM, and he was complaining about the 'crappy' font rendering under X.org on his Thinkpad.
I showed him my desktop, and he was shocked. I revealed to him the solution, and he was shocked.
Stop messing with AA settings! Setting your displaysize correctly is the *best* thing you can do to improved your font rendering!
Oh, and before some wise-ass says, "Why don't you have to do this in Windows or Mac OS X?"
1. Windows renders its fonts at the same resolution no matter what resolution your screen is running at. X.org does not. That means the default font resolution on X.org may look good, but may not. Windows fonts always look good, but the size is not resolution or DPI dependant. That's why Dell's 1600x1200 laptop screens (14") were kind of annoying in Windows; you had to pump up the font sizes so large that the dialogues all looked funny, and some applications didn't work properly. This doesn't happen in X.org
2. Mac screens are all the same DPI. That's why the Powerbooks have weird screen resolutions. That's also why Mac font rendering isn't as good if you aren't using a monitor that correctly reports its display size to the rendering system through DDC information (incidentally, modern linux distributions can sometimes pick this data up as well, but many built-in monitors do not report it correctly.
As usual, X.org's implementation is superior. It's just that most setup tools do not correctly configure display size (except for SuSE's YaST2). Once its configured correctly, you get resolution independant font rendering of extremely high quality.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Desktops, Bah! Just give me a nice window manager and someone who appreciated the eloquence of Unix.
1. SuSE installs many, many fonts by default, and includes scripts that will download additional fonts from online repositories. It does this through its GUI updater utility, YoU. (YaST Online Update)
2. Configured your DisplaySize (in your xorg.conf) correctly! SuSE will try and detect DDC information and configure this in YaST, but it will pop up a warning if it is unable to. Most distributions simply leave this value at default. Your fonts will be *butt* ugly if DisplaySize is not set correctly in millimeters.
3. Freetype can perform the same exact font rendering that Windows/OS X use. See, Windows/OS X both interpret TrueType Bytecode, by using a patented software. You can enable the TrueType Bytecode support in Freetype by changing one option in the SRPM file, and then using rpmbuild to generate a Bytecode interpreter enabled version. Technically, this version is illegal, if you are in a country with software patents.
However, I find that the Freetype version without the bytecode interpreter actually has superior rendering as long as hinting and subpixel AA are enabled, and YOUR DISPLAYSIZE IS CORRECTLY CONFIGURED!
Having your DisplaySize incorrectly configured screws up fonts badly, and makes anti-aliasing function even worse.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
No Offense, but the other poster got it right.
;-)
Fonts in Linux rock.
Fonts on your misconfigured system suck
I had the same problem as you, and then found that when I installed on a particular monitor that it looked absolutely beautiful.
The reason? That monitor was very close to the default value for displaysize in xorg.conf, 320 mm by 240 mm.
Once you set that correctly, your fonts will be immeasurably better. My systems easily compete with OS X and Windows in terms of font rendering quality, and everyone I show my systems to is quite shocked.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Let's hope that they release the API well enough in advance so that those of us under the tyranny of antisocial companies which only release binary drivers can actually have working drivers when it's released.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
First, I agree, current free software is absolutely capable of drop-dead gorgeous font rendering, certainly on par with, and in many cases better, than contemporary Windows/Mac rendering.
/etc/fonts, everything looks splendid. Installing the microsoft fonts also helps because they're very well hinted, and many apps explicitly expect them.]
However I think it isn't the "desktop" which is the usual problem -- the main desktop environments/toolkits (Gnome/GTK and KDE/Qt) have good support for this stuff, and simple and obvious configuration of (their part of) it.
I think the main problem is that responsibility for configuration seems to be split up between so many different places -- not just the toolkits, but the libraries, someone mentioned an X configuration option which made a difference, the font installation, etc. Furthermore, there's the weird issue that the important feature of autohinting (which isn't necessary for well-hinted fonts like the bitstream vera stuff, but really helps some other fonts) is turned off by default because of some bizarro patent issue or something.
[FWIW, I use Debian and Gnome/GTK and after enabling autohinting in
We live, as we dream -- alone....
"Porting the existing drivers to this new acceleration architecture should be easy"
:D
Obviously not written by anyone who has ever worked on a coding project
I just want to elaborate on eno2001's point...
AFAIK, with AND taking a higher precedence than OR, e.g.: (eye candy && (reliability || faithfulness), you're definitely right. Since OR short-circuits, the implication is:
She's not eye candy (given). AND
( - She's not reliable OR
- She's not faithful )
Good point, eno2001. So, the question remains to the parent poster (this post's grandparent): Which is it? Reliability or faithfulness?
He who has no
Who the hell keeps marking this jew hater's posts as "informative"!?
Sure you can change resolution on the fly (and more elegantly than Ctrl-Alt-KP+).
The extension is called xrandr (rotate and resize) and is installed by default in most current distros. There are panel applets that let you pick your resolution (and rotation, if supported) and everything will resize appropriately (e.g., maximized windows won't be off the screen), or you can use the xrandr utility if you want to do it under script control.
