Novell Makes Public Release of Xgl Code

hamfactorial writes "Novell has announced the public availability of the Xgl code, an openGL accelerated X server layer. Available binaries ought to be coming soon for distributions running the modular X.org 7.0 release (possibly 6.9, though unconfirmed). A temporary page for Xgl information is up at the openSUSE website. This is the same code that was running in the Novell Linux Desktop 10 preview videos as seen earlier. Further information is also available at Miguel De Icaza's blog."

Comments

Window manager land

[Gopal.V]

Should I kill my fluxbox and use compiz as my default window manager ? Or can compiz actually live along side a normal windowmanager which has about half a year of short-cuts that I use heavily ?

I would love if someone could actually tell me if fluxbox (or indeed xfwm4) will work with XGl out of the box.

Re:Window manager land

[hamfactorial]

Compiz is just a compositing manager. As I understand it, it exists independently of Metacity or any other window manager you choose to use. Compiz should be similar in functionality to xcompmgr or the compositing manager built into xfwm. I don't think it will require shortcuts or much hackery to function on non-GNOME desktops. The window manager demoed appears to be Metacity, and as such, I can't see why Novell would be pushing for even more fragmentation in the Linux world. If anything, they would be in favor of easy-to-use interfaces that will serve to promote their Novell Linux Desktop 10 product, or whatever it will be called. Indirectly, that benefits us, and you as the non-GNOME user.

Re:Window manager land

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

It's an X.org extension. It's in no way like a window manager at all. At least you don't use gnome or kde, I suppose...

Re:Window manager land

[nathanh]

Compiz is just a compositing manager. As I understand it, it exists independently of Metacity or any other window manager you choose to use.

You understand incorrectly. Compiz is both a window manager and a compositing manager. There were technical reasons as to why it was done this way. Metacity will also be incorporating composite code directly rather than have a separate userspace process.

Re:Window manager land

[Tet]

Metacity will also be incorporating composite code directly rather than have a separate userspace process.

Which doesn't quite answer the question. Can *any* window manager be used, or only those that have incorporated the compositing code? Is it possible to use a standalone compositor (say, at the expense of some performance), or does it have to be part of the window manager? If it's the latter, than the obvious route is to make it a shared library, which the wm can dlopen() as appropriate. That way, you avoid having a fork of the compositing code in each wm.

Re:Window manager land

[nathanh]

Which doesn't quite answer the question. Can *any* window manager be used,

No.

or only those that have incorporated the compositing code?

Only Compiz; the different compositors are not feature compatible.

Is it possible to use a standalone compositor (say, at the expense of some performance),

No.

or does it have to be part of the window manager?

Yes.

If it's the latter, than the obvious route is to make it a shared library,

No.

which the wm can dlopen() as appropriate.

No.

That way, you avoid having a fork of the compositing code in each wm.

Too late.

Re:Window manager land

[a.d.trick]

Yes, and I believe e18 is planing to have it too. I can't wait :)

Re:Window manager land

[Tet]

Wow! With a design that braindead, I sincerely hope that this project disappears into oblivion. Linux needs sanity far more than it needs eye candy, and this is without doubt the wrong path to be heading down.

Re:Window manager land

[arkanes]

For a lot of effects, the comp manager and the window manager have to have a high degree of interaction and knowledge of each other. For example, in some CVS versions of Metacity, the window can be transparent while the window decorations are not. This is impossible without merging the comp manager and the window manager. It gets even more complicated when you bring Xgl into the mix. This is not a "braindead" design. It is, in fact, the only possible design. Which you'd know if you worked on or with these projects instead of high handed proclamations about sanity.

Re:Window manager land

[Tet]

This is not a "braindead" design. It is, in fact, the only possible design.

Wrong. It is one possible design. The window manager and the compositor have to interact, that I'll grant you. But they don't necessarily have to be in the same process. There are many ways they could be communicating with each other -- using sockets, or shared memory, for example. Now for performance reasons, that might be impractical. As you say, I haven't worked on or with the code, so I don't know. But if that proved to be the case, then anyone with half a brain would have realised from the very start that people would want to do this with a variety of window managers, not just the one chosen by the inital developer. Given that, the current solution to the problem (just take a fork of the code for each wm) is a braindead design, and it makes me question the other design choices that may have been made here. If they can't get something that simple right, then they obviously haven't thought about the bigger picture, and have just concentrated on their one implementation. It makes me wonder how many other similar mistakes they have made.

Re:Window manager land

[MamiyaOtaru]

the way compiz does it may be better technnically, but is certainly not the only way. It was quite possible to use glxcompmgr (compiz' predecessor) together with kwin to achieve the famed wobble and exposé effects. http://img148.imageshack.us/my.php?image=xgl7uk.pn g http://img95.imageshack.us/my.php?image=xgl22bc.pn g Mashing it together with a window manager does seem to make sense I admit, and I'm sure the technical reasons I don't understand are valid. Nonetheless, now if I wish to stick with kwin, I'll have to wait for the code to be transplanted from compiz to kwin, where it will undoubtedly diverge. How good or bad that is remains to be seen.

Re:Window manager land

[markhb]

I thought e18 was going to be the engine for the sequel to Duke Nukem Forever!

Re:Window manager land

[arkanes]

Seperating interrelated components that are fundamentally linked and have dependencies on each others behavior just because some retard who's read but doesn't understand some comp sci books mouths off on Slashdot is lousy engineering. Especially when said retard doesn't actually know the design or the implemetation.

Re:Window manager land

[arkanes]

You *can* seperate them, of course (xcompmgr, glxcompmgr), but integration with the window manager provides a number of possibilities that aren't present with a seperate comp manager, because it has knowledge of the window managers internals. The previous example of shading window chrome seperate from the window itself isn't possible unless you merge with the window manager. Now, you *could* still keep it as a seperate process and write special-case code for every window manager you can think of. But thats stupid.

Re:Window manager land

[TheCRAIGGERS]

The difference is that you can actually try out e18 now. Sure it's buggy, and last I compiled it a few months ago, leaks memory like crazy, but it does work, and it does look good. E will likely be my choice over Novell's desktop in the future, but I'm reserving judgement until they are both past version 1.

Re:Window manager land

[mrchaotica]

That doesn't make any sense. Haven't the people working on this stuff ever heard of an alpha channel? The way you make the window transparent but the decorations opaque is to have the window manager set the [per-pixel] opacity of the texture that then gets passed to the compositing manager.

Re:Window manager land

[DnasTheGreat]

That would be E17.

Re:Window manager land

[octopus72]

Alpha channel covers only transparency. What about other effects? Do you want important system message to wobble or to be still and readable? Or consider any other possible effect in the same context. Separate compositor can't know that information without input from window manager. Making them work in single process only simplifies design for both compiz and plugin developers, which can only benefit Xgl users. After all, Anyone disagreeing with this design decision is free to write their own separate composite manager or use already available ones. It's probably even doable to have compiz composition-only plugin which isn't a window manager and instead works with regular window managers (like metacity).

Videos?

[moriya]

This is the same code that was running in the Novell Linux Desktop 10 preview videos as seen earlier

Could someone post the URL where these videos are available?

Re:Videos?

[Organic_Info]

Can't be bothered to check the article links hey? Check the Novell link.

http://www.novell.com/linux/xglrelease/

Re:Videos?

[moriya]

The line I quoted implied it was mentioned elsewhere so thus I did not check. And nowhere in the paragraph did it say that the videos are also on there. If the blurb was worded differently, then I might have checked the page already.

Re:Videos?

[xNstAble]

You can find videos and more info here:
http://www.novell.com/linux/xglrelease/

Eye candy can make sense

[Max Romantschuk]

Most people who dislike eye candy do so because it slows things down or clutters the UI. Watching these videos and seeing what Apple has done with OS X made me realize that eye candy can make the interface more intuitive when done right. The virtual destop cube -thingy really looked like something usable for a change.

I suspect the possibilities created by hardware accelerated UIs will lay the groundwork for a whole new set of UI paradigms, but the real implications are probably still years away.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[ardor]

I agree. Furthermore, the current state actually does not make much sense. Considering that, for example, nvidia-chips do not have a dedicated 2D core anymore, the driver has to emulate 2D for the legacy 2D APIs that have been used until now. Essentially, dedicated 2D development is dead; its nonsense to have a 2D core since the 3D one can do everything 2D-related much faster and with extras like blending or shaders.

So right now we have an artificial distinction between 2D and 3D. The vendors have to deal with composite stuff AND with opengl acceleration, sometimes simultaneously. Using OpenGL as the base for everything is much better, since opengl already has a client/server-architecture, driver development gets easier, X as a whole becomes leaner, responsiveness and look-n-feel of X improve, and the CPU does not have to deal with fake transparency stuff.

So its all about moving the 2D/3D-distinction away from the driver into the X server.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[joebebel]

Exactly - except that the people who use linux all the time tend to abhor too much eye candy. A lot of *nix users think KDE or Gnome is too much already. A lot of people who like fancy, useful 3d user interfaces have already got their macs too :)

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[VON-MAN]

What bothers me is that the FOSS community didn't seem to take this technology seriously until Microsoft announced it was going into Vista.

You're forgiven because you said "seem". Don't be bothered, the discussion over eyecandy in the FOSS community is as old as the GUI. Heck, for some the GUI alone is eyecandy.

Here's hoping the result isn't half-baked.

Why would the result be half-baked?

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[MikeFM]

As someone that's spent way to much time trying to get work done on OS X I absolutely disagree. OS X is fine for users trying to run two or three windows but for serious users that run ten or twenty programs at once it just is in the way.

I'm fine with eye candy if it does something useful but if it doesn't then it doesn't belong, as a default, on my desktop. This thing looks cool but I don't see it being useful in of itself. Maybe someone will use it to create something useful though. I see 3D as being a good tool for looking at complex relationships but just replacing workspaces with a 3D cube seems pointless.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[nathanh]

What bothers me is that the FOSS community didn't seem to take this technology seriously until Microsoft announced it was going into Vista.

What bothers me is that you can make such statements with such conviction when they are entirely untrue. The FOSS community have been working on features like this since at least early 2004. The Xorg/XFree86 split was partially due to arguments over the Composite and Render extensions that are necessary foundations for this demo.

This technology hasn't appeared on your radar because you aren't looking at the right places. If you read xorg-devel, or planet gnome, or freedesktop, then you would be aware that this technology has been treated seriously. The Novell demo came from out of the blue but the FOSS community has been working on the technology for ages.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[FireFury03]

What bothers me is that the FOSS community didn't seem to take this technology seriously until Microsoft announced it was going into Vista.

The FOSS community _has_ been taking this technology seriously, it's just not hit the main-stream. (Seems to be the case with most FOSS GUI stuff that Apple and Microsoft get there first with the shiny bits.)

From the screen shots I've seen of Vista it looks like the 3D UI features (e.g. 3D windows, etc) are ripped off Project Looking Glass and OS-X, both of which have been around for a long time. As usual, Microsoft are just taking someone else's work and putting it in a system that's already main-stream.

My immediate questions really are how long until:
1. XGL ships as standard with Fedora Core
2. Enlightenment DR0.17 supports all the shiny XGL functionality. Is XGL fundamentally compatable with E17's existing composite system?

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[Curtman]

"The FOSS community have been working on features like this since at least early 2004."

3Dwm is much older than that. From the PDF available on their web page:

"Initiated in 1999 by Niklas Elmqvist and Robert Karlsson at Chalmers Medialab"

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[ratatask]

What about those who (like me) dislikes eyecandy for the reason they
serve only to distract you from the actual work at hand ?

I want to get work done in an environment that works with me, not cause distraction with all fancy smancy so called "eye-candy" which granted, are cool for about the first 3 minutes (unless you're a 15-year old fanboy, in which case everything is cool). Thereafter it just becomes silly.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[Macka]

OS X is fine for users trying to run two or three windows but for serious users that run ten or twenty programs at once it just is in the way

You need to learn how to use the OS X desktop more effectively then.

1. Map your Exposé functions to the screen corners from the "Dashboard and Exposé" option in System Preferences. I've got the following mapped: Top-Left-Application-Windows, Top-Right-All-Windows, Bottom-Left-Start-Screen-Saver, Bottom-Right-Desktop. Its way faster than having to hunt out F9-12 between mouse movements.

2. Make better use of Command-H to hide an app and its associated windows instead of iconizing. It keeps the dock from getting cluttered up

3. If things are getting too busy on the desktop use Option-Command-H to hide all the other apps except the one you're working on. Instant clarity.

4. Remember that you can bring an app (and all its associated windows) to the foreground by clicking the app icon in the dock.

