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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."
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.
... 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.
.. 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.
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"
Seriously If you wish to post something insightful/informative, don't start it with..."I'll probably get moded down". Don't uderestimate others' ability to mod correctly or atleast meta mod correctly.
And no I am not new here.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
actually this is not as much of a waste of resources as you might think. Almost every desktop has some kind of hardware acceleration. It really is about time that X started to use it. Apple of course is using it in OS/X Microsoft will use it in Longhorn. Why not use it in X?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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
if it's any consolation, the new render acceleration architecture will accelerate desktops with little to no eyecandy, too.
Inconceivable!
Eye Candy is not always bad. For example shadows under the windows and semitransperance helps the eye understand where the data is in a more realistic environment. Animations help the eye follow where the data is going.
For example on Max OS when you minimize a Window it does a fancy dgeni efect which allows your eyes know that the window just didn't go away but it shrunk into a spot on the dock. While the boxes on linux and windows does a simular thing the Mac method makes it more percises that you know the application is still running it is just smaller, while the linux and windows way makes a person feel the application has stopped when it was minimized.
Semi-Transparencies are good to. It help the person realize there is something under your window. There are a lot of times when an App is open and an other windows is on top of it and you don't know it is there.
Eyecandy when used correctly is not a waist of processing for trivial things but actually an important key in having people understand the environment.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This poster has a valid point.
Xorg crashes my machine on switching from X to a text VC.
This bug is well known and serious - all eye candy and other non-essentials should wait until this and other serious bugs are fixed.
Qaulity before features.
If I wanted it the other way around, I know where to buy Windows.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
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.
Tone down the frothing-at-the-mouth paranoia a bit, please. I doubt the GP poster was suggesting that the drivers run at ring 0 -- he certainly never suggested such.
/dev anyway.
/dev device hardly equates to proper support via a driver API. I'm beginning to get the impression that most Linux developers really don't see why this was a bad idea from day 1, and that's very unfortunate.
Instead he was just pointing out the pure stupidity of the fact that X Windows itself must handle drivers for video, sound, mouse, and so forth, rather than relying on services exposed by an underlying layer of the OS (which does not have to be running in ring 0). If the OS handled these devices, AS IT SHOULD, any program could make use of them without having to go through X.
Where do you get the notion that the X server takes care of all the input devices? The kernel already provides access to them through
Raw access to a
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Chances are, the folks that are implementing this eye candy and not the ones that could / want to fix bugs - this stuff is pretty parallel, so I don't think these people working on acceleration will prevent others from fixing bugs. -Neil
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?
> Moving the drivers into the kernel is crazy.
It's a fact that graphics cards for many years have required interrupts and DMA to be programmed well, and that is just not something you can do from userspace. Several other things that X does today are at least dubious to do in userspace.
A good graphics driver these days need some sort of help from the kernel, but moving the *entire* driver into ring 0 is indeed a bad idea. The things that can safely and sanely be done from userspace should be.