Wake up guys, all decent software these days runs on more than one platform, and putting both "free" and "open" in the thing at the same time is just pandering to semantics in MIT staff room politics where dictionary definitions are irrelevant (read any of a hundred RMS interviews for an attempted redefinition rant whenever some poor sod used either the word "free" or "open").
... a firefox which would take less than 160 MB of RAM, an Openoffice.org which would take less than 150 MB, an X.org which would take less than 100 MB.
Done.
You're looking at the wrong figure. The amount of memory an app allocates to itself doesn't matter that much - write a simple C program and try it. The amount of memory an app uses - called Resident Set Size (RSS or RES) in top - matters a lot more - use lots of that memory, and your system slows to a crawl.
But you're not using lots of that memory. The resident set size of X is about 35MB, Firefox usually about 24MB (my firefox here is a little busier than most), etc.
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
3201 mikem 15 0 124m 50m 20m S 0.0 10.0 2:54.73 firefox-bin
3407 mikem 16 0 115m 35m 20m S 0.7 7.0 0:17.11 mono
2825 root 15 0 103m 34m 9440 S 6.0 6.9 4:22.46 X
3306 mikem 16 0 100m 23m 14m S 0.0 4.7 0:15.00 evolution
2980 mikem 25 10 35500 18m 10m S 0.3 3.6 0:15.34 rhn-applet-gui
3013 mikem 16 0 39672 13m 8632 R 13.6 2.8 0:09.10 gnome-terminal
2971 mikem 16 0 29632 13m 10m S 0.0 2.7 0:02.71 nautilus
His mistake is that he thinks that additional developement is going to make things more bloated.
It's not. X.org is cleaning up and improving the X window server by leaps and bounds. They packed more development and actual improvements in 1 year then XFree86 got done in six years.
On the other hand, KAA is fucking worthless. Waste of time, waste of effort.
Even though it's worlds better then XAA and WILL improve performance and WILL improve stability. XAA works, and it's fine.
You see the reason that it is worthless is because it's a driver model that's been obsolete for a couple years now.
We want to get it all working on a single software stack; opengl. That's it.
OpenGL isn't just for eye candy. It's for a unified driver structure for X.
You don't have hardware acceleration? No problem, you just use Mesa, it's just as nice as normal unaccelerated X. No eye candy, but what it does have is nice compatability.
Right now for Linux you need 2 or 3 drivers running _simultaniously_. Minimally 2.
That is 2 different drivers from 2 different sources running at the same time on the same card and outputing the information to the same display.
You need OpenGL drivers for apps that aren't 2d and you need 2d drivers for those that are. That's why X drivers suck, not because XAA sucks (although it does), but because the driver model for X is broken.
It's stone age, it's obsolete, no other operating system out there requires that you have do things like that. It is making the live of driver developers twice as hard as it should be.
Also the other problem is that X windows has control over the hardware.
X windows should not have control over the hardware. The kernel has control over the hardware. When X fucks up it can lock up your machine. Also X is a huge security hole. It is a major application that has to run as setuid bit.
It also makes having compatable X versions on wide veriaty of hardware difficult.
If you move the driver model to opengl then any machine with a OpenGL stack, even if it is just software, is perfectly compatable and it works.
The kernel drivers hardware libraries are the things that should work with your hardware not X.
This makes it possible to run X as a usermode proccess. This increases stability, portability, and security. Windows, FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, embedded platforms, It doesn't matter.
If it has some sort of opengl stack and it's able to use the GNU tools to compile stuff, then it should work.
Then this opens up much more interesting possiblities for the future of X. Have any of you ever used sunray x terminals, for instance?
Think about 'screen' program, but for X windows... and network transparency...
You see that's what XGL is aiming at. Improving capabilities, providing the framework to take advantage of modern hardware (say anything newer then a 486). Improve stability. Improve security. Provide for future development directions.
KAA doesn't do any of these things. It's not even going to provide any new hardware-based acceleration.
The only card that KAA currently works on has the best OpenGL dri drivers out there. All the hardware that XAA runs perferctly fine on, will probably use KAA and be slightly better, if somebody wastes the time to completley rewrite already working drivers. And hardware that doesn't have opengl drivers or Xaa drivers isn't going to get KAA drivers either.
KAA is obsolete coming out of the gate. It would of been a great idea 5 years ago.
I'd much rather see fonts that don't suck on LCD monitors than eye candy. I can do without shadows and showy effects, but not without clean, clear fonts.
/this/ instead", i.e., about as valuable as "Me too!".
That's nice, dear. What does that have to do with anything?
Do you think programmers are completely replaceable, and the same people who write acceleration architectures are the ones who'd rework font rendering?
About the only thing your comment is useful for is as a "If it was me, *I'd* do
If *you* want better LCD fonts, then write it yourself. Or hire somebody to fix it for you. Nobody owes it to you -- not even people who write new graphics architectures in their spare time.
Of course, now you're going to flame me for having written this comment instead of making LCD fonts better.
I wanted to mention, I had DisplaySize set wrong in xorg. That helped. I installed Microsoft fonts, that also helped. If I enable sub-pixel hinting, my system will lock up. I tried the byte-code interpreter but I like it better without.
