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Fedora's OpenGL Composite Desktop
An anonymous reader writes "First we had Novell's XGL and Compiz technology, which allows for OpenGL-based composite rendering on the Linux desktop. Now Fedora has created the Advanced Indirect GL X project, which aims for similar desktop effects but with a simpler implementation. Sure, at the end of the day it's just eye candy, but make no mistake - the Linux desktop is due for a massive shake-up!"
I'd have to say, this '.ogg' link is a first. I'm shamed that I (or more precisely WMP) has nothing to play it with. Off to the CODEC mines!
Sig? - yeah, whatever.
I spend upwards of 10 hours a day staring at a computer screen; what I'm looking at had better be aesthetically pleasing.
It *does* serve a purpose - it makes my day that little bit more enjoyable. Decorating your house serves no real purpose (unless you're trying to sell it), but most people want something a little nicer than bare walls. People decorate their cubicles and offices - a photo here, a plant there.
I don't see why a desktop should be any different.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
How does this relate to the ongoing accelerated X11 efforts?
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Making incompatible forks, each one trying to be different from another insetead of collaboring to rush development of unified tools.
Take the configuration tools like Mandriva's, Suse yast, Fedora Control Center... If they just stop and start working together, it won't be a problem or a mess like it's now.
You know, they can have different interfaces, but why, OH WHY can't they work together on the underlying front??
This make me sick when they start complaining that microsoft won't work with them or use standards.
Having increased OpenGL support for Linux and gathering development support for advanced graphics toolkits will be a big win for Linux desktop. Having a sexy and slick interface has helped make OSX very popular. Sexy graphics for Linux will open new possibilities for interfaces, data display, games, and more.
Let us pay homage to Silicon Graphics, the originators of OpenGL. They may not live out the year.
What we need is a concerted effort from our worldwide developers to create better interoperability with Microsoft's Active Directory structure and better hardware compatibility.
What's also missing is the "zero-user" configurability that Windows has, allowing any user to load and install any application or hardware accessory without needing to be a hardware tech. Linux need to be engineereed to be "smarter" for the casual office user.
Only until we solve the above issues and Linux becomes more mainstream on the corporate desktop should we worry about the eye candy factor.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
How can they talk about graphics advances without screenshots? I believe the term used these days is "TTIWWP".
-JesseNothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
I'm not liking where this is headed. Now we've got Xgl, Aigl and whatever Luminocity used.
Why couldn't they just standardize on Xgl? It works *today*. Aigl doesn't even support my nvidia card right now.
xterm is a luxury, bitch!
I'm as excited as the next guy about new sexy UI for linux.... and certainly apple's rather posh desktop has helped them out..... but how excited should we be when clearly only a small number of video adapters currently work ? ~~~ Video card status Here is the current status as far as we know. We also intend to release driver updates in the yum repository as we get those cards to work. If your card isn't supported, come back later to see if we've added support. Note that this support status only affects new functionality; everything should work as well as it did before with the compositing manager disabled. Success and failure updates to this page are welcome. Known Working ATI: Radeon 7000 through 9250 (r100 and r200 generations) Intel: i830 through i945 Occasionally / Possibly working Intel: i810. Should work but not tested. 3dfx: voodoo3 through voodoo5. Might need NV_texture_rectangle emulation. Known to not work ATI: Radeon 9500 through X850 (r300 and r400 generations). Some issues with rectangular textures may be fixed in new DRM CVS, need to verify. ATI: Rage 128. Looks like driver locking issue. ATI: Mach64. No DRM support in Fedora, still insecure. Matrox: MGA G200 to G550. Needs at least a driver update to fix DRI locking. PCI cards probably have other issues as well. nVidia: Any. No open DRI driver. Closed driver support coming soon though. 3dfx: Voodoo 1 and 2. No DRI driver. ATI: Radeon 8500 through X850 with the closed fglrx driver. Uses an ancient version of the DRI driver API that can't work with the new driver loader. No ETA on closed driver support. Anything without a free 3d driver. Unknown status via, s3 savage, sis. No intrinsic reason why these wouldn't work, as far as we know, but no one has tested them yet. ~~~
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
"XGL is a different X server. This is a more incremental change which is slated to become part of Xorg. We don't believe that replacing the entire X server is the right path, and that improving it incrementally is a better way to modernize it. After talking to people at xdevconf, it felt like much of the upstream Xorg community shares this view. You can search Adam Jackson's notes for "large work for Xgl" to get the blow-by-blow or NVidia's presentation from XDevConf 2006 on using the existing model.
We've been working on the AIGLX code for a some time with the community, which is in direct contrast with the way that XGL was developed. XGL spent the last few months of its development behind closed doors and was dropped on the community as a finished solution. Unfortunately, it wasn't peer reviewed during its development process, and its architecture doesn't sit well with a lot of people.