As a serious user who's been using Mac OS X for 3-4 years now, full time, for both work and home I can tell you that the OSX desktop does not get in the way if you make full use of the available features. On the contrary, its a pleasure to use.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[oxymor00n]

E17, AFAIK, does not have a composite system (X11 composite). I've read some messages from raster that he's thinking about this for e18. What E does have is a XRender output plugin. Since Render is supposed to be fully hardware accellerated in Xgl, this could help. But if it really does make a difference can only tell someone who tried it out (and e17 is quite lean anyways, so i guess the benefit would even out ATM)

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[denominateur]

Or you could just have 4 to 6 virtual desktops and a list of ALL programs that can be accessed using alt-TAB, without messing with all those pesky osx features... man I hate osx even more than windows.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[Serpent Mage]

It doesn't replace your workspace with a cube at all. Most all linux desktops already default to having 4 workspaces. This is simply making a more usable navigation among the 4 workspaces everyone already has (linux users). OS X only has 1 workspace so it is difficult for them to grasp the concept right away but having 4 workspaces is exactly what people with 20+ apps open need.

Also for the record, if you use 5 or 6 desktops then that cube looks like a pentagon or a hexagon. As far as I know, it supports up to 64 workspaces but well personally I feel that anything more then 6 is just hard to navigate through usabily.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[popeyethesailor]

MS started Avalon over D3D way back in 2003. I'm not contradicting your post, just making a factual observation.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[nathanh]

MS started Avalon over D3D way back in 2003. I'm not contradicting your post, just making a factual observation.

Cairo, which is the closest Free Software equivalent of Avalon, also began back in 2003. However the comment you were not contradicting was about Vista, not Avalon.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[Lussarn]

OS X and windows has the same problem, cluttered Dekstops. As you say you need to hide the programs. When on UNIX I don't have overlapping windows, I use virtual desktops. It doesn't clutter and works really well. I manually position my programs the way I like to have them, that way I know where they are. On Win and OS X the windows can be all over the place where there is enough space at the moment. I don't see anything you just explained that changes that. No thanks. I don't want to search for my programs.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[xtracto]

I agree with you in this sense, I have never understood what is the functionallity of the "transparency", I mean, what is the big deal, I can blend the content of all the stacked windows on the screen. Aside of the "coolness" factor It is confusing.

Why would you like to make lets say, your Firefox window transparent and having under that OpenOffice Word and under that your desktop image showing the moving world clock, what you will see at the end is, Nothing, just a mess of blended images.

Really, someone please tell me a way to use is productevly as I do not mean to be a troll but, I cant find any use for that.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[cyclomedia]

it's also worth bearing in mind that the desktop is *already* 3d... you have windows on top of other windows, objects in front and behind of each other, it simply lacks perspective.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[popeyethesailor]

As far as I know, Cairo is just a 2D graphics lib; Avalon's scope is a little more than that - it atleast includes both 2D/3D, a markup language for UI development, animations, audio/video support,text handling, among other things. And it was originally targeted for Vista(Longhorn), though back-ports exist for XP/2003.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[master_p]

What you said seems interesting superficially. But when you examine the technology, you will see that nothing really groundbreaking will come out of this. The only real benefit from using the 3d hardware of a graphics hard for GUIs would be the independence of the image from the underlying video resolution. But since the GUI display will never become a vector display, this benefit will never be realized: all solutions currently implement top-level windows as 'textures', thus the bitmap world is here to stay...which is a pity, really, because modern 3d cards excel in vector graphics manipulation (they can manage billions of polygons per second).

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[10Ghz]

I have never understood what is the functionallity of the "transparency"

It looks cools. I for one would like to see the unfocused windows become partially transparent. It would effectively differentiate the focused windows from the unfocused windows. You might say that "we don't need something like that". And you are right. But if I had to choose between two functionally identical systems, with one of them being gorgrous and the other one being ugly, I would choose the gorgerous system.

There's nothing wrong with looking good.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[Gulthek]

So use virtual desktops:

Codetek Virtual Desktop Pro. I've moved beyond virtual desktops myself. I used to be incredible anal about my virtual desktops going so far as to label them by program type or even by program. When I switched to OS X from Linux two years ago I was annoyed by the lack of virtual desktops and focus follows mouse, but now with expose and the dock I find virtual desktops clunky and hard to use.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

What about those who (like me) dislikes eyecandy for the reason they serve only to distract you from the actual work at hand ?

Then you don't enable it. The answer is so blindingly obvious that I suspect you posted just to let everyone know how much you disdain eyecandy (as it distracts you from your single emacs window in twm) in an attempt to get precious "slashdot cred". I swear, "eyecandy distracts me from my work" is the new "I ditched TV ages ago and I'm all the better for it blah blah blah".

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[ratatask]

What's with the trolling ?

I don't use twm, nor do I use emacs, or otherwise run a single whatever window.

Eycandy can't always be "disabled". You have toolkits incorporating shadow/hover
features.
You have animated icons here and there. Applications starts to make windows tranclucent.

Not everything is tweakable. (Well - in some desktops, particulary
some that begins with a 'K'. It is, and it still has a feel of disorganizing withall these turned off)

My mere point it, why not rather spend resources enhancing user productivity, than all these "features" ?

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[xtracto]

Yeah... you and me sure have very different tastes... . I prefer to squeeze every CPU cycle for the work I am doing :)

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[DavidHOzAu]

My mere point it, why not rather spend resources enhancing user productivity, than all these "features" ?
Because adding features increases user productivity. More features = more things I can do.

That's why extensions, plugins, and shared objects exist: to enhance our programs by adding features.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[TheRaven64]

There are three schools of thought when it comes to this kind of thing:

1. Eye candy is pretty, and we need more of it.
2. Effects, used in moderation, can provide important visual clues to the user making interaction easier.
3. Eye candy distracts me from my work.

Microsoft tend to sit in the first camp, with a few lone voices in the second. Apple tend to be more in the second camp, but with a strong leaning towards the first. Most open source developers seem to be resolutely in either the first or third group.

There are lots of things that transparency can be used for. Consider tool windows. There are often a lot of these, and they can make the UI cluttered. OS X avoids this by hiding all tool windows when their owner is not first responder, as do a few other UNIX environments I've used. This can be slightly jarring, since windows vanish and re-appear. A nicer solution would be to have them fade to being almost transparent. This would provide a constant visual clue reminding the user where they are, but help reduce desk clutter. You might also make them unclickable (passing clicks to the windows underneath) in this state, but I'd have to see a user study to see whether this would be beneficial or confusing.

There are lots of ways in which translucency can be used. My personal favourite is for notifications. Rather than having dialog boxes pop up with just an 'Okay' button (really, really, bad UI - why require user intervention when the user is not making a decision? See Raskin), you pop up a translucent notification that gradually fades over time. The user can see it and ignore it. OS X uses these for things like volume changes from the keyboard volume buttons and when it loses connection with a bluetooth HID.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[delire]

No thanks. I don't want to search for my programs.

Precisely. After giving OSX Tiger a try for several weeks, and even with a virtual desktop extension (that should be installed by default - KDE/Gnome have had this for 10 years or so) and reading HOWTO's in blogs and the like, I found it sluggish and domineering to use compared to that of KDE on the same machine under Linux. This bizarre 'Finder' program assumes my applications are somehow lost already and I feel like I'm constantly managing my Windows instead of using them. After turning off all the special effects any further attempts to configure the environment to suit me were thwarted - as though manipulating the environment was somehow a bad thing and really shouldn't be attempted. Why can't I have an applications menu or panel under RMB instead of all the way down at the bottom of the screen? Why can't I save window layouts by name for the next time I log into the machine? Why can't I group windows to one-another?

I'm sure OSX is a revolution for Windows users making the switch but from a useability perspective it does seem a few years behind Linux offerings - eye candy aside.

Let's hope incorporation of Xgl does compromise the configurability of Linux DE's that support it, or hit the GPU so hard it slows performance.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[delire]

.. I meant to say [...] "does not compromise configurability of Linux DE's that support it"!

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[Kadin2048]

...a list of ALL programs that can be accessed using alt-TAB

Erm, which is exactly what you get if you press Command-Tab on a Mac. (That's OpenApple-Tab to all you old-school folks out there.) Except instead of a vertical list, it's displayed left to right, which I've always found faster to read. And the applications are ordered by last use, so pressing Command-Tab quickly switches you back to the last application, pressing tab twice gets you the application before that, etc. I think it's a much better interface than WinXP's or Linux's app switchers, although I admit the differences are minimal.

The lack of virtual desktops on Mac OS is a bit of a drag, though. There aren't a lot of features that I think MacOS is lacking, but that's one of them. I understand that it might confuse some new users, but I think it could be enabled as a preference or something.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[cmdrbuzz]

Why can't I have an applications menu or panel under RMB instead....

I'm not sure why you'd want it, but you can have a contextual menu of the currently running applications.
Have a look at FruitMenu from Unsanity. It does all of that and more (for $5 or so)

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[delire]

I'm not sure why you'd want it

Hehe this should be an Apple Mantra.

Thanks, but this shareware doesn't cut it either, I wanted a full contextual menu for applications running or not, and right under my cursor wherever it was.

Having tried Tiger I realised I've been spoiled with Linux desktops over the years; I set up a desktop once just how I like it and take that with me to whatever machine I'm using. KDE in particular offers a wide range of sensible customisations without hunting around and reading endless HOWTO's. OSX just doesn't seem to offer what I need to be productive out of the box - it takes far too much work tweaking and hunting around online to make it a personalised experience. While it was fun to try OSX for a sustained period, the G5 now runs Ubuntu.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[miyako]

There is one instance when I've found transparency to be very useful in OS X- and that is with the terminal. It is incredibly nice to be able to code in a terminal window and have documentation open beneath the terminal so that you can simply look through the code to see you're documentation.
The thing about transparency isn't that you want to have all your windows transparent, it's that you want to be able to have one window open full screen and still be able to quickly reference another window.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[modmans2ndcoming]

sounds more like you have gotten used to the Linux desktop rather than spoiled by it. (unless you mean spoiled as in ruined [in a negative way])

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[mmkkbb]

I think it's a much better interface than WinXP's or Linux's app switchers, although I admit the differences are minimal.

Um, the WinXP alt-tab works exactly as you describe, and with the Microsoft powertoys, you can actually make it display a preview of the window you are switching to.

The lack of virtual desktops on Mac OS is a bit of a drag, though.

http://desktopmanager.berlios.de/

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[bjohnson]

So use virtual desktops: http://desktopmanager.berlios.de/

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[p3d0]

Using OpenGL as the base for everything is much better (. . .)

Except that OpenGL, last time I checked, can't even do curves in hardware. It only does polygons. That makes implementing things like SVG pretty labour-intensive.

Other than that, I really like OpenGL. To bad OpenVG (which can do curves in hardware) seems, to me, nothing whatsoever like OpenGL, aside from the name and the function naming conventions. My favourite part: any OpenVG call can cause an out-of-memory error at any time, and can leave the graphics system in any state it wants. Yeah, that's a real winner of an API.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[fak3r]

"Having tried Tiger I realised I've been spoiled with Linux desktops over the years; I set up a desktop once just how I like it and take that with me to whatever machine I'm using. KDE in particular offers a wide range of sensible customisations without hunting around and reading endless HOWTO's. OSX just doesn't seem to offer what I need to be productive out of the box - it takes far too much work tweaking and hunting around online to make it a personalised experience. While it was fun to try OSX for a sustained period, the G5 now runs Ubuntu."

Thanks for that comment, this is EXACTLY what I try to get across when ppl see my iBook and wonder why I don't run OSX on it! "OSX has the best gui out there" just misses the point of running Gnome/Openbox/whatever for me. The freedome to do whatever with your desktop spoils you, once in OSX you can do...some things, and with 'shareware' you can do...more things, but you can never do ALL the things that you just take for granted using Linux (or BSD) as a desktop/workstation. I've never been more content and productive as when I ran Openbox at work; I had 6 virtual desktops (one for web, one for email, one for dev, one for terms, etc) that I could switch around to via the scrollwheel! Perfect. Yes, you can do SOME of this in OSX, but you'll never be able to match the speed and simplicity that you can in a free and open DE.

I know OSX is perfect for some since it's "The best GUI on top of UNIX!" but those ppl are not me, and do not work as I do. As for hating finder, yeah, it blows, and the thing is I never even use Nautilus in Linux; I'm just too used to the comamand line. You can never get faster or more precise than doing things CLI, plus it's the way you *have* to do it on your servers, so why not be used to it?

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[CableModemSniper]

1. Map your Exposé functions to the screen corners from the "Dashboard and Exposé" option in System Preferences. I've got the following mapped: Top-Left-Application-Windows, Top-Right-All-Windows, Bottom-Left-Start-Screen-Saver, Bottom-Right-Desktop. Its way faster than having to hunt out F9-12 between mouse movements.