So my situation is much improved from this discussion. I'm not sure if I agree that it looks better than Windows, but it looks better than it did. It seems like in Windows the fonts are tinier and thinner or something, like more lines can fit on screen at once. Linux side the fonts are thicker and darker. IIRC similar to cleartype in Windows which I really didn't like.
Including multiple images (ctrl-click to select).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I don't know about anyone else, but my biggest gripe with X performance these days is the rendering speed of RGB subpixel anti-aliasing. (at least on Radeon cards, which is all I have..) It's not unusably slow, but it's highly noticable and makes everything feel sluggish.. especially scrolling.
Curious? Do a quick test:
x11perf -aa10text
x11perf -rgb10text
On my system, running X.org 6.8.1, regular AA text is about 8x faster than RGB-AA. RGB-AA produces no slow-down in Windows on machines I've checked, so it must be a driver or implementation issue.
Just because you're less bad than 19/20 of entrants in a particular contest not related to the subject at hand doesn't mean that you're an expert on this topic.
So does one have to be an expert in fonts to be able to setup Linux fonts correctly?
If you say, "It's great that (list of OS that works with setup), but I really wish it would work with (my esoteric setup)"
Then you increase the chances of other people saying, "Hey, I wish (my esoteric setup, as above) did indeed work with (hardware name) , too!"
Then, by chance, a small snowball will form to start rolling down the hill. Once that gets to a certain point the manufacturer (in this case Nvidia) may decide that it is worthwhile to make available drivers for (my esoteric setup, as above) available for you to install.
But hey, I figured that you would have caught that with my snarky comment about how useless complaining about the small list of supported hardware, without mentioning what hardware you have, appeared to me and likely others.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
So does one have to be an expert in fonts to be able to setup Linux fonts correctly?
Apparently so. And do remember to take notes while you research, because rest assured it will come up again long after you've forgotten the specifics of all the work you did. Thus in typical fashion, you can install, get bad defaults from the distro, complain that what you have sucks, and everyone will jump down your throat that it's all your fault for being a lazy ignorant moron. God forbid if anything were to ever actually "Just Fucking Work" (TM) out the box... I spent all day yesterday fucking with font and xorg settings, recompiling packages etc. It is the way of linux, and in the end, I get a result that is still not satisfactory to me, but somehow, I am supposed to believe that what I have is so much better than MS and Apple.
I have to update myself here. In fact I do believe my results are actually superior to windows. Looks a little different. But things definitely look sweet now. But still distros should be able to give you a proper setup out of the box.
I am also using Gentoo ~x86 with nvidia. All the same software versions. I followed the gentoo manual just like you probably did. I set up fonts/local.conf just like you wrote. I tried your DisplaySize and it was fuzzy, so I calculated the proper DisplaySize for my monitor, a Dell 1703FP, and it is still fuzzy.
I tried your fonts and they are large enough that it's difficult to see the blur. But that's not a solution to the problem because I don't particularly want to use large fonts. I don't have to in order to make Windows viewable when I use it. I have tried the most recent Mandrake and SuSE, neither of which set the DisplaySize variable btw and they both have fuzzy fonts, along with Red Hat 9 and Fedora Core 2.
Some fonts and sizes look okay; maybe I should set all the fonts on my system to the same size? I know it is not a hardware problem because dual-boot Windows is clear as day.
To sum up the posts:
* it must be your fault because you are using a "strange" distro... like SuSE, Fedora or Mandrake.
* it's easy, just edit this xml file... oh wait you also have to set this magic value exactly right in another text file.
* it works for me, so you must just suck
So what's next sherlock, use a hex editor? recompile the kernel? The fact that the fonts are clear on Windows after doing nothing and crap on Linux on my system even on major distros and hours of work tells me something is wrong with fonts on X. Maybe some systems have smooth fonts in X. Maybe most do. I wish mine was one of those.
You really just wanted to make a snarky quip to someone proclaiming their ignorance, because you are Uber-leet and user Plan9.
Kudos to you sir, kudos to you. (That's sarcasm)
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
BTW, what's your refresh set to?
I still don't think that X's use of possible incorrect DCC values makes it inherently bad. You probably had to load a monitor driver to get Windows to look good on LCD, unless you're very lucky. If Dell gave you a valid X.org config section on the driver disk alongside the Windows drivers, chances are we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I set DisplaySize to 338 270. The math came out to 337.92 so I figured that was more correct. Refresh is 75hz. But I given up and gone back to no subpixel and some hinting and its readable. It shouldn't ever take more than 30 seconds to turn on subpixel rendering on any system and have the fonts look better than without it.
Possibly OT, but many LCDs really don't like to be run higher than 60Hz. In fact, my Viewsonic's manual states explicitly that doing so for long periods will destroy it. Just something you might want to check.
It shouldn't ever take more than 30 seconds to turn on subpixel rendering on any system and have the fonts look better than without it.
If anything, blame your vendor for shipping the instructions (in form of a driver) for getting it running under Windows but not under X.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?