The other question is Wait, can I use compiz? The answer there is a theoretical yes, although no one has actually gotten it to work. We love compiz and we think it's great stuff and is well polished, but it's often confused with the underlying architecture of XGL. Much like the code that we've added to metacity, compiz is a composite manager. With a bit of work, it should be possible to get compiz working on this X server. There's an excellent post from Soren on the topic of compiz vs. metacity."
Anand Rangarajan anand@cise.ufl.edu
My, that was a yummy potato!
I am absolutely irate with respect this project and XGL and even expose on the mac. Heaven forbid they let use scale a window and keep it scaled. I don't mean resize, I mean zoom in and out of ONE window. Imagine how useful that will be for tiled window managers, if we can scale windows we don't need to worry about the app handling resizing right.
DEVELOPERS PLEASE STOP WORRYING ABOUT THE EYE CANDY AND THINK ABOUT FUNCTIONALITY.
From TFA I get,
Known Working
ATI: Radeon 7000 through 9250 (r100 and r200 generations)
Intel: i830 through i945
Known to not work
nVidia: Any. No open DRI driver. Closed driver support coming soon though.
I'm getting fed up with NVIDIA lately. Have this nx6200 card and on a amd64 system I can't get them to release drivers for it. Maybe it's time to look at what ATI is doing and consider going that way when I'm going to purchase my next AMD X2 system
But to be honest, I like this eyecandy (just as I liked the compiz thing from novell). Will the FOSS lovers finally be able to show off with their nice looking desktops??
hmmm.....would that nessessarily be a good thing?
If Linux allowed anyone to install anything without having to think first, then you'd get what windows has: tons of viruses and malware. If it is easy to dupe people, then people will be duped. Unfortunately, this is the catch-22 for linux: how to achieve an install base like Windows while maintaining a Macintosh-like affinity with hackers, so that the user base won't get attacked.
stuff |
How about a boot up your can to get you up and doing something instead of whining that you are waiting for someone to do it for you!
But do we want Linux to be mainstream? Or I should say, do Linux users/developers want Linux to be mainstream? I read some of the other responses to your posts (trolls...) and some of them make good points. Insecurity is bred by ease of use. Yet when I gave Linux a go two years ago I found it quite difficult to use (adding a hard drive, for example) and just plain awkward. I don't think it's *bad*, per se, but I think about my Mom, when I suggested getting a Dell to replace her current 7 year old computer, asking if she'll be able to shop online. She asked me that after I told her she could browse the web... :\
Not all users are like that, but if you want Linux to be mainstream, simple install, simple hardware addition, all need to be there.
But I reiterate, do you all *want* Linux to be mainstream?
Anonymous Cowards are at -6...
Yeah, off-topic, but please cut that out. That's as annoying is "x is new y...".
I would love to see KDE 4 with a tiled window manager like Ion and scaled windows like you described. (The only overlapping windows being dialogs.) This could be switchable, between "tiled" and "normal" mode.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Having increased OpenGL support for Linux and gathering development support for advanced graphics toolkits will be a big win for Linux desktop.
Yes. Now all we need is a modern graphics card with good open-source drivers.
I currently own a Radeon 9250, which is about the fastest graphics card that you can get with workable 3d open-source drivers for Linux -- and even those are quirky. If a vendor would just produce one solid set of drivers for an up-to-date product, I'd buy it. Yes, I know about Nvidia's binary-only drivers, but I want open-source drivers. The Open Graphics Project is taking ages to get around to releasing their card.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Hi. :)
While Linux eye candy is some of the sweetest in the market, IMHO, it's one of the reasons Linux will never be mainstream.
I don't understand what you mean here, our eyecandy rules, so thats why we'll never be mainstream? huh?
What we need is a concerted effort from our worldwide developers to create better interoperability with Microsoft's Active Directory structure and better hardware compatibility.
Re: Active Directory: This is going on with the new Samba stuff. Its all being worked on as we speak, and in fact its coming along nicely. I think the samba team released a preview shortly ago.
Re: Hardware support: I'm tired of hearing this. We create all the drivers we can for the hardware we have specs for. Better hardware support has to come in the form of vendors helping us with it. Very little of this has to do with the linux kernel team.
What's also missing is the "zero-user" configurability that Windows has, allowing any user to load and install any application or hardware accessory without needing to be a hardware tech. Linux need to be engineereed to be "smarter" for the casual office user.
No offense here, but you don't work in the industry do you? You don't go to a corporate office and see users installing any shit they want, you don't see them swapping out the video cards or whatever. That sort of thing is useful for the home user, but its no good to the corporate user. Also, hardware autodetection is handled by the distros, and I know redhat and ubuntu do a pretty good job of it where the specs are properly released to the appropriate team. The casual office user doesn't install his own software, he uses what the admin put on there. Windows machines in a corporate environment are locked down hard. In this regard Linux is already setup nicely for a corporate environment and the casual office user.