Hunt? Hunt!? Come on, they're nice big keyboard buttons. Plus by using the keyboard buttons instead of hotcorners (yech for the most part, although I do have one for disable screensaver) dragging and dropping just became a lot more useful

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[Doctor Memory]

having 4 workspaces is exactly what people with 20+ apps open need

No, people with 20+ apps open need four monitors. Trust me, once you go dual-head, you never look back (or need to -- just put a reverse view on the other monitor... ;)

Seriously, my productivity increased probably a good 20% or so once I was able to keep my full-screen IDE on one monitor and a full-size display of the current spec on the other. No more flipping through thirty or forty pages of printout to find a definition while coding a use case, no more minimizing or maximizing or tiling, just throw an app on a monitor and use it.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[shadwstalkr]

why not rather spend resources enhancing user productivity, than all these "features" ?

Two reasons: eye candy sells software, and making advancements in usability is hard and not necessarily universal across all users.

Hardly anybody is going to work with a transparent window, or watch a movie on the edge of a cube, but it's something that impresses people and gets them excited about trying your software. On the other hand, most people don't even realize how much more productive they could be with features X, Y, and Z, so they couldn't care less about seeing them in software demos.

The bottom line is that to compete in the desktop market, you have to have some wow factor.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[dlZ]

I swear, "eyecandy distracts me from my work" is the new "I ditched TV ages ago and I'm all the better for it blah blah blah".

I was one of those "ditched TV ages ago" people, mostly because cable was expensive and I was poor. So I gave up on it, read a lot more, and played a lot more video games (okay, I played Unreal Tournament and that was about it.) Now I can afford cable, have the whole digital package, blah blah blah, and love it. I still don't watch a lot of TV and I play less Unreal Tournament (now the 2004 variety.) I'm pretty sure I'm not worse off because I watch TV some now, if anything I'm better for it, because I still read a ton and get to enjoy my other hobbies, but I also work out more because I like to while I watch TV.

On the subject of eye candy, if you don't like it just DISABLE IT. Not that hard. I like KDE with transparency turned on. I'm pretty sure it doesn't distract me from getting my work done, and I enjoy the experience more with a little bit of eye candy prettiness. I dislike OS X for the main reason that I just don't like it. I don't need to give a ton of reasons why, it's just not for me. Same goes for GNOME, I just really don't like it. Desktop wars are as pointless as OS wars. We have multiple choices, so just choose what suits your needs and you enjoy using.

Now /. distracting me from work is a completely different matter.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[octopus72]

You are talking about plain OpenGL OpenGL backend) which investigates appropriate GL ways to do required work.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[octopus72]

You are talking about plain OpenGL 1.5(or less) or 2.0 specification?

Extensions handle "missing functionality" problems. If you have a capable hardware, design extension, implement it in driver and you have what is needed. Another popular method is to use pixel shaders to do antialiased vector rendering. Xgl doesn't really care here about implementation specific problems, it leaves all that to glitz (Cairo - OpenGL backend) which investigates appropriate GL ways to do required work.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[octopus72]

Avalon is also a (graphic) hardware accelerated UI engine, similar to Xgl.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[10Ghz]

Yeah, I need every bit of CPU-power to surf the web, draw images, check email... I guess I could reduce my compile-times by 0.3% if I eliminated all eye-candy. But OTOH, that would make my computer-usage a bit less enjoyable, so I fail to see the benefit.

And to be honest, that screenshot looks like crap and it's very unproductive IMO. Just because something looks like crap does not mean that it's "efficient". and just because something looks good does not mean that it's inefficient.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[pthisis]

As an alternative, you can have focus-follows-mouse and put the docs on top of the terminal.

One of many reasons I hate click-to-focus, autoraise, and other things that force the window with focus to also be the on top.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[octopus72]

Interesting point.

In theory Xgl could buffer, e.g, all XRender commands used to draw data to X app bitmaps and let compositing manager actually render them with appropriate transformations accounted for. Same with server side fonts or other similar extensions.

Not easy thing to design though, especially if application does partial screen updates. In that case you would need to rule which vector operations are still visible on desktop and which aren't and delete them from operation queue (which could in case of full-window updates simply be flushed). To have this functioning for applications that can take advantage, I think there should be new protocol extension for actual applications to actively control that queue.

I remember that Avalon stores vector data on graphic card before compositing, at least for 3D objects (I'm not sure how they do fonts).

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[Crazy Eight]

Hmmm. I'm not sure I understand your point. No matter how abstract the initial representation of an image it will still have to be rasterized. If that means tapping hardware GL and shaders to turn SVG (or what have you) into a bitmapped texture, and only then painting it to a monitor I don't see what's lost. The available hardware is still utilized. Doesn't the intermediary step merely add flexibility?

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[starnix]

Limited functionality. Why do you think it "Just works"? Because you really can't do much beyond what Apple decided it wants to let you do.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[be-fan]

Neither API supports curves at the lowest levels. Both handle curves by tessellating them to polygons then sending the generated vertices down the transform and rasterization stages. Hardware tessellation isn't used that often on OpenGL, however, since OpenGL-capable platforms (unlike the embedded platforms targetted by OpenVG), are able to do flexible and high-quality tessellation in software.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[master_p]

If the display was vector, then the visual effects would be much better. With rasterisation, drawing commands are rasterized as soon as they arrive in the X server, causing effects to produce pixel artifacts.

For example, let's say that we need to change the font size of menus. If the display was vectors, the only action needed would be to scale the font vectors in the appropriate manner; whereas with rasterization, the GDI engine must rasterize fonts to the new size.

Furthermore, if fonts were vectors, then special serif information would not be needed: the serifs would automatically be drawn as functions of vector drawing.

Another example: suppose we want to have windows with rounded edges. Play a video in a window, then drag another window onto the video player and watch the rounded edges: are they still round, or the part behind the rounded edges is not updated and remains black? the reason for such things is that the window system needs to calculate regions i.e. visible rectangle lists. If the display was vector, such problem would not exist: at every refresh rate, the display would be built out of vectors.

Another example: a CAD application opens a CAD document that is 10000x10000 pixels wide, and the user wants to see the whole image by opening the window in a virtual desktop. With rasterisation, the 10000x10000 window in 32-bit color as a texture would need 4,000,000,000 bytes, something which is impossible with 32-bit computers. With vectors, the window would take up so much space as the drawing commands needed to built that window: a few Kb at most. In fact, maintaining rasterized windows would consume a lot of video memory, whereas with vector drawing the video memory utilisation would be much better.

Another example: window zoom effects. If you remember from early MacOS, when windows appeared/disappeared, a rectangle made out of lines was zoomed from/to the icon that was used to open the window. Now the MacOS display does digital zoom effects on the window texture. The overall effect has smooth animation, but the raster display causes pixel artifacts to be visible on the effect: it is similar to going very close to a wall in an FPS game. If the display was vector, no such problem would exist.

Another example: windows within windows. Many applications support the MDI interface. With a vector display, it would be possible to zoom windows within windows and provide the same effects as for top-level windows. With the rasterisation technique, it is only top-level windows that are managed as textures; effects are only available for top-level windows.

Another example: icons. Icons would be much more detailed, much better animated and take much less space if they were vectors. On Windows XP, for example, when an application that uses the graphics card heavily is closed, the Window GDI engine "momentarily" makes a mess of icons because the GDI defragments the video memory, moving icon images around (sometimes the "momentarily" part becomes long, if the swap file management kicks in, or infinite, if there is a problem, needing to reboot the machine). With a vector display, no such problem would exist, because vector data need not be continuous in memory (and take much less space).

There are numerous examples where vectors are better than bitmaps.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[p3d0]

Ok that's interesting. I made the mistake of coming off as an OpenGL expert, but really I haven't done that much of it. For instance, I have never used tesselation. :-)

Thanks for the info.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[Macka]

Not on a PowerBook they're not. The F* keys are half the size of the regular keys. Believe me, using hot-corners is way faster.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[Macka]

Ditto. I tried the free Desktop Manager which (last time I checked) was better than the Codetek virtual desktop. But even so, I've found that its slower (for me) in real life to work with virtual desktops than not.

Re:Eye candy can make sense

[Serpent Mage]

Trust me, once you go dual-head, you never look back (or need to -- just put a reverse view on the other monitor... ;)

I have dual-monitors at home and work. Yes you are correct once you go dual you can't go back. However, it still doesn't change the fact that even with dual, multiple desktops still kick the pants of a single desktop for much the same reason as dual monitors is better then one monitor.

Finally!

[rsilvergun]

Real Transparency! But who's providing the hardware accel? This is still kinda sticky, right now your choices boil down to nvidia's closed source driver (not that I have a problem with that), ATI's bug fest (sorry, but it's true), or a really old Radeon. Oh yeah, while I'm idly wondering, what are the odds of this making it into mainstream desktops ( stock gnome/kde )?

Re:Finally!

[sumi-manga]

I believe it can be installed on gnome.

Re:Finally!

[crwl]

The open source R300 drivers (http://r300.sourceforge.net/ - now part of Mesa/DRM + X.Org source trees) for the 9600 and 9800 series of ATi Radeons seem to be currently at least somewhat usable.

I mean, at least Planet Penguin Racer (ex-Tuxracer) seemed to work fine, 3D acceleration and all..! :P

Re:Finally!

[SillyNickName4me]

I have played with those drivers (actually, I'm kinda stuck with the new xorg ati drivers and dri because the kernel I use doesn't work well with the 'old' dri module).

They are nice, tho fairly incomplete as far as r300 support goes. It is a real step forward tho, and the difference with pure software rendering is huge.

For those with slightly older cards, the difference is quite substantial as well. For the first time I have seen a 9200 perform at least good enough to be usable for things like enemy territory on linux (something that has never been a problem on anything from nvidia that is more recent then a tnt2 really, with their proprietary drivers that is, while the proprietary ATI drivers have always given me huge problems, preventing them from being usable alltogether for me). Depending on the application you can see upto some 40% increase in performance for 3D work.

I haven't used them enough with a 9600 to say anything about stability with that hardware, but stability with the 9200 I'm using right now (well, a 9600SE actually, but that is pretty much a 9200 for as far as drivers go) is excelent.

All in all, for 'low-end' 3D graphics on Linux, ATI has become a more serious contender with those drivers. The fact that they are open source makes them the prefered choice now unless I want something for more serious gaming on Linux (or FreeBSD usually in my case).

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Nat Friedman was using a Centrino Vaio laptop with 512 mb of RAM and a GeForce 6xxx card for his preview demo of Novell Linux Desktop 10 at the Linux Solutions show last week in Paris (and it was pretty fluid). I don't know which driver he used though.

Re:Finally!

[PhilRod]

Oh yeah, while I'm idly wondering, what are the odds of this making it into mainstream desktops ( stock gnome/kde )?

Well, to some extent it's already there: KWin uses COMPOSITE to do translucency and shadows, for example.

There are plans to extend use of these features in KDE 4. Zack Rusin from KDE, has been working on this sort of thing (you can see an interview with him from the Summer). There's also the Plasma project, which has beauty and usability as its key aims built in from the start.

And best of all, you can get involved and help make KDE 4 the best ever!

Re:Finally!

[ciroknight]

"I've been waiting a long time for this. And this, and this, and this."
GNOME Storage: Dead.
Beagle: Braindead.
Dashboard: oh dear christ.

The one thing about the whole GNOME project which is about to uproot me and make my move back to QT, is their extreme dependance on Mono. Not only does this put them in legal limbo, it doesn't fix the problems underneath, thus it's building a zoo on top of a house of cards.

I've played around with GNOME Storage, it was a disaster. (No wonder it died; installing a kernel CORBA object? You've gotta be KIDDING ME). I've played around with Beagle (as much as I could, C# makes me feel dirty on so many levels). I've watched demos of Dashboard. I hated all of them.

GNOME Storage was on the right path; use the database at daemon level, using a kernel patch to notify you of what's going on. Beagle adapts a tried and true method (Spotlight for GNOME!), but fails to realize that Lucene is simply an index server, that iNotify is only as powerful as the user who's using it, and that the daemon has to run as a per-user instance; not something you'd want to do on a server/multi-user computer. I don't even want to go there with Dashboard.. *shudder*

I presented as a design plan an idea to recode Beagle using ODBC for database abstraction, running a root-level database daemon, and storing the whole file system in the database, with the metadata extractor running at user level (which allows for a lot more flexibility in controlling what the user can/can't modify in terms of the file system). A system like this would allow for remote file storage (something Beagle doesn't allow for), much like "Roaming Profiles", only everything would roam. It would allow for less redundant storage (no need to keep local copies of anything except for cache). It would allow for a much simpler backup scheme (database replication). And performance would be based on how fast your database server and network connection were based, which granted is slower than your harddrive might be, but with all of the added advantages, I could see people wanting to go that direction.

