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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.
I've been looking to change the font on my command line.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
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.
.. 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.
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"
While i love enlightement, evas just provides i a layer on the top of X (or some thing else). A new x driver architecture is requite to let evas, qt, gtk (and your other favourite toolkits) to really take advantage of you graphic hardware with accelerated alpha blending and window backing store. This is not to compete with evas, just to allow it to do better things.
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
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.
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.
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 you bothered to read the links, you'd know that 6.9 (the (last?) monolithic release) and 7.0 (the modular release) will occur at the same time.
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.
They'll only make it X12 if and when they break that compatibility, and they won't do that without a good reason.
There's no requirement that an X12 server be completely incompatible with an X11 server. i.e. The X12 could easily accept commands from an X11 stream. While the X11 server would not be able to understand X12, such issues would be slow in cropping up, and X12 should easily be able to replace X11 long before that happens.
The extension architecture works fine AFAICS, is there an actual problem you have with it?
I can't speak for the parent poster, but my primary issue with current X-Windows is not so much the protocol (which could use a good overhaul anyway), and more the current design of X-Servers. Instead of forcing the OS to do its job, current X-Server designs schlep up video card, mouse, joystick, and other hardware control. The reasons for this design aren't entirely clear, but it is obvious that this is a source of many X-Windows issues. Moving these drivers to the OS level would improve reliability and configurability all around.
Don't take my word for it, however. Mr. Packard has a very good writeup on the issue.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The X Consortium shut down in 1996, after declaring X11R6.3. At this point, it's not clear how an accepted X12 standard could be generated, even if people wanted to do so.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
/Me offers CoolVibe a glass of ice water
/dev anyway.
:-)
Ok, slow down there buckaroo. Let's go through these points one at a time.
And lose that wonderful cross platform ability and userland protection?
X-Windows' cross platform abilities are inhibited by keeping driver code in the X-Server. Having OS specific code only leads to various build trees for each system, some incompatible. As for userland protection, no one is suggesting that X-Windows itself be moved into the kernel. Just the drivers which run in Ring 0 anyway.
Moving the drivers into the kernel is crazy. It might simplify the X server code, but it will be a bitch to maintain for several operating systems.
Nonsense. It's the Operating System's responsibilty to provide driver services. Shunning those services in favor of a hodgepodge of semi-userland drivers is silly. The X Server should float on top of the Operating System's graphical services, not cram a new driver model down its throat.
Not the whole world wants or does want to run Linux.
Preaching to the choir there. But that still doesn't mean that the X-Server shouldn't do its job correctly. It's not supposed to be a hardware manager, that's the OS's responsibility.
The kernel already provides access to them through
Not quite. Up until recently, the OS only provided raw access to the ports. X was responsible for managing these devices. As time went on (and BSD in particlar pushed back), X was modified to work with system mappings of devices. Unfortunately, X still demands direct control and can often screw up if it doesn't get it, or doesn't understand the device correctly.
Sure, the GFX side uses blitting directly to video ram, but that's what the others do as well. mmap(), memcpy and friends work fast enough from userland anyway.
The GFX side does not blit directly to RAM. X commands are queued up and shunted to the driver as appropriate. This may translate to blits, or it may translate to accelerated graphics commands. There's a major push at the moment to change all X operations over to OpenGL. If this were done, then the X-server would never need to see another blit again. It would simply pass a set of command primitives to the driver, and the video card would do all the work. Quite fast, quite easy, and quite correct.
And don't start about X using sockets to talk to clients, because they have nothing to do with networking
There is nothing wrong with X's networking. That's what it's designed to do. My point only addresses the matter of hardware control which X should not be in the business of. Look at a Sun machine, for example. The card is always in graphics mode, and those modes can be determined on the command line. All the X-Server does is take over the screen and begin drawing. It really doesn't care about the underlying hardware, as it should be.
I understand that you're upset about the old "X is slow" arguments and the like. Unfortunately, you're barking up the wrong tree here. My argument has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with architecture. Should the OS be given back control of the hardware, then it would again be possible to do things like run multiple X-Servers, run video games without X interfering, using graphics mode for the terminal, and other fun and interesting things. All because X would be a client of the OS, not a peer.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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?