Only until we solve the above issues and Linux becomes more mainstream on the corporate desktop should we worry about the eye candy factor.
If I had a dime for everytime I heard someone say something like this. Did it occur do you that different programmers are good at different things? Leave them alone man. When it comes to interoperability its a thousand times harder when you have to reverse engineer something to get it to play, you know MS doesn't want linux to have good AD support.
Linux has problems, but none of them are really the above. Obnoxious, ignorant vendors are the biggest problem, everyone who doesn't program is clamoring for better support, blaming the linux devs for not properly supporting their pet problem. Better MS Office? MS's fault. Better hardware support? ATI/nVidia/Broadcom/Whoever's fault. Better hardware autodetection? Same as the previous crowd. Linux moves against the grain of the rest of the industry and thus has a harder time of it.
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
Other than playing games & 3D apps that a small fraction of users use having a Open GL-accelerated desktop makes having a 3D card more than a luxury.
Well, I've used three laptops with ATI mobile chipsets and none of them have worked properly. Two AMD64, one Pentium-M. On the other hand, my own laptop with an NVidia-based GFX card has worked fine. I'm wondering what made Fedora move towards RedHat as opposed to NVidia... although perhaps it's just that the full open-source ATI drivers (reverse-engineered) have been better than the NVidia ones.
Chances are, you care because it's pretty and pleasing to the eyes. If not, move along.
I don't see why your post refers to the question about how it affects application developers if you haven't written a line of code since GWBASIC. That tells me than anything to do with application development doesn't matter to you at all, anyway.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
Unfortunately, although I've picked apart many XFree86 device drivers, I don't know very much about the architecture of X and X servers. Could someone give a thumbnail sketch of the issues at stake, and the tradeoffs?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
If you don't care about "gee-whiz technology shrouded in layers of techno-babble", then stop reading /.
A good step, but not the end game...
The project has a good concept model, not to destroy XWindows with a rewrite; however, this will considerably limit any real advancement into a comprehensive environment.
I see this as more of a test bed, and partial stepping stone; however there are many issues not being addressed that just need to be ripped apart and rethought out, and this CAN be done without destroying the existing environments.
Part of the problem of Bringing any 3D GPU functions to the desktop is the nature of Video cards, and they are designed to operate in a 2d accelerated mode and a full 3d accelerated mode, with both aspects of the cards not mixing normally.
What this leads to is an environment that mimics the 2D acceleration features in the 3D mode, and turns the Video card into 3D mode full time.
Strangely, what will help this push for full time 3D utilization or cross utilization is work being done at company people really don't like, Microsoft.
Microsoft is pushing both ATI and NVidia to move their Driver technology to allow for overlapping of the two operational modes, and also adding in virtualization of the GPU RAM space - the WDDM/LDDM that will ship with Vista, as it will be the first consumer OS that has a full time 3D accelerated accessible UI environment active.
Also by virtualizing the GPU RAM, Vista drivers (WDDM) are pushing the cards to pull off some interesting tricks, like pushing to System RAM lower priority applications Video, without out of memory considerations - Just like Virtual Memory on Hard Drive did years and years ago, and leaving a full 3D environment and 'appearance' of GPU RAM continually available to applications no matter how many remain active.
Video RAM of the old days was basically having enough RAM to display the resolution and depth for the screen you were displaying, but in the 3D world, GPU RAM is filled with textures, etc - so this mixing and virtualization process has been a long time coming, and surprisingly, Microsoft if the company helping NVidia and ATI get it working at the driver level.
Now for the good news, Microsoft has been generous to ATI and NVidia in the driver development process and in doing so has given both companies a lot of information and technology they would not of had access to from the multi-app OS environment viewpoint.
So all the cool new functions of the WDDM that is being developed for Vista should eventually flow back through both NVidia and ATI and their own driver technologies for supporting these concepts in other OS environments.
However, as I started out and still believe, this technology from the article, and even going full OpenGL desktop is not a complete answer. A full OpenGl desktop will be problematic when you want to run a 'windowed' version of Quake in for example, as the applicaiton will be expecting to have full control of the OpenGL/GPU and not expecting the first priority to be going to the Desktop Environment.
So to get to the full OpenGL desktop is going to break a lot of existing 3D applications in the *nix/OpenGL world, or a technology to bridge this is going to have to come about. A technology that maybe sucks info from ATI and NVidia and Microsoft even to emulate what Vista is pulling off.
Wasn't there an article not too long ago about a restaurant requiring their employees to hit the gym if they gained more than x% of their bodyweight?