It would be the killer business application; clients no longer need very complicated operating system installs, less complicated backup procedures, less complicated IT support (just blank the dumb client and reinstall the OS, something Windows users have been doing for ages). And it would be great for tracking metadata including copyright, permissions, etc. etc.

So why haven't I coded it? Because I have to LIVE!!! You can't do that kind of work for free. And I've still got to complete a degree, so until then, a dream of having a database file system still escapes me. *sigh*. Enough of my rant.

Re:Finally!

[manno]

"a 9600SE actually, but that is pretty much a 9200 for as far as drivers go"

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Radeon 9550, and 96xx, series are based off of ATI's 4 pipe core that's based of of the 97xx architecture, they are DirectX 9 parts (Shader Model 2) with fully programmable shaders. your 9600SE is no where near similar to the 9200, as far as architecture goes. Driver wise the 9200 drivers should work on a 9600, but your cutting off a huge portion of the 9600's potential. The 9200 is an old 2 pipe core that's a DX 8.1 (Shader Model 1.x) you are castrating your already castrated 9600SE using drivers for a 9200

Re:Finally!

[SillyNickName4me]

Whoops, you are completely right of course.

I have a 9600se around, but in my workstation is actually a 9200. No idea why I thought I had the 9600se in there. At any rate.. I know I was using a rv280 and not a rv300 based card, and for that one the new drivers seem to do quite a bit in performance.

Re:Finally!

[ardor]

You Sir are completely wrong. Compiz is a combined window manager/compositing manager. KDE uses its own compositing manager (kcompmgr) and its likely that KDE 4 will have a combined WM/CM too.

Re:Finally!

[niko9]

Have patience young man. Help is coming.

Sunscribe to the list, or just look at the archives. They have done alot of work. I'm very excited.

Re:Finally!

[x_codingmonkey_x]

From what I have read so far it seems that Xgl only really works with proprietary drivers (ATi and Nvidia). I have also heard people have problems with this, but personally I could care less. If it works well and gives me the beautiful eye candy I desire, it doesn't matter what drivers I'm using.
As for being included with Gnome and KDE, it is already based on Cairo and thus works with Gnome (which is what the demonstrating was using). I believe that it works with KDE as well, but I'm not sure. However, it is said that SuSE 10.2 will come with KDE 4.0 and Xgl so I assume it should work in KDE by then (I sure hope so since I use KDE).

Re:Finally!

[SirTalon42]

If I remember correctly, the 'open graphics' hardware is going to ONLY support 2d, with no 3d.

Re:Finally!

[LordMyren]

I'd be interested to see comparison of r300 feature support v. nvidia & ati's drivers.

Whoa

[strider44]

This is a great advertisement for Novell here - their servers have lasted something like ten minutes already after posting 4 videos on Slashdot!

A little preemptive.

[Stalyn]

"Xgl has already been checked into the public repositories, Compiz will be checked in after David Reveman's presentation at the X conference."

Which is Feb, 8th at 10am PST.. Also the XGL code has been available for some time. Browse the CVS. I'm somewhat expecting an update of the code tomorrow too.

Re:A little preemptive.

[linds.r]

As far as I understand it, the public version of XGL was very out of date for a long long time, much to the dismay of people trying to use it. Essentially, they were dealing with bugs they had seen fixed in public demonstrations. I'm fairly sure this marks the successful merge of some recent XGL into a fork of X.org, for the most part done by the X.org/DRI maintainers.

At least this marks a step toward the future of X rendering for 2 of the 3 available visions (to my knowledge). They all seem to be going for very similar visual/functional features, with only implementational differences (whether you run gl as a special, all encompassing yet sub X context, run X on GL, or change X such that it direct renders GL contexts). Facts may be in error.

Whatever wins out, I'm glad we will one day soon leave behind the flicker. It will not be missed.

Debian

[Saxophonist]

Wow! I can't wait until this hits Debian stable, probably in the Debian 15.8 release in 2028.

Re:Debian

[1310nm]

You give them too much credit.

I predict version 5 by that time, and Xgl will still be in an unstable apt repo.

Re:Debian

[slashdotmsiriv]

By the time it gets stable in the Fedora repositories, we will be talking about FC 15.

Seriously any idea when I will be able to yum those xGL rpms?

Re:Debian

[Karora]

Clearly this is contradictory. If you "can't wait" until it hist Debian stable then you are looking for a release which is less stable than Debian stable.

The reality is, of course much simpler. Odds are that given it's optional "runs on top of Xorg" nature it will be available in Debian testing within 3 months and will consequently be released next time the 16000 or so Debian packages are declared stable enough for a release.

</TrollFodder>

Re:Debian

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I guess the only way to point out the truth on this site is to work it into a joke.

The last couple times I expressed disappointment in how far behind Debian Stable can get, I was marked as a troll several times over. And no, I won't load unstable or experimental software onto a server or workstation if I can avoid it, I'm just saying that Stable can move a bit more more often and not get so behind.

Re:Debian

[DigiShaman]

Hey! That's got a good ring to it. :D

"It's not stable unless it's Debian stable"

Re:Debian

[muyuubyou]

That may be a valid point for libraries or server-related packages, but for anything that has to do with a windows manager, you're just wrong about your concept of stable. You're looking at "unstable" or "testing", or Ubuntu which isn't any more stable than any of those two BTW.

It's just that their choice of names is a tad misleading.

Re:Debian

[Curtman]

"I predict version 5 by that time, and Xgl will still be in an unstable apt repo.

And packages.debian.org will still be broken, as will search.debian.org. Seriously, they can't have been working very hard on it. It'll be two years in May.

Lazy asses.

Re:Debian

[squoozer]

How about this for a solution. Debain make a stable server version and a stable desktop version. The server version can be as stable (or even more so) as the current stable releases. The stable desktop version would be released every 6 to 12 months and be pretty damn stable but not as stable as the server version. That way you get the benifit of most of the stability on the desktop without falling horribly far behind. I'm currently tracking unstable because I don't want to fall too far behind but I would probably track "stable desktop" if I could be sure I would get regular well planned updates.

Re:Debian

[Ginger Unicorn]

Isn't that what Ubuntu is? Albeit unofficial in that it is a derivative of Debian, it seems to effectively provide what you suggest.

And I'm glad it does because I agree with you that that is exactly what we need. I was put off Debian by the fact my DSL modem wasnt directly supported by Sarge; a week of research couldn't help me fix it, but then I stumbled across FAQs that told you how to set it up on Ubuntu so I gave it a go and have had nothing but joy and satisfaction using this well supported and up to date 'desktop version' of Debian.

As for stability issues, there are the odd problems (close a terminal window without typing 'exit' and it leaves a non killable 2.2mb procces, you have to patch firefox 1.5 onto the system becuase 1.0 has bad memory leaks, a few other App memory leaks, etc) but its certainly not less stable than Windows.

They have a 6 month release schedule and everything is anchored in Debian 'unstable', but with the worst bugs removed so that desktop users have an acceptably stable system to use.

Re:Debian

[ezzewezza]

coincidentally, that's about when gentoo users will finally have everything compiled again to use it.

Re:Debian

[Hatta]

I'm just saying that Stable can move a bit more more often and not get so behind.

But then it wouldn't be stable anymore. Quality control takes time, especially for an all volunteer project.

Re:Debian

[mrchaotica]

Now, I could be wrong, but I think they have that... and call it "testing."

Re:Debian

[squoozer]

I certainly wouldn't claim that the idea is all mine and Ubuntu is close to what I suggest but not quite there. I want a Debian style desktop distribution that is a little more stable than testing. I actually used testing for about 18 months and found it to be very stable but the constant updates were a pain (I suppose I could have just ignored them). I would much rather one big update every 6 months that has been through a defined QA process. Who knows perhaps we'll see it one day. I hope Debian starts to directly address this issue because I think it's the best managed distribution in town but by god is it hard to work with.

Re:Debian

[squoozer]

You don't know much about testing it would seem. Non-critical updates appear on a daily basis - I am suggesting non-criticals are once ever six months after a QA process.

Re:OMG XINERAMA PLEASE!

[Organic_Info]

The project is fresh out development and your already whining for what it might not have.

And to think when the news first broke that this would be initially developed in house there was outrage, but you comment exemplifies why they started development away from the "community".

Question is are you going to do anything to help the project?

Re:Novell

[kclittle]

Yes, you have successfully gotten past my built-in Bayesian filter. *Now* will you go to your room? :)

Wow

[gregeth]

After watching some of the video (still up too), I'm impressed. While eye candy isn't always the best to create just to have it, I think this is more a case of making a more productive experience. The less time it takes to go switching between applications to look at some information the better.

Then again, guess I'll have to go get that high end video card just to run the next distro. :)

Re:Wow

[ardor]

Then again, guess I'll have to go get that high end video card just to run the next distro. :)

No, actually not. The rendering presented in the video does not need a 7800. This is basic 3D rendering most on-board graphics chipsets can handle. This functionality has been around for a decade in consumer cards.

Re:Wow

[SillyNickName4me]

I think that's a genuine danger - that you up the requirements for Linux

Seeing how pretty basic 3D hardware can do this, and how it takes load off of the cpu, it is actually more likely to lower the hardware requirements for building a nice looking and responsive desktop with Linux.

Re:Wow

[Pecisk]

And don't forget to add that it is WHY XGL and XEGL is important - if we can show that Linux can use for example, those Intel 3D onboard cards (GraphicsExtreme2 or something) for such eye candy, well, it is as 10:0 in basketball in one quater. It IS important to get lot of new users, even advanced ones, to Linux/Free desktop bandwagon.

Re:Wow

[IamTheRealMike]

Using XVideo via 3D does require a card that supports pixel shaders though, and according to glitztest my GeForce4MX isn't really up to the task. So I'd have to upgrade at least.

Re:Wow

[JesseMcDonald]

Remember that this is just the first version. There's no reason why they couldn't add support for non-pixel-shader-based XVideo rendering later on, for cards that need it. Right now they're trying to get a basic version working, and they're taking advantage of all the features of modern cards to simplify the architecture. Once the basic feature set is in place they'll create workarounds for older cards. After all, supporting the current XVideo system isn't all that difficult, since they can just pass the XVideo calls on to the underlying X server.

Of course, some of the effects (transparency, non-rectangular windows) will probably be incompatible with the old XVideo system. In the worst case, they'll just have to disable those effects while XVideo is in use. There might be some visual glitches if composited windows are overlayed on top of the XVideo rendering area, but otherwise there shouldn't be any trouble. Furthermore, with more of the graphics rendering offloaded to the video card, you should have extra CPU capacity available for the video codec.

Re:Wow

[LordMyren]

Doesnt it use indirect rendering (render to texture)? Is that available on old Geforce1 class or TnT hardware?

Is this mean, I can finally enable Composite?

[layer3switch]

=======xorg.conf=======
Section "Extensions"
              Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection
=======================

Does this mean glx module and Composite finally play nice without death to X? I'm so totally confused.

Re:Is this mean, I can finally enable Composite?

[ardor]

In xgl you should disable it, the extension is present anyway (no matter whats written in the xorg.conf).
Also, if you have a nvidia hardware, you should disable it in xorg.conf.

Re:Is this mean, I can finally enable Composite?

[m50d]

You mean you can't? With the nvidia binary drivers you have to add Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true" to the Device section since glx stuff isn't properly composited, but it still works.

Re:Is this mean, I can finally enable Composite?

[Lisandro]

Indeed. I've tried compositing on my XFCE desktop and a nNvida FX5200 with the binary drivers, and i had these beautiful window shadows and the ability to set window transparency. It works, and works now.

    Unfortunately, nVidia binary drivers still don't properly support glx (OpenGL) if compositing is enabled. The option you mention forces it, but you still get weird graphical glitches everywhere. For the time being, if you can live without glx, try compositing. Really cool stuff.

Re:Is this mean, I can finally enable Composite?

[Mo6eB]

It is a bit more complicated than that. Xgl doesn't work all by itself - it relies on having a working OpenGL enviroment. In this case - Xorg. So you run Xgl on top of Xorg and Xgl implements RENDER and GLX, by passing relevant calls to the OpenGL system of the underlying Xserver. COMPOSITE is also turned on by default in Xgl, but it does NOT use the underlying server's COMPOSITE.

It will take some time until all this is finally merged into Xorg and we have an OpenGL-accelerated desktop without the need of running 2 Xservers, but for the time being, if you want (somewhat) stable COMPOSITE with GLX, this is the only way.

Re:Is this mean, I can finally enable Composite?

