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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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:Videos?

[Organic_Info]

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

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

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!

[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!

[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.

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.

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

[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

[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: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: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.

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!

[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...

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?

[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: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.

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.

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: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...

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 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: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.

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: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: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.

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).

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: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).

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.