"Jane, maybe you shouldn't eat that donut. You're seriously lowering the asthetic value of my work experience."
Procrastination Man strikes again!
One nice eye-candy and which would be usefull too, would be to be able to have different backgrounds for each of my workspaces. Why has this never been implemented? CDE has this! I read about all these efforts to implement complex eye-candy, but simply having different backgrounds for each workspace would, I believe, relatively easy to implement. I am using Gnome here.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
But they are in ogg format. Didn't even know there was a ogg video format. As long as the Linux world continues to alienate those using Windows, I don't care about it.
I.e. Make the vides in WMV or even just avi or divx format and then let all the billions of PC users see what they are missing and possibly want to move over to Linux, instead of just catering to the millions of linux users that happen to use OGG. Its like preaching to the choir, they already heard that sermon thousands of times.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Having watched the movies, I am greatly unimpressed. The reason the Mac UI works so well is that its eyecandy is a method of subtly including information that might otherwise be lost. For instance, when you minimize a window in MacOS (if I remember correctly), it slides down to a nice little parking place on the dock. In the first movie, the minimized document shrinks down in a nifty animation but shows no relationship between it and the button at the top of the screen. The second movie solves this problem (so why even have the first) but is slow (can you imagine minimizing eight windows? What a mess!).
Similarly, in the third example -- what information is being given to the user by fading the menus? I'm not sure what it is; instead, it just looks messier, and therefore less useful.
A side note: I knew this whole "No! Vorbis is the format! OGG is just the container" idea would bite me on the ass some day, and it looks like today's the day. I clicked on the movie links only to have my Winamp playlist destroyed. Even worse, Winamp didn't even know how to play the file. Is there a solution to this absurd problem?
They're working on it: cairo is vector based so it can be scaled well.
Maybe you didn't read the question well: Q. How does this affect application developers?
as a developer, I want to be able to write one application, and have it run on all three systems. Its great that they are integrating opengl more and more into linux, as long as they normalize it such that it can be used by an API transparently (Ex. SWT/LWJGL for java, which i use.. and it works really well). If they dont, it wont be that useful because no one will be inclned to take advantage of it... Unless they arent lazy, (me) or they have a big room with a lot of developer monkeys constantly implementing different application/interfaces for different platforms.
It's amazing that when Vista has new eye candy its bad but when Linux has it it's good!?
Cool! Now Linux desktops can be as annoying as Windows XP.
...how am I supposed to feel about this again???
No, wait.
Cool! Now Linux desktops can compete with Windows XP.
No, wait...
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
KDE does it just fine. Not to troll, but once you escape the clutches of the "options confuse the users" Gnome desktop, its amazing what you can do ...
Now that I'm at work on a Windows machine, they've chosen a format that I can't use. Why not just use f'ing mpeg? In these threads where people interminably rant about "why Linux isn't mainstream" and "why Joe Sixpack will never get it" we get the glitzy eye-candy gee-whiz demo in !#%ing OGG?!?!
Honestly...
This is already happening.
Look at Ubuntu. I can take the install cd, and get a blank desktop up and running with no configuration. It will be able to get online, browse the web, and do word processing.
You can even install software without console (apt-get).
I managed to get my wife to run Ubuntu for several weeks without complaint. She ended up switching back to windows only because she had to use illustrator, photoshop, etc. This was before I started using Crossover Office, which runs these programs on Linux with few issues.
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Among the many things a compositing manager can do is precisely that, scaling windows. A window manager which does its own compositing can very well do scaling *today*. All this GL stuff about which we've been hearing lately is an attempt at being able to do the compositing with GL, which is good for many reasons.
Before becoming irate and all UPPERCAPPY, you may want to actually research what are the uses of this developments you describe as eye-candy. At the very least, do not go shouting at developers like that.
Oh jesus chrit, you're right! How dare we do something we enjoy doing instead of doing something we absolutely despise, just to make your inconsequential ass happy?
Shame on us for not bowing to your every whim! The nerve!
Now we're seeing FOSS' killer application -- mix and match modularity. Obviously RH needs to respond to Novel's efforts or potentially lose market/mind share. Because the different approaches are built on a truely open platform, you don't have to ditch your current environment from the hardware on up in order to get the solution that is right for you. Competition to fill niches exposed by open API's works. Anyone can play. (And of course there's also the fact that someone can come along and distill the best of serveral solutions into a derivative FOSS work.) There's something quite satisfying about that, particularly in relation to much of the rest of the modern world.