[layer3switch]

Great! Thanks. I'm absolutely clueless what that just did, but seems like it didn't spit out X err... :)

Re:Is this mean, I can finally enable Composite?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. GLX still doesnt play ball nicely with composite enabled, BUT, it doesn't have to. XGL is another X server running atop of Xorg's X server - so it has it's own composite implementation. In other words, you still have to disable the composite extension from xorg.conf, but it really doesnt matter, because XGL will be able to produce eye candy anyway.

Re:Is this mean, I can finally enable Composite?

[m50d]

It isn't properly supported - any GLX stuff won't have transparency, and, because of how composite works, you may well find that if you hide glx windows the glx stuff is still visible on top of everything else. But it mostly works, and I know I only use glx for fullscreen things anyway.

Come on guys, stop complaining!

[BerkeleyDude]

This is great news! Weren't we waiting for the Xgl?

Why is everyone complaining about Novell, graphics drivers, Debian, and lots of completely irrelevant topics?

Nothing can make Slashdotters happy...

Re:Come on guys, stop complaining!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you'll need to add complaining about slashdotters' complaining to your list.

Re:Come on guys, stop complaining!

[BerkeleyDude]

Now you'll need to add complaining about slashdotters' complaining to your list.

Damn... Not only that, but also slashdotters' complaining about my complaining about their complaining...

Re:Come on guys, stop complaining!

[slysithesuperspy]

Now your stuck in a loop for the rest of your life, you should trick people into not complaining, without making it look like your complaining yourself.

Re:Come on guys, stop complaining!

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Nothing can make Slashdotters happy...

A couple of naked supermodels just begging for my lovin' should do just fine.

very pretty, but what does it do?

[semiotec]

I watched the demo movies, the last one (Spinning Cube) especially looks quite impressive.

However, I am wondering if the step from 2D to 3D desktop is as significant as say, going from commandline to GUI.

It doesn't seem like these 3D desktops actually offer much more functionality than existing 2D desktops. For example, the screen captures of Looking Glass 3d desktop from Sun doesn't seem to offer much more than just some eye candies. Or in case of the spinning cube demo, it doesn't seem to offer (functionally) more than virtual desktops, essentially a fancy way of changing from one desktop to another, which probably can still be done faster with some keyboard shortcut.

I am trying not to sound like some diehard stubborn conservative who wants to bring back the glory days of command line only interface, rather, I am asking if 3D desktops will change the way that we interact with computers, in the sense that barely anyone remember what it was like to work in DOS? Is this a step towards to (gasp shock horror) VR-based interfacing? Will a new hardware tool be needed like the mouse was necessary for the transition away from commandline?

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[ardor]

Well, its a new tool for UI design. As with all tools, one has to learn how to use it properly first. For example, OSX shows that alphablending can be useful.

The main advantage is the sheer responsiveness. Everything feels more fluent, and lags are no longer noticeable.

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[Lisandro]

Forget 3D desktops - the real beauty of Xgl is that allows the use of OpenGL to render parts of your desktop, which means your video card won't just be using 1% of its potential anymore. This is done by OSX and it means faster and sleeker graphical desktops.

    Also, combined with the new X.Org extensions (Compositing, Damager, Cairo) it means, of course, eyecandy galore :)

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[Ziviyr]

What does it do?

What did blitter hardware do for framebuffers way back when?

This means we won't be that far behind Vista.
I think we're pretty late nonetheless.

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[Lisandro]

"Damage", not "Damager". I need to stop drinking coffee.

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[CRCulver]

Forget 3D desktops - the real beauty of Xgl is that allows the use of OpenGL to render parts of your desktop, which means your video card won't just be using 1% of its potential anymore.

What about those of us with crappy notebook display cards that use main memory, you insensitive clod?!

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[semiotec]

okay, I absolutely agree that speeding things up with just the existing hardware is a good thing, and _even_if_ this is the only that Xgl brings, it is still a very good and important thing.

But my question still remains, do 3D desktops have the potential to change the way we interact with computers? or is it still too early to say?

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[Lisandro]

Well, instead of having X.Org using system memory you'll have your video card using video memory - which on most laptops are the same thing. And even then, it's not like you can't disable it.

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[oneandoneis2]

I had a few thoughts about desktops going 3D a while ago, if you're interested.

It basically says that, instead of making 2D windows go 3D, we should throw away the whole concept of "windows" and switch to multiple 3D layers instead

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[Lisandro]

I don't think so, no. Atleast, until real 3D displays become available. A 3D desktop like that Xgl demo is nice to look at, but doesn't really improve usability, IMHO. It's a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.

    I recall trying an addon for Windows that placed the desktop on a sphere. Nice, but not really useful. The spinning desktop on the video is very similar to 3D-Desktop, which only adds a nifty way to switch between virtual desktops. It's really cool to look at, but, say, an horizontal displacement between desktops would achieve the same practical effect. It's cool, and i want it, but it isn't really groundbreaking.

    Check the window movement on that video though - awfully smooth. That kind of stuff is what i want to see on my desktop. That, and real transparency on consoles ;)

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[GauteL]

There are many things this can do. Functionally, the fastest way of minimising a window is to simply make it disappear. This, however, can be confusing because it is not obvious where the window went. A fancy window shrinking effect like on OS X thus improves usability. If done correctly you will not lose time on it either.

Functionally, the fastest way of switching virtual desktop is to simply make the old one disappear and the new one show up. This, however, makes most users think all their applications crashed. Using virtual desktops is something only geeks have used before. Maybe this fancy cube effect makes the virtual desktops obvious to the average user and thus makes them start using them as well.

These fancy effects thus show transition between states something which makes the connection between the states more obvious to the user.

The wobbling windows I don't know. They might be just a proof of concept. Although some of the developers have stated that it gave each window a real and tangible quality, like a sheet of paper being moved. It certainly shouldn't be excaggerated, but maybe it does help?

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[dr.badass]

However, I am wondering if the step from 2D to 3D desktop is as significant as say, going from commandline to GUI.

This kind of thing isn't really 3D. Yes, it uses 3D visual effects and all, but the overal metaphor involved is still 2D. That's why you don't see much new functionality. Even the cube-rotation virtual desktop is just a visual cue for a 2D movement. Instead of thinking "that window is on desktop #2", the user can intuit "that window is to the right of where I am now". There's still a lot of room for this kind of enhancement in current-style interfaces.

"Gamey" 3D interfaces like Looking Glass are a completely different beast, one that I hope and expect will never take off. There is just no reason to apply the environmental metaphor of the real world to things on the computer.

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[cyclomedia]

the desktop is already 3d, windows go behind other windows, objects can be in front of other objects. the reason it doesnt "look" 3d is because there's no perspective.

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[squoozer]

It's hard to say what the benifits are because we haven't really had the tools to play with yet. What I think history shows though is that given the tools we generally find something to do with them. I admit that we don't always find something good to do with them but that's part of research. I think in 5 to 10 years we will look back and wonder how we ever worked on 2D desktops. I wouldn't like to say what the final 3D interface will look like though - my guess would be that this is the first step towards an immersive VR interface.

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[daemonc]

"This means we won't be that far behind Vista.
I think we're pretty late nonetheless."

What parallel universe are you from?

This is available now.
If anything is late, it is Vista.

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[nathanh]

There are many things this can do. Functionally, the fastest way of minimising a window is to simply make it disappear. This, however, can be confusing because it is not obvious where the window went. A fancy window shrinking effect like on OS X thus improves usability. If done correctly you will not lose time on it either.

The problem even on OS X is that the application "shrinks" to the Dock where I can no longer see it. I have to raise the Dock by hovering my mouse down the bottom of the screen before I can see a small preview of my application in the Dock. I can leave the Dock permanently raised at the cost of 20% of my desktop. I think applications should shrink to the Desktop and stay there as icons, similar to the way mounted disks and documents appear on the Desktop as icons. That would at least be consistent with the rest of the interface.

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[Hatta]

For example, OSX shows that alphablending can be useful.

It does? How?

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[evilviper]

A fancy window shrinking effect like on OS X thus improves usability.

The Afterstep method of a spiraling window border works just fine, and uses very little CPU time, without needing OpenGL acceleration.

I'd like to see the OpenGL support result in more PERFORMANCE myself. Eye-candy be dammed.

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[Shadowlore]

It has the potential to usher in a UI revolution, or serve as the groundwork for it. New devices could be the sci-fi UI favorite: gloves.

With the capabilities to provide the visual aspect of the GI "Glove Interface", the glove can actually be practical. With the current 2D "desktop" metaphor, mouse and keyboard are pretty much it.

In the meantime .. hey it's cool! ;) Seriously though I do see host of interface improvements that can come from this. But as said, it won't be coming from the big boys first. IN particular watch the desktop organization video. Note the window dispay, how it shrinks and expands. This is an alternative the the ubiquitous taskbar, perhaps even virtual screens.

Take this display technology and mate it with VR goggles or HUD systems. Combine the GI and you've got a very significant departure in computing interface. Whether or not this helps us use our systems better (safer, more efficiently or effectively, yadda yadda) remains to be seen. I am, however, quite optimistic that it will be.

As far as data/text entry in the GI/VR display combination, it could range from *real* gestures to a virtual keyboard that can be displayed on the "screen". I wonder how much that would help "learning to type". Picture a virtual keyboard with virtual hands. As you progress, the hands and/or the keyboard would gradually become transparent. Hmmm ....

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Wow, you read some cyberpunk stories.

Ok, I admit gloves + goggles is a good gaming or 3D design interface, but for the vast majority of what we do on a computer, it's pointless.

A word processor is two-dimensional, because text is two-dimensional. That may change someday, but I don't see it happening. So what's the point of taking your word processor window and dragging it around in three dimensions?

More space? No thanks, virtual desktops + dual monitors is more than enough space for me.

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[LordMyren]

However, I am wondering if the step from 2D to 3D desktop is as significant as say, going from commandline to GUI.

Dont worry, the de-evolutions are nearly perfectly analogous.

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[shaitand]

X will use memory the same as it does now, but X will think the memory it's using is video memory. The processing overhead for desktop rendering will still be offloaded from the cpu to the gpu.

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[shaitand]

Congratulations, you year for a hardware accelerated win 3.11

Re:very pretty, but what does it do?

[jumpfroggy]

Holy crap, I'm most impressed by that "Desktop Organization" video. How incredibly useful would it be to have that view? If I've got many windows open, my options are usually either to minimize what I've got (hopefully it's just below what I'm working on), or alt+tab until I find it (which means I have to go through a small icon list), or use the taskbar. Having that kind of "lay everything out on the table for a second" view would be incredible.

Really shows what happens when it's no longer "eye candy" but more usability. I can't wait to use these kinds of features on a daily basis, and also to see what other useful things they'll come up with.

The cube idea... neat, helps with spatial awareness. I'd rather have something less fancy, maybe a filmstrip (the never ending horizontal desktop... cut into frames). But still neat (and still not meaningless eye candy). Cool.

nothing but impressed

[x_codingmonkey_x]

I've been following this for the past week and having seen tons of videos and I must say that I am nothing but impressed. I recently upgrade my computer with an Nvidia 6800 GS and was hoping to try out composite (since I had an ATi card before). Although it was pretty stable, I found it to be rather buggy and even sometimes slow (even with this video card and an AMD 3000 with 1GB OCZ Premier, etc, etc). I really hope that Xgl will prove to be more powerful, more efficient and less buggy. Kudos to Novell.

Windows and OS X versions

[idlake]

I think what will be more important than XGL will be the Windows and OS X versions; the currently available free X11 servers on those platforms tend to be slow and feature-limited. Apple's X11, for example, doesn't handle international keyboard input correctly, doesn't implement RANDR, and doesn't adapt to changes in screen resolution correctly.

Re:What kind of hardware is used?

[aussersterne]

They've always been rock solid (not to mention easy to install) for me, across multiple GeForce generations. This is on Red Hat and multiple incarnations of Fedora with SMP systems. Many, many hours of gaming, with FSAA and all effects on. I think I may have had what appeared to be a graphics hang *once* in all the time I've used them (about three years).

Finally!

[sepelester]

I've been waiting a long time for this. And this, and this, and this.

I'd sure like to see 3d GTK+ widgets and window decoration, all following the same global illumination, complete with specular maps and all the advanced pixel shader techniques available the desktop could become truly beautiful.

Look is important

[William Baric]

I can't understand why there is so many posts saying that eye candy are not important. For people who can't judge the internal quality of a software, how it looks is what tell them if it's good or not. You can't impress a PHB with some C code, but you can sure impress him with a lot of eye candy. I need this very badly to be able to "sell" linux to my client as a desktop and I need it BEFORE Microsoft do it.

Re:What kind of hardware is used?

[Sterling Christensen]

From my experience the nvidia drivers aren't very stable.

That's odd. What card(s)/motherboard(s)/kernel version(s)/nVidia driver version(s)?

They've always been perfectly stable with my GeForce 4 MX and GeForce FX 5700. A motherboard with Via AGP and an nForce 2 motherboard (all nVidia chipsets, nVidia AGP etc). Stable on Arch Linux, Gentoo Linux, kernels compiled with GCC 3.3.x, 3.4.x, and now 4.1 beta, and stable with both the kernel's AGP driver and the nVidia driver's built in driver.

The only trouble I remember was console framebuffer not working on the 4 MX, and nVidia drivers at the time (not a problem now) not being compatible with the 4K stacks option introduced in kernel 2.6.6.

Here's a good place for nVidia Linux driver help:
NVIDIA Linux Forum @ NVnews.net

Target Vista

[cyberjessy]

The target surely seems to be Vista. If Linux did not do this it would have meant that Vista would have a free ride with fancy hardware accelerated 3D transparent glassy glossy grossy interfaces. For J6P, the OS is only as good as it looks.

Since Miguel is involved I sure hope we can target all this hardware accelerated goodness with Mono as well. Mono makes making Linux apps amazingly easy, atleast for those of us with years of Windows programming background. This step is absolutely essential for Mono while it tries for Windows API compatibility. The upcoming Windows APIs (called WinFX, which is .Net based) include something called Avalon, which benefits (and at times requires) hardware accelerated graphics. If X did not have hardware accelerated graphics, this would have been a block in the progress of Mono.

Well, for Mono lovers this is the reason to rejoice.

Re:Target Vista

[octopus72]

Why does it need Xgl? Avalon is implemented in Direct3D, so almost everything offered in Avalon can be with some work implemented on top of OpenGL + extensions. Therefore from server side you require, for each window, GLX window set up for direct GL, something any recent mainstream X server supports (with proper driver).

Xgl is relevant only if this is done in indirect GL, which is hardware accelerated in Xgl, while software rendered in current server.

Re:What kind of hardware is used?

[arevos]

I found that hardware acceleration on X.org with a 5900 worked flawlessly, whilst a much older card (300 or something) crashed after only 5 minutes of hardware acceleration being switched on. There does seem to be stability issues with older NVidia cards.

Re:OMG XINERAMA PLEASE!

[ooze]

You are aware that your sig line is originally attributed to Diogenes of Sinope. And Tyler and Diogenes have really really much in common (to the point where you could say Chuck wanted to create a Diogenes with a masterplan and cool fighting skills). Except that Diogenes was a real person (in both senses, he wasn't the imaginary evil twin of anyone and also not a character in some fictional work). At least there are more indications for Diogenes to have actually existed than for Jesus.

Not to take anything away from the movie...

What?

[cadu]

people are always trying to speak their mouths out don't you guys think?

novell is surely trying to make more people adopt Linux, and that's quite good in the overall .... i'm no die hard mac user [had a powermac 8500 for a while, just to see what it had...ended up boosting Debian in it] but i frankly admit that those features like Exposé truly make it easier to change windows, specially if you're of the coder or attention disorder-type [loads of text editors opened and browser windows/tabs/ whatever] , so , if it adds something to our beloved system, why brag ?!

don't get me wrong, i just felt like it.

Re:What?

[Bazzalisk]

Is it just me or does cadu, based upon that post, fail the Turing test? :)

Re:What?

[cadu]

ehehehheeh, i think i don't have much experience in posting on Slashdot (being this my third post) so could you please take it easy on me?

i'm even starting to accept the overall language proposal down here

*i, for one, welcome our nasty reply overlords* :)

Composite

[ptarjan]

For those of you looking transparencies, the new NVIDIA drivers are wonderful. Just enable the composite extention in your xorg.conf file, and KDE will start to look wonderful after you go into System Settings -> Desktop -> Window Behavior -> Translucency.

Re:Composite

[tannhaus]

Yes, but that creates other problems:

http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-8 178/README/appendix-s.html

What's a Composite Manager?

[Chris Pimlott]

I know what a window manager is, and I understand the idea of a resolution-independent GL display layer, but would someone mind filling me in on why we now need a composite manager as well as a window manager?

Re:What's a Composite Manager?

[thebluesgnr]

"My understanding while talking to David Reveman this past week was that the complexity of keeping a compositing manager as a separate process from the window manager was too high (too much bookkeeping that made it error prone, and there were some fundamental problems that he could not solve). So some time ago he abandoned his effort to patch Metacity and have a separate composition manager, reduced the complexity and eliminated a lot of bugs and the source of these bugs. That is what David explained to me, but I can only understand about 50% of the technical stuff that he talks about, so keep that in mind." http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/ 2006-February/msg00120.html

Re:What's a Composite Manager?

[Chris Pimlott]

Er, I'm sorry, that's half the question. The other half is - Why do I need a composite manager? What does it do? Why do we need one now and we never did before?

Re:What's a Composite Manager?

[oglueck]

Simplified it's this: Standard X servers can only draw windows to the screen (framebuffer) directly. Real translucency can not be implemented with this technology.

The X composite extension allows an X server to render windows to memory first. The composite manager is then responsible to create the final image, composed of all the windows. A composite manager may opt to render some windows translucent over others for example.

Re:What's a Composite Manager?

[popeyethesailor]

Take a look at this.

Also, Jon Smirl's excellent roundup of Linux graphics is worth reading.

Re:What's a Composite Manager?

[Ignominious Cow Herd]

Compositing is the process of deciding what parts of each window are visible (z-axis ordering) and building the screen image based on the results of this analysis. In a sense it has always been part of any X server implementation. By formalizing the api and making it an X extension, it allows these operations to be handed off to another process - in this case the video card hardware. This makes it easier to experiment with new features (transparency) and makes the whole process faster (hardware acceleration).

It's not really new - it is more like a new implementation.

Use on thin clinets?

[Daengbo]

What it means is that neither of my laptops (running the SIS 513 video chip series) will be able to deal with anything. Heck, glxgears gets a whopping 2-3 frames per second on this chip.

On another note, I wonder what impact this will have on remote X use: Will old clients still be able to connect and Xgl go ununsed if 3d acceleration is not available?

Re:What kind of hardware is used?

[drgonzo59]

Rock solid on Ubuntu all version of drivers : from GeForce to FX5700. NVIDIA was actually chosen consistently for upgrades because it had stable linux accelerated drivers.

Re:What kind of hardware is used?

[Janek Kozicki]

I'd like to know what kind of hardware they used to create the demo's. From my experience the nvidia drivers aren't very stable.

I belive it's the problem with your hardware, since I had similar issues. My max. uptime was 19 days after that a total freeze of the system (or at least X lockup). After one or two months my GeForce6600 got badly damaged http://janek.kozicki.pl/z/karta.jpg, and the reseller had replaced it. But my system still was unstable, and after some investigation the power supply was replaced (possibly the power supply had damaged my graphics card). And now - current uptime is 75 days, and everything seems to be fine.

Re:What kind of hardware is used?

[FireFury03]

I'd like to know what kind of hardware they used to create the demo's. From my experience the nvidia drivers aren't very stable.

In my experience, stability hasn't been a problem for nVidia drivers released over the past few years (it was a problem 4 or 5 years ago but they seem to have sorted it). There are still some niggling bugs (not usually stability related) which would've been fixed a long time ago if the drivers were open though... I think a public bugzilla would also help so we can see the progress of our bug reports.

Re:Use on thin clients?

[drnlm]

Xgl -> an Xserver running ontop of OpenGL. i.e. all the X11 drawing calls are converted to OpenGl calls executed on the underlying 3D hardware of the display. It's still just an xserver, so any remote client will still be able to connect and run.

The October 2006 Uber-distro

[Dimble ThriceFoon]

I know people like to say that linux isn't "at war" with windows for market-share, but I believe that the more people who use linux and the greater the mind-share it has in the world, the faster it will develop and improve.
this inevitably means taking current windows users from microsoft as well as bringing in new users, and doing so BEFORE the titanic marketing push that will be the November/December Vista release.
this puts major distro's like SUSE/K-Ubuntu/Mandriva who have an October release schedule in a very strong position, especially given the raft of revolutionary technologies that are being released in the next 6 months.
these are the technologies I hope will make it into the October releases in time the Years-end royal-rumble:
KDE4
Reiser4
Samba4
Compiz + X.org 7.1
Koffice 2.0 + the new Kitchensync
Kernel with full support for nVidia DDR2 A64 chipsets
nVidia graphics drivers supportting Unified Shader videocards (i know it won't be packaged)
nVidia motherboard drivers supporting all chipset features (ditto above)
Openoffice 2.1?
GCC 4.1+

Re:The October 2006 Uber-distro

[thebluesgnr]

You should put a question mark next to KDE 4 too. The chances of it being available in stable distros by October are not that great, some devs are even talking of early 2007 for a release date. (it doesn't have a schedule yet).

Re:The October 2006 Uber-distro

[Dimble ThriceFoon]

i am sadly aware that no-one is willing to commit to an August release of KDE4, which realistically is the latest it could arrive and still make it into the October distro extravaganza. :(

desktop cube: old idea

[raboofje]

The virtual destop cube -thingy really looked like something usable for a change.

Actually, something similar has been available at least since 2002: http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/

It's still cool of course, and it probably works much better with Xgl.

Re:Use on thin clients?

[Daengbo]

Thanks for clearing that up. After I realized that freedesktop.org was heavily involved, I figured that Jim McQuillan wouldn't stand for a setup that wasn't thin-client friendly. Good to hear, though.

Re:That's not progress

[Bazzalisk]

Just to point out that it can be quite beneficial to have a slight pause before submenus open - it prevents button-bounce from causing you to select the first item in the menu immediately instead of having a chance to choose one ... yes I have had that problem personaly when menu delays weren't setup correctly in a program and it was a real sumbitch to use the damned thing.

Moral of the story: best and most usable interface design is not necessarily obvious at first glance.

Re:OMG XINERAMA PLEASE!

[Organic_Info]

I didn't know that - thanks :)

Its a good day when you learn something new.

Re:That's not progress

[Anonymous Coward]

The eye candy is only there to get people to look at it. However, the underlying technology here is NOT wasting CPU. In fact, its taking advantage of the increasingly beefy GPUs in modern PCs to offload as much as possible from the CPU. Demos are always there to impress, watching someone get through their daily grind faster doesn't make for a good video.

Re:That's not progress

[sholden]

Because moving the processing to the GPU wastes so much CPU...

Just out of curiosity....

[alexmipego]

I submitted this story yesterday but it got rejected, anyone have a clue why would that happen?
Anyway, thats very nice news. I think now we'll have some of the best (advertised) Vista features, and desktop users just love those kind of things :)
See my blog post about the subject.

Re:Just out of curiosity....

[lpcustom]

Submit it to digg. They usually run something at least 3 times.

Re:Just out of curiosity....

[alexmipego]

I don't understand... what do you mean?

Re:Just out of curiosity....

[BridgeBum]

www.digg.com

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Re:Just out of curiosity....

[Atzanteol]

The editors have it in for you. Seriously, it's personal. They hate you. They told me.

Re:OMG XINERAMA PLEASE!

[xtracto]

Just a comment, you should add that to Wikipedia, I found that interesting, but could not find any reference over there :-)

Temporary page?

[houghi]

A temporary page for Xgl information is up at the openSUSE website.

That is no temporary page. It is a Wiki page on the openSUSE website. No idea why the article talks about a temporary page.

Re:OMG XINERAMA PLEASE!

[elleomea]

3D does work on ATI cards (at least using the open source driver) for large screen resolutions using MergedFB. You're correct that there is a limit to area for 3D support, but a higher resolution still works, it's just only applications within that region have working 3D acceleration (anything outside that region just appears black).

Re:That's not progress

[MamiyaOtaru]

I've played around with glx and glxcompmgr in kubuntu and debian a bit. It is nice to see stuff moved to the gpu of course, but in my short expecience it is still very sensitive to busy cpus. I'm still using a single core processor unfortunately, dual core may alleviate it some, but if some program is using most of the CPU, the glx effects slow way down and it looks quite bad. Hopefully the updated stuff and compiz can do it better, but from what I've seen so far, it only succeeds in looking nice as long as nothing is putting any significant load on the cpu.

Re:competing with cairo?

[nickallen]

Cairo is a 2D graphics library for applications to draw things on the screen and Xgl is an X server that can process the cairo requests (usually through the XRender extension) and accelerate them through the graphics hardware. So they are completly different things and there is no waste of resources. In other words Xgl is an implementation of the X Window System and Cairo can output to many different windowing systems as well as X (eg MS Windows or Mac OS X).

Still a waste.

[TheLink]

Whatever, it's still a waste and a disappointment.

I wouldn't mind except that it's been 30 years, and computers are thousands of times faster with magnitudes more storage.

And here we are getting excited about transparent wobbly windows?