Many players will accept ".oga" for Ogg audio files, and ".ogv" for Ogg video files. Similarly, the ".wma" and ".wmv" extensions, or ".m4a" and ".m4v", are also commonly supported.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
I don't mean to troll, but what the heck is wrong with the Fedora-type people that they think incrementally improving the X server is a good idea? I've looked into the source and its full of 30-year old code. The 'best practices' for a 0.1 MIPS machine is just cruft on a 1000 MIPS one.
a nuary/011922.html
The xgl people are actually rewriting the X server from scratch to use opengl. That is a much, much better idea, and it shows with what they can *already* do:
* virtual desktops on a cube
* popup effect for menus
* "gummi-bear" window effect when moving, sticks to other windows / side of screen
* translucenty
* gl screensaver on root window
* shadows
* fading
* magnification
* apple-style expose (show all windows non-overlapping)
* accellerated 3d games (quake) and movies
* make non-responsive windows go grey
etc
You can see the video at:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-J
(click link for the movie)
This is I think using an existing Xserver to give an opengl window, which can be running a software opengl for unsupported cards, and then their xgl server using that as the opengl backend until the drivers are ready. Which basically means people will be able to get the eye candy slowly on computers and force nvidia/ati/intel to support the server with a driver. Eventually xgl gets a native opengl driver for you hardware and runs as a 'normal' X server (only without all the crap from 30 years of evolution).
The window manager associated with XGL has rescaling windows but does not allow interaction with them. The point is they already do scaling but are too blinded by the foolishness of eye candy and what is seen on the mac to actually make scaling useful.
Hopefully this will be something other WMs outside of Metacity will be able to take advantage of as well. Since until there's some decent working edge flipping in Metacity, I'll stick with Enlightenment.
Why features that most users want are pulled out (due to the opinions of a few) when they can just be turned off by those that don't like it I don't understand.
When I read an article like this one regarding "better" graphics capability on the Linux platform, I can't help but wonder "how does this improve the use of the system for the vast majority of people who use it?"
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
If it was a mandatory thing I'm pretty sure there are many users who will find it useless and resource monster to use. That is the case with Windows operating system. You can't choose what technology and what you want on your desktop.
However this is Linux and here's where choices exist everytime. If you find it useless, just don't install/use it. If you need that eye candy, go for it, it's there for you to have fun.
That's why Free Software existed, people will have whatever they wanted not whatever vendor wanted. And its seen that Free Software is successfull in this aim admirably.
Why should Red Hat go and start a seperate project to achieve more or less the same effects ? Can't they work with the XGL project team and improve on the existing code ? What good will re-inventing the wheel or duplicating the code help achieve? Reading about this takes me back to the 80s when the UNIX OS was severely fractured with applications working on one Unix flavor not running on another flavor of Unix. Even though Red Hat is doing a good thing, it is actually taking a step back by forking the project.
Linux Help
for all things on Linux
http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/
# Uninstall any previous version of these filters.(This is important!) Go to add remove programs, remove oggcodecs
# Make sure media player or any directshow applications are closed.
# Run the installer.
Then Windows Media Player or any other directshow application (eg. BSPlayer) will be able to play Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, Ogg Theora, Ogg FLAC and native FLAC."
You're welcome.
Not every argument requires reduction to absurdity.
While Linux is happily going all-in with it's OpenGL bet, Microsoft has left the OpenGL group (long ago) and even marked the entire OpenGL API as obsolete. Will games really be developed for OpenGL (Linux) or will they target DirectX (Windows) in the future? After all Windows is still *THE* gaming OS, and Windows got a much bigger market share so it makes more sense for companies to dump OpenGL alltogether and just go for DirectX instead. So is there a dark side of this OpenGL-mania spreading in the Linux world?
Enlightenment 16 has different backgrounds. E17 has animated backgrounds.
Gotta love the eye candy.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
He deserves it, as he got the story, which doesn't happen all to often here on slashdot.
I haven't heard anything in quite some time about efforts to make a completely vector-based desktop, to work with high-dpi displays and the like. I want fully scalable widgets, hell, fully scalable applications. What ever happened to that? Or to using SVG icons for everything, with the possibility of having parameters in them, so that your trash bin would actually appear x% full instead of 'empty' or 'full'?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
An image takes a second to download, I can make a judgement on it in a second and be on to the next one. Movies take a stupidly long amount of time.
Deleted
I've thought this for years. Windows in hardware with scaling. WYSIWYG editing for all documents, simplified printer drivers, easy screen capture.
Eyecandy??
I just went to the Perfect 10 site... What a view!!! I found myself overwhelmed by all the natural beauty and subscribed to both the site and magazine...
Uh... wait... wrong article...
Am I the only one who finds the menu video highly annoying and nauseating?
If the open source desktops want to really steal a march on the Mac and Windows platforms we should design and build an entirely resolution independent environment.
If all UI elements were made from vector graphics you would just be able to set a level of 'zoom' on your display and choose to balance the amount of information on the screen with the sharpness of it's rendering.
Being able to dynamically change the level of zoom and manipulate relative window sizes would have the potential to make Mac OS X look like Windows 3.1.
Why have zoom tools in the applications when it could be in the OS and for every application?
___ www.lingo24.com Language and translation solutions - online
As Windows users tend to have good paying jobs we can usually afford to buy nice computers
Oh my god, this is the best flamebait I have read in a long looong time.
I know people who use ONLY Linux and have the hell more money you could ever want (for one, my PhD supervisor which is a professor in the UK department I am at). I find stupid how people keep comparing Linux to Windows, if you want to bash any Linux, please bash a distribution specifically, as Gentoo is a PITA to install whereas Mandriva is cool and smooth, Kubuntu is very friendly and Knoppix can be used in a breeze. Of course all of them share the the same stability from the kernel.
I surely use DSLinux in my Pentium MMX 200 PC, I have a HP laptop with windows and use Fedora Core at my office.
The only thing you are demonstrating is that you *really* do not know the different uses of computers, Surely you tried to install Windows XP in a PII and could not make it run fine... and of course installed Microsoft Office 2003 plus ultra...
Darn, I do not even know why am I answering you
I have been Trolled.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Microsoft tied to the corperate desktop can't offer the heaviest of gui's
OsX and Aero Glass are raising the bar for consumer level graphics.
Back in the day I was running win2k and I saw Enlightenment it motivated me to dual boot Linux.
The interface wasn't the easiest but the Gui alone influenced me to try it out.
Linux could easily have the best Gui out there and since it doesn't have to be tied to the corperate ideals of colour co-ordination they Linux could be doing some really unique stuff.
Linux having the best GUI would be a not insignificant step towards linux making space for itself on the home and education desktop.
I can't help but wonder "how does this improve the use of the system for the vast majority of people who use it?"
Why don't you stop worrying about other people and worry about yourself?
AIGLX is simply support for accelerated indirect rendering.
Your X server already supports indirect rendering. The problem is that the OpenGL driver and library interfaces made it impossible for the X server to use the DRI driver. Only clients of the X server could use DRI.
IBM and others have been working on that issue for a while. The Red Hat work is in combination with those efforts, and has resulted in updates (some of them fairly complex) to the OpenGL driver system to allow the X server to access the OpenGL hardware directly. The X server needs to access the 3D hardware to make OpenGL-based compositing efficient.
Xglx does the exact same thing, but in a much more round-about way. Xglx is both an X server and an X client. Xglx simply uses the normal client-based DRI access. However, any clients attaching to Xglx lose DRI access. Instead they all do indirect rendering through Xglx, which then calls into DRI on behalf of the clients to get hardware acceleration.
Xglx also implements all of the core X drawing commands and RENDER using OpenGL, unlike X.org which uses the 2D drivers for those.
The new extension that the AIGLX page refers to is not an X extension. It's a GL extension. It is, in fact, the exact same GL extension that Xglx requires for decent performance.
AIGLX has quite a few advantages over Xglx, and not really any noteworthy disadvantages. It adds all of the capabilities that Xglx does, does it with less code changes, and retains the advantages and features offered by the existing 2D accelerated drivers. Any advantages you get from Xglx by having 2D rendering forced through the 3D driver can be done just as easily by client applications using 3D-enabled toolkits (Like GTK on Cairo on glitz).
But a "win" that Apple made years ago, and one that will be soundly trounced by Vista in late 2007. Linux is catching up, not getting ahead. It's only a relative "win."
I've been running Xgl and Compiz on Ubuntu and I have to say, the Novell guys are way out in front of Fedora for this, Xgl is ready for primetime and runs nearly flawlessly for me. This looks more like sour grapes over Novell holding onto Xgl until nearly the last minute before opening it up to the community. While I don't agree with how Novell developed this, it's hard to argue with the product.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
Of course if you can't afford a nice computer than sure use Linux, it's ideal for the third-world in this respect.
Well trolled, sir! You've almost made it to an hour and haven't been downmoderated yet.
No points for subtlety, though.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Will this support having more than one monitor? Every time I hear about new eye candy for Linux (I've tried composite and XGL), there's no support for dual monitors. It seems like everything cool breaks TwinView and Xinerama.
'Ugly' is nothing more than a matter of taste, and 'slow' is similarly problematic to judge. But what about the Mac UI is "unfeatured" or "confusing"? Further, how do you propose to resolve either one of these without making the other even worse?
But can it make my computer look as good as Windows 3.11?
MadOgre.com
I stare at text on the screen all day, and I really like small, smooth, sharp fonts. Small fonts that are just anti-aliased look blurry to me. But with sub-pixel font smoothing on an LCD, I am a happy camper.