OK, maybe Mr Englebart was way too advanced for his time. So lets call it 20 years since Apple, Amiga, Atari etc. If we have such low expectations no wonder we're still stuck with such crappy automotive and aerospace tech too.

Re: Still a waste.

[infernow]

You know, cars have been around for around a hundred years now, but we've been operating those with pedals and a steering wheel for 70+ years. Sometimes an interface design is so successful that there's really no way to improve it.

Re:That's not progress

[grommit]

I guess you didn't bother to watch the videos then huh?

I don't give a rats ass about whizzbang whoop-de-doos that make the desktop look neat. I'm interested in performance and from what I've seen of xgl, it's snappier than just about any modern X desktop. No stuttering when moving windows around or changing to a new desktop. That's what I'm interested in and xgl provides just that. I'm excited about it.

Just another case of somebody not RTFA or, more appropriately, not Watching The F'ing Videos.

Re:That's not progress

[TheLink]

" watching someone get through their daily grind faster "

How is all that animation stuff going to make things faster? It's faster to just display/vanish a window immediately, rather than draw the animations. You could of course do the animations in a "ghostlike/background" way, and allow immediate access to whatever is now actually on top, but the animations could still be distracting and get in the way.

Experienced[1] workers really wanting to do stuff faster should get rid of these "cutscenes".

Now, something like this might make things faster: Bug 121349: Allow direct selection of last active tasks with keystrokes / key combos

You can do this one already: custom keyed menu sequences.

[1]
How many of you would get confused by things appearing/disappearing immediately when they are consistent with _your_ intended actions? You click on close and a window vanishes immediately. I call that good, not confusing, it's more likely to be annoying/confusing/worrying if you click on close and a window doesn't close.

Re:That's not progress

[Adnans]

Having animations and other silly stuff (like _pauses_ before actions)just adds latency, and wastes CPU.

What? I think you haven't tried the xcompmgr style setup at all, or else you wouldn't be making this IMHO very un-informed rant! How can offloading the compositing to hardware that actually has specialized circuitry to deal with is be a waste of CPU??? In my experience it actually save gobs of CPU for the simple fact that expose events are reduced to a fraction of what they currently are!! No excessive redrawing of window content if you unobscure them. I bet the CPU will almost idle when you're moving windows around (resizing is something else). The silly effects you see are just crowd pleasers, the important part is the architecture, which will improve even more (e.g. no need for a mother XServer).

A low latency theme is of course perfectly possible, if there is a need for such a thing, we'll just have to wait and see.

-adnans

Re:That's not progress

[TheLink]

Button bounce? Well that hasn't been a problem for me.

In fact, you sure it's not caused by all those delays? Having to click more times due to the sub menus not opening immediately - and thus you clicking to open them. More clicks = more chances for errors.

If you have problems releasing fast enough, have you tried it Apple/Mac style? Keep holding the button down after click, and release only when the cursor is on top of the item you want to select.

Re:What kind of hardware is used?

[Henk Poley]

nVidia Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 MX 420] (rev a3) on an Asus A7N8X-X motherboard (nForce2 chipset). Versions around 6xxx began crashing on the KDE splashscreen. Current versions (just tried 8178) crash on Kopete's textballoons.

Besides that, they still don't work well together with the 2.6 kernel's slightly changed ACPI model. Which makes them crash the system at resume time when using Software Suspend 2 (the driver doesn't POST and reinitialise the card like it should do).

The system is otherwise rock solid, and I can supend and resume the system fine when using the nv driver.

Open Source community had to complain loudly

[billybob2]

Novell was initially reluctant to release this code -- after all, they didn't have to because the X11 license doesn't contain any forced sharing, copyleft provisions. The Open Source community had to complain loudly before Novell decided it didn't want to risk losing support from independent developers. One reason they might have wanted to keep the modifications closed was to make a big splash for the release of the Novell Linux Desktop. Another possible reason is that Ximian (and Nat Friedman, who was Ximian's CEO before Ximian was bought by Novell) that long tried to undermine KDE, the Free Desktop System that currently has a slight edge in terms of popularity. By keeping the source closed, they would have prevented KDE developers from incorporating XGL into their windowing system, leaving KDE slightly behind Gnome in terms of eyecandy for a period of time.

Re:Open Source community had to complain loudly

[LWATCDR]

"Another possible reason is that Ximian (and Nat Friedman, who was Ximian's CEO before Ximian was bought by Novell) that long tried to undermine KDE, the Free Desktop System that currently has a slight edge in terms of popularity. By keeping the source closed, they would have prevented KDE developers from incorporating XGL into their windowing system, leaving KDE slightly behind Gnome in terms of eyecandy for a period of time."

Is Novell pushing KDE or Gnome this week?

Re:Open Source community had to complain loudly

[Sri Ramkrishna]

I'm trying to figure out why this is "interesting"? Xgl is part of Xorg, how the hell is that supposed to screw KDE? KDE already knows how to use compositing, kwin already does compositing internally like compwiz does. KDE already knows how to use compositing in X windows. We need to take your tin hat away. :-)

No, I'll tell you the real reason. The real reason is to screw XFCE. As you know XFCE has been breathing down GNOME's neck for quite some time taking away their mindshare both in developers and in users. Afterall they use the same toolkit. I have secret papers from Nat that tells me that the threat of XFCE achieving world domination is too big to ignore. This Xgl thing and compwiz is specifically targed at XFCE. He and oGo concocted this plan together.

Re:Open Source community had to complain loudly

[Stalyn]

They could have never kept the source closed because it would have to be checked into the Xorg tree eventually. These conspiracy stories are just created by people in certain communities who are scared of Novell. Novell is doing things unconventionally and is actually making some progess. Read more on how Novell is doing things...

Re:Open Source community had to complain loudly

[IamTheRealMike]

KDE is independent of the X server in use, and compiz is neither KDE nor GNOME ... it just "iz"

Re:Linux ready for the desktop

[kiddygrinder]

Erm, lemme guess, you use KDE?

Re:Heavens, what a blatant rip.

[argent]

Exposé isn't cut from whole cloth, either: cool transitions between display layouts and virtual screens go all the way back to the Amiga, and virtual window managers on UNIX have used them for desktop transitions for a while now.

Similarly, thumbnail views of a larger vitual workspace are common.

Exposé combines a cool transition with a dynamically created layout, and it looks cool, but frankly I'd rather Apple work on a virtual desktop or even trying to really take advantage of the 3d capabilities of OpenGL than more bling like Expose, Genie, and Dashboard ripples.

Re:Linux ready for the desktop

[WhiteWolf666]

Not sure if its still true, but fairly recently in GNOME you had to manually edit your menus and file associations. As in with a text editor.

Yes, it blows my mind as well.

GPL, MIT, or BSD?

[gr8_phk]

Sorry, but I didn't see which license they put it under. Slashdot is notoriously bad about having headlines that say some project has been open-sourced without telling us what license is used. This is just another example.

MORE DEMO VIDEOS HERE

[DrunkenPenguin]

You can find more demo videos here.

http://cto.secs.oakland.edu/~castro/NLD10video/

Re:That's not progress

[kiddygrinder]

Dude, ITS LINUX, I think the delays MIGHT BE CONFIGURABLE.

What it's all for

[augustm]

This is not -just- for gewizz graphics. Applications (firefox)
will be using these interface (via cairo) in the near future. See for instance
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2005/0 4/glimpse_of_the.html
This allows a much more sophisticated 2D drawing model with layers.
Several bug fixes to acid2 errors http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/
will then be "free".

Look at the java2D demos too to get ideas of what you can do with
this, within a 2D window.

Progress?

[eyegone]

From what I can tell, if Xgl becomes the de facto standard, it's going to become impossible to have a usable Linux desktop without non-free drivers. How is this progress?

Re:Progress?

[narfbot]

Some of us use DRI from dri.sourceforge.net. It will work fine with Xgl.

Re:Progress?

[Peter Bell]

Many of us don't have a problem with closed-source drivers. Closed source drivers help keep intellectual property so companies can stay in business and keep the market competitive. Besides, they are free, just not open.

Re:Progress?

[Compumyst]

There is a minor problem with your idea - openGL is only a programing API. It makes it a simpler task to write 3d-accelerated applications/interfaces. The problem lies in the fact that you still need the video card drivers from the manufactures (ATI/NVIDIA) to interface the openGL API with the hardware.

Re:Progress?

[shaitand]

Last I checked intellectual property is a way of misnaming limited privilage grants gifted by the public to make it seem as if copyright/patent holders owned the material rather than the public. Further, the companies in question (namely ATI and NVIDIA) make and sell hardware and not software. Since the software really does not reveal much about the product and can easily be reverse engineered by any 13 year old (let alone their competitors) there is actually no benefit to the companies or to the users in keeping the drivers closed.

The primary purpose for closing the drivers is to hide the dirty hacks used to boost scores on popular benchmarks and that does NOT help keep the market competitive. Lets call a cat a cat shall we?

Re:Heavens, what a blatant rip.

[thebluesgnr]

"Yet that Novell lacks the balls to openly admit that it's inspired by OS X and Expose goes to show what losers they are."

Have you looked at the code?

http://cvs.freedesktop.org/xorg/app/glxcompmgr/plu gins/expose.c?rev=1.2&view=markup

The plugin is called, let's see, expose. (it will probably be renamed due to legal reasons though).

Voodoo 3 3500 w TV in/out

[Dareth]

Best video card ever! Will this new X support my old Voodoo card? I am sure there are lots of these cards in many linux boxes out there.

Re:Linux ready for the desktop

[thebluesgnr]

Actually, I've been using GNOME for years and I never had to do that.

Re:That's not progress

[TheLink]

I did watch the videos.

The Macintosh, Amiga, Atari etc drew windows just fine and that was 20 years ago, on machines 500-1000 times slower. The Apple IIGS only drew windows fine with 8MHz or higher CPU accelerator chips and on later GS/OS versions - the standard speed was only 2.5-2.8MHz.

So I find it hard to be impressed with animated transparent windows more than TWO DECADES after those GUIs. I've recently seen one demo where the windows wobble when you drag them around - not sure why of all things.

For one, I'm weird I guess, but I don't normally need to move windows around much, I usually prefer them fully maximized. I just switch from window to window - in fact it's often easier to do quick compares of similar stuff by tabbing between windows.

The desktop organisation thingy in the demo would suck with 20+ windows (a few ssh windows, source, docs, browsers etc it adds up). Why would anyone need to resize and tile windows, and then only select them, when they've already got this nifty thing called the Taskbar. Maybe they just need to improve the taskbar so people can identify tasks more distinctly.

I think some thing like <a href="http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121349"> this</a> would be more helpful.

Re:Linux ready for the desktop

[Lispy]

Try this, please. What an uninformed post. ;-/
http://www.realistanew.com/projects/alacarte/

This is nice...now do something with it

[wandazulu]

Presumably now all the building blocks are in place to do some *real* cutting edge interface design/research. OpenGL-based toolkits, check. Dual-core, dual-processor machine, check. SLI video cards, check. 4+ gig of memory, check. *Now* let the fun begin.

Seriously though, while those specs I mentioned are pretty high, they're not totally out of reach or relegated to a Pixar workstation or whatever. I would like to think that there is a sea of PhD dissertations ready to be written on what could be the next interface we all use, replacing the desktop metaphors. With the machine I mentioned, a researcher's flights of fantasy could really become working reality, and while not everything is going to pan out, it's important to try. No longer can anyone hide behind the "hardware/operating system isn't up to the task" bullsh*t.

You've got the machine, you've got the OS, you've got the toolkits. Stop following Apple's cues...start leading with your own.

Re:That's not progress

[TheLink]

OK it's a waste of GPU. Happy now?

Also, not all desktops have GPUs fast enough to support all that. I suppose this would make the hardware manufacturers pretty happy eh? All the integrated graphics chips would need to be higher spec'ed.

For very little UI/usability gain, this sort of stuff would make machines that were perfectly decent, slower and less responsive.

I am not a luddite, far from it. I'd rather see _real_ improvements.

Not "Ricer UI".

BTW I wonder if the 2D performance of video cards has actually improved over the years, I recall getting a 3D vid card a few years ago and noticing the 2D performance was poorer than my old 2D video card - lower fps in software rendering mode. Don't see many 2D benchmarks being done nowadays...

Exposé is patented

[finnif]

Well, I hope Novell is ready for a legal fight with Apple.

Apple has a patent on the Exposé behavior.

Re:That's not progress

[ardor]

OK it's a waste of GPU. Happy now?

Wrong. RIGHT NOW the GPUs are wasted. They sit there, with a lot functionality, doing 2D tasks that are a dead end. No one expects 200 million parallax-mapped triangles in an UI, which leads me to the next line:

Also, not all desktops have GPUs fast enough to support all that. I suppose this would make the hardware manufacturers pretty happy eh? All the integrated graphics chips would need to be higher spec'ed.