All these 3D desktops (Linux and Vista) that allow smooth magnification/shrinking of windows or 3d transforms on windows can't possibly allow sub-pixel font smoothing to work right (as far as I can see). The best they can do is something like anti-aliasing, I would guess. I hope I am wrong.
Personally, if I have to choose between smooth sharp small fonts or 3D eye candy, I think I will stick with the nice fonts, thank you.
This would result in semmingly randomly sized widgets and incredibly poor font rendering.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
So what happened to the OpenGraphics.org project that aimed to create a graphics card with fully published specs and open source drivers? If they actually get it working, there will be no more debate as to what video card Linux users (and manufacturers of Linux-capable computers) should buy.
Given the fact that the best open source drivers currently available are those for ATI cards, and that those cards are 15% as efficient in Linux as in Windows, the Open Graphics card will have no competition.
Hate to tell you this, but that's already scheduled for the next version of OS X (10.5), and the next version of Windows (Vista, although I'm not sure if it will be there at release, or if it'll be patched in in a service pack.)
The Linux community's gonna have to move pretty damned fast if they want to beat the two established OSes to it.
That said, I do think Apple made a *huge* mistake by not using vectors all over OS X 10.0, considering they were basically rewriting it all from scratch anyway. Microsoft has backwards compatibility to contend with, but Apple's pretty free to do what they want-- they should have gone for it. The OS includes built-in PDF rendering anyway, they should have just stored all the icons/widgets as PDF in the first place.
Comment of the year
SVG-based pr0n! X-D~~~
How can XGL/AIGL make editing *.tex files WYSIWYG? Even Lyx won't let me edit *.tex files.
Known to not work ------------------ ATI: Radeon 9500 through X850 (r300 and r400 generations). Some issues with rectangular textures may be fixed in new DRM CVS, need to verify. :(
YOU NEED A COMPOSITE WINDOW MANAGER IN ORDER TO ZOOM THE WAY YOU WANT
There, I said it, but the advantages of a composite window manager go a lot deeper then eye candy. It'll improve performance while expanding the boundary on the graphical capabilities of desktops, it's only a improvement and a logical step now that 3d acceleration is the norm.
I'm perfectly capable of accomplishing the task. The point is that in many environments not only are your blocked from installing software, succeeding in doing so is grounds for termination--and OGG is hardly a widely used standard outside of the *nix world, so choosing this format effectively alienates a pretty wide workday audience.
Resolution independence!! It's really time we got past this idea that 1024x768 is an optimal resolution due to web site design or the lowest common denominator or because some people can't see too well. If my new monitor can draw the curve of an "A" at 300dpi, then that's what what I want to see it at, dammit. Sticking with 96dpi or similar is just dumb.
My take on this is Redhat doesn't like that Novell got all the press and kudos for Xgl and is trying to get mindshare back.
Reasons for my viewpoint:
1) I prefer Redhat over Suse. (This isn't an ego post about me, so hear me out.) I use both, but of the two I like Redhat better. I've had bad luck with Suse and Novell seems to be having trouble turning into an opensource/Linux company. We use Groupwise at work and evolution and Suse and have problems. So given a choice I'll take Redhat since I've had good luck with them. However, after reading about Novell's Xgl contributions and checking them out, my impressions of Novell have greatly improved. I'm definitely much more open minded now about them than before. Redhat has always had the reputation for commercial distros that give back to the community. Now with Novell's contributions, Redhat has contribution competition (if that makes any sense.) They are no longer THE company when it comes to good charma in the community. Another company has given back a HUGE contribution and a VERY visible one at that. Now if a person who has stated his biad towards Redhat has now given second thoughts to Novell, what is a person who has no bias or preference either way likely to think.
2. They're not contributing to Xgl, but rather they came up with their own way and specifically stated is is different than Xgl.
3. Make specific points about doing it 'upstream', which resurrects the flame wars on the xorg mailing list about in-house vs inet cvs development.
4. Specifically mention how their approach is better than Novell's and how Novell's 'doesn't sit well with a lot of people.'
My humble opinion. Don't get me wrong, I still like Redhat but in this case I think this is more for PR good than community good.
Wow.. this is nowhere NEAR as cool as the wiggle or cube effects of XGL...
Open GL can take advantge of a hardware graphics processor from say Nvidia. Now you can afford to do things like smooth zooms and pans with no or little CPU and you can do image and video processing. Just look at what Apple does with Core Image. There really is a use for semi transparent windows and animated graphics if they are used for the right purposes. Current brute force CPU intensive methods require a powerfull CPU, 100+ watts of power and a cooling fan.
We need to nip this in the bud right here. My understanding is that this approach will still allow the same eyecandy but will lose the only REAL feature of XGL. A hardware accelerated desktop. Some of you like the eyecandy and transparent windows. That must be nice for you. The rest of us want a snappy and responsive desktop. XGL delivers that by hardware accelerating the entire xserver.