Which is wrong too. The effects demonstrated in the videos require _very little_ GPU power. A typical shooter demands 100 times more computations. Today, ALL integrated chipsets with graphics cores support basic 3D. Intels Extreme Graphics 9 even supports Direct3D 9, so what's the deal?

For very little UI/usability gain, this sort of stuff would make machines that were perfectly decent, slower and less responsive.

First, these machines must be older than ~3 years. Second, you can always choose another X server. Right now the real problem is not the hardware - its the missing 3D functionality in the drivers.

I am not a luddite, far from it. I'd rather see _real_ improvements.

Like what? There have been many attempts at doing something else than a desktop. The thing is, nothing beats it. Its pretty sure that as long as we have 2D screens with a fixed frame, the desktop is here to stay. This may change with flexible OLED sheets like the ones in "Red Planet", with some sort of 3D displays, or with direct neural interfaces, all of them being still quite far off. Also, don't forget that today, often the hard drive is the bottleneck. If FRAMs/MRAMs/whatever-persistent-RAM gets ready, it
will most likely cause a huge advance, since booting no longer loads stuff in mem (because its unnecessary by then), programs can access files directly without loading into mem speeding up things more, sleep mode becomes a lot easier (simply dont erase the temp files in the ram)..

In fact, Xgl is one GOOD progress. Its absolutely foolish to force an additional 2D system when the 3D system can do everything the 2D one is capable of, just MUCH MUCH faster and with a lot more flexibility (blending for example). Absence of stalls while drawing reduces (if not eliminates) subjective "lagging", which is very important.

Somewhere else you mentioned the Amiga UI. Point is, window redrawing is NOT fluent there. Try moving a window, it takes its time to redraw. Also, you forget about the simple fact that today's resolutions contain a hell of a lot more data. 1280x1024x32bit = 5 MByte for the framebuffer. Compare this to the typical Amiga Workbench resolution 640x256x4colors (2bit): 40960 byte. Turn on 16 colors, and performance and latency got a lot worse.

BTW I wonder if the 2D performance of video cards has actually improved over the years, I recall getting a 3D vid card a few years ago and noticing the 2D performance was poorer than my old 2D video card - lower fps in software rendering mode. Don't see many 2D benchmarks being done nowadays...

Today, GPUs do not have a dedicated 2D core. The space it takes in the die simply doesnt pay off. Instead, the driver acts as the emulation layer. (At least newer nVidia and ATI chips do this.)

Re:That's not progress

[TheLink]

" "I am not a luddite, far from it. I'd rather see _real_ improvements."
Like what? There have been many attempts at doing something else than a desktop. The thing is, nothing beats it."

Like the "scrollbar"? That was a major advance wasn't it?

And the taskbar. It sure took a while before the taskbar became commonplace. A taskbar that didn't get covered by other stuff.

I think those are greater and more useful improvements than transparent windows. I'm sure you can think of others.

It would be quite remarkable if there is little else we can do to improve things as significantly.

It is telling that in one of the videos (the zoom one?) they talk about the animations making the desktop feel more "physical" (as if it's a good thing). D'oh! Why should we want to be artificially limited to something similar to common physics? Fine if it's for a game, but for a UI?

If you wanted to travel from home to work, I bet if you had the choice most of the time you'd rather teleport directly and instantaneously (almost everything else being equal - safety, energy+monetary costs). Making stuff more "physical" is overrated.

Re:That's not progress

[ardor]

Scrollbars have been around for a long time. Taskbar: the same. These are basics of GUIs, and were present in the late 80s already (the scrollbar is even older). Simple but groundbreaking advances are rare nowadays simply because there has been put a lot of work into UIs already. The easy innovations are already here.

It is telling that in one of the videos (the zoom one?) they talk about the animations making the desktop feel more "physical" (as if it's a good thing). D'oh! Why should we want to be artificially limited to something similar to common physics? Fine if it's for a game, but for a UI?

I wouldn't say "physical". I'd say "solid". Some desktops feel like patchworks: they work but have many quirks here and there. More important, the latency varies greatly (when moving large windows for example). A solid feeling requires these two to be solved. Flickering is also bad. All of this is not *necessary*, but it makes working with the desktop less annoying.

Indeed, one wonderful example comes from the GUI of the game Aquanox Revelation. There, I can move windows with animated rendered content, and there is NO lagging increase at all, no matter how many windows are open. With a geforce4 ti4400 and 1280x1024x32bit 4xAA.

fonts still suck

[Randall311]

Any chance that this new 3d accelerated rendering can help make anti-aliased fonts actually look good ? Unbelieveable that OS X and Windows have better looking (smoother) anti-aliased fonts then linux ever dreamed. I thought I remember reading about something on linux that could change all that. It might be called Cairo or something? Does anybody know anything about this?

Re:fonts still suck

[arevos]

Any chance that this new 3d accelerated rendering can help make anti-aliased fonts actually look good ? Unbelieveable that OS X and Windows have better looking (smoother) anti-aliased fonts then linux ever dreamed.

Eh? If anything, my fonts look smoother in Linux than in Windows (especially on serif fonts). Fonts haven't been a problem in Linux for years.

Re:fonts still suck

[Lennie]

It's not in the way the fonts are rendered. It's the fonts them selfs, there aren't that many good free fonts. Good fonts are hard to make, it's tedious and thus takes a lot of time.

Re:fonts still suck

[shaitand]

Sorry but you are alone on this one. Fonts have looked beautiful in linux for a long time on my screen.

Re:fonts still suck

[FooBarWidget]

I don't know where you have been the past 4 years, but font rendering isn't a problem now. Most likely you're either using an outdated distro which doesn't have a modern font system, or you don't have good fonts. Download the Bitstream Vera fonts or copy the Arial/Times New Roman fonts from your Windows partition and you're done.

Re:Finally! Good job Novell!

[eGuy]

Yes, it's about time. Two years ago Sun tried this, then RedHat tried it and from what I can tell both quit. Novell deserves credit for getting it done.

Re:Irony

[BobNET]

Don't worry, he'll get to it once HURD is done, any day now! No point in writing printer and video drivers if there's no free operating system, eh!

Re:What kind of hardware is used?

[Rojar North]

I've had only good experiance with Nvidia drivers for the past 4 years. Multiple installs, problem free. Check your hardware or kernel config.

Re:What kind of hardware is used?

[SirTalon42]

use vgatool to save the state before suspend, then on resume have it do a post, then restore the state. Also I believe you can configure most BIOSes to enable/disable video post after resume.

Re:OMG XINERAMA PLEASE!

[addaon]

The history in the Bible is more authentic than that written by most respected 'historians'.

How could you try to demonstrate this using respected historians as the sole references?

Negative.

[Kadin2048]

Um, the WinXP alt-tab works exactly as you describe,

No, there is a difference: Alt-Tab on Windows rotates between open windows, on MacOS it rotates through applications. Like I said, the differences are minimal, but they're there.

An example of why this difference matters:
On Windows, if an application is running but doesn't have any open windows, it won't appear in the Alt-Tab list. This happens for example with my IM client -- I can close the buddy list window and it will reduce itself to an icon in the tray, but continue to run; it will not be available through Alt-Tab in this state. iChat or Adium on Mac OS X, on the other hand, can still be running in the background, without any open windows, and will appear both in the Dock, and in the Command-Tab display of applications.

Re:Negative.

[mmkkbb]

Actually, with the Windows MDI interface, there's no telling what might pop up in the list. Point taken.

Proprietary software

[Arandir]

From the article: "...we're not going to cede 3D graphics acceleration to proprietary software."

But will we be required to use a proprietary video driver to get it? It would be nice if Novell were putting its resources behind open source drivers or pressuring the release of hardware specs. Proprietary firmware doesn't bother me at all, but the drivers (both kernel and user mode) for open source systems need to be open source themselves.

Re:Proprietary software

[hitchhacker]

Buy ATI Radeon cards. open source drivers for up to 9800 are available. Then let ATI know that you made the decision to buy their card because of this project.

then.. buy one of the experimental cards from The Open Graphics Project.. when it's available.

I can't express enough how important open 3D drivers are for linux on the desktop.

Re:Proprietary software

[Arandir]

Buy ATI Radeon cards.

I did. But I'm not sure how well the open source driver will work with Xgl. Right now using X Composite doesn't work right with this driver, and I fear all the new pie in the sky features Nat is promising will be just the same.

then.. buy one of the experimental cards from The Open Graphics Project.. when it's available.

Believe me, I will.

Re:What kind of hardware is used?

[Arandir]

The proprietary nvidia driver for FreeBSD was panicking my kernel every couple of days two years ago. It caused me to switch to Radeon and the open source driver for it. The nvidia driver panics have been the ONLY kernel panics I have EVER seen in 25+ years of Unix computing.

Re:Use on thin clients?

[Arandir]

It is just an Xserver. But the article also makes it clear that the movement is away from raster operations. This implies a change in the X11 protocol. When X clients start requesting 3D vector services from the X server, you are going to have problems if that X server can only handle the X11R6 protocol.

Re:Linux ready for the desktop

[WhiteWolf666]

How do you edit mime-types, then?

Gnome 2.10 is fairly recent, and it doesn't have a mimetype editor
http://www.ces.clemson.edu/linux/fc4_desktop.shtml #gmime

Does 2.12?

Or do you just not use mime-types?

Xinerama + Network == teh win

[LordMyren]

On the other hand, your future mobile phone shouldnt have a problem.
OpenGL ES is a mobile spec for OpenGL. Xegl is the Xgl for OGL:ES, iirc.
Also, mesa is supposed to be able to do everything in software. Slowly.

OpenGL supposedly can be done over network. A number of really big really expensive display wall solutions do this. I think it'd be awsome to try and run remote X locally through an OpenGL network pipe display driver. I'm sure there would be *cough* problems *cough*, but it might be able to work. Not sure where to get info on GL over network...

But this is where it get really really interesitng:
More interestingly is the possibilities crafted by indirect rendering. Since you're doing render to texture and then compositing, it'd be easy as shit to simply compress the textures in the video card via some shader, export the compressed results, then pipe them over the network to another target. [NoMachine's nx-compression basically does this, but it does it on the CPU, without indirect render.] Its not X, its not ogl, but it is pretty cool.

So basically you run the X app on the remote machine, and send the results out over the network. It'd be cool because you could switch where each individual app appears. Its just some indirect texture buffer after all. You could change the render target real time from remote to local, or display it on both or even three systems. And you could change each app individually. Hello [b]Rebuilding Xinerama[/b], without any of the nasty driver hackery. Xinerama as a window manager. If you spent the effort building it properly from day 1, it'd be really fairly easy to make it so the remote X server could be running on old technology.

Indirect rendering fucking rocks.
Myren

Re:Xinerama + Network == teh win

[beezly]

OpenGL works just fine over a network. We use it at my work every day for running apps on our big cluster and exporting the display back to the users workstation. GLX is a "binding" (i'm not sure if that's the right word to use) of OpenGL to the X11 protocol. It need pretty good bandwidth though :)

Re:OMG XINERAMA PLEASE!

[ooze]

Well, I won't say Jesus definitely didn't exist. It's just that it isn't an overly convincing case.

Diogenes met and conversed regularly a lot of very famous and influential people in his lifetime. But in the end he was just an eccentric bum as Jesus. The difference is, written accoutn of him started already in his lifetime, and there many different independent sources. Jesus' contact to acknowledged people was a little limited in his lifetime. Pilate and Some priests were the top of it. And virtually everyone he met became known in the world because they were connected to Jesus. Alexander the Great and Platon, to name only two, became reknown on their own merit. And both gave account of Diogenes. Yet still serious historians consider him possibly only a legend.

And after all, I don't know why it is so important wether they existed or not. They are real in a lot of peoples minds, and this is what counts. This is their influence. Probably the biggest influence any bum could have.

Re:very nice, but what when running openGL apps ?

[bhalo05]

don't know about performance, but you can see screenshots of openGL based Quake3 here:

http://www.linuxedge.org/?q=node/39

At least it seems it works fine.

Re:OMG XINERAMA PLEASE!

[ooze]

Oh...letting yourself being percecuted for soem ficzional character...that happens all the time. Hallicunations happen all the time. People claiming to have seen something for some personal benefit (material or psychological), all those things happen all the time.
All accoutn of Jesus can be tracked back to some small unimportant fanatical sect in Jerusalem. And a fanatical sect is a pretty good guess for a group that may see things that weren't there, or that may say things that are of benefit for them or anything like that.
Account of Diogenes has been given by several different people of differing background in different cities all over Greece. And quite a few of them were pretty famous and reknown in their time and even today. And still there is doubt.