If my understanding is incorrect then by all means, enlighten me. If not, then please stop with differing standards and approaches and embrace the fully functional system in existance today.
P.S. Nvidia will use what they have to. They support this approach because it requires the less work on their part than XGL and therefore costs less money. Therefore, their opinion should be ignored and only the interests of the USERS should be considered.
I don't really know why. Most of the media extensions you see on a regular basis are containers in the same way that ogg is.
But among multimedia container formats seen on a regular basis, each is strongly associated in practice with one or a few specific codecs. For instance, a RIFF file with .wav extension most often has PCM audio, even though RIFF supports any audio codec with a DirectShow codec filter. From QuickTime 3 through 5, a QuickTime file with .mov extension most often had QDesign audio and Sorenson video. An MPEG-4 file with .m4a has MPEG-4 AAC audio; an MPEG-4 file with .m4v has MPEG-4 AAC audio and MPEG-4 Simple or Advanced Simple video. A RealMedia file with .ra or .rmj has one of the RealPlayer audio codecs; a RealMedia file with .rm has one of the RealPlayer audio codecs and one of the RealPlayer video codecs. The exception is .avi, which is a RIFF file (essentially a .wav with video) that makes full use of the container's ability to hold data using arbitrary codecs.
Also in practice, it is common to use different styles of player for audio files vs. for video files because of the end user's different ability to perform other tasks while perceiving audio vs. video. Under at least Microsoft Windows Explorer (Folder Options associations) and Apache HTTP Server (mime.types), it's the file name suffix that determines whether to play the file in the background using an audio-oriented media player or to play the file in the foreground using a video-oriented media player. That's why a lot of people who work with media using the Ogg container have adopted .ogg for audio-only files (usually Vorbis) and .ogm for files that also contain video.
At least the dissidence gives us more choice. All you staunch defenders of your immediate favorites had better develop some Kuick Kombacks for when a story involving one of the competing technologies surfaces on Slashdot.
Back before the turn of the century, when 100MHz was an unimaginably fast speed for a PC (probably late 1980's), I remember sitting in a meeting discussing rendering window decorations (frames, title bars, buttons etc) with drop shadows, and I suggested, sarcastically, why not raytrace all the window decorations. People wrinkled their brows and laughed nervously.
XP doesn't have a composited desktop. What are you talking about again?
It has also been reported to be working under Breezy Bager, but I'm not sure.
And let me say, it's damn slick. Not everything is working (or at least not enabled by default), such as trasnparency, and the top and bottom of the desktop cube are simply white. I'll try to figure out if they're broken or disabled. But what is working, is everything else.
Performance isn't the best. Theres some lagginess to DVDs, but only minor, and even less then expected when doing a wobbly-window move.
As a plug for Ubuntu, this is by far the best distro I have played with. Every other time I have tried to get myself to Linux I ran into unmovable road blocks. This thing, (a damn BETA release!) boots up first try with all hardware detected and running (even my Dell-supplied Broadcom wireless NIC). Then, I go install the nVidia 3D driver and an experimental windower and stuff works perfectly. Honestly, I don't think it could get much better than this.
You can feel however you like about it. Be an individual!
exists already for linux.
http://cairographics.org/
given that nVidia seems to be the more popular choice among linux users (no stats to back me up on that, but that's the feeling I get from boards), the fact that AIGLX does not currently work on nVidia cards may work against uptake.
The site does say that support using the closed-source (yes, boo-hiss, i know...) nvidia driver is on its way, however..
Out of curiousity, how would this be a benifit? I can't yet imagine. ANd how is this different from zooming?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Hit the redhat "applications" icon, scroll up (or down depending on where you have it) the list, on mine, 5 apps up, the "control center". It's there.
Gnome desktops know what the file is no matter what extension you give it. KDE probably does, too. Macs apparently don't judging from the recent virus, but they might in the future.
The only thing that is certain is that staying on Windows is not a solution - you may find a workaround for this, but you'll be continuing to do workarounds for the rest of your life, then.
Gnome or KDE could probably do this on an application level (especially with SVG) - but it would be a bit hard at the window manager level. Enlightement as an example takes image snapshots of windows to make icons, but scaling the other way and feeding mouse clicks and focus to the app - how would you do this without too much latency or pixelation?
I agree with this post.
how would you do this without too much latency or pixelation?
Funnily enough, using the exact same development work that the GP is criticising as useless eye-candy. The same tricks that allow visual effects like wobbly windows and rotating cubic workspaces makes scaling window contents trivial.
Pretty sure he's aware of that. I think the point is he is making is that there is something incredibly do-able and useful that can be done right now but is instead overlooked in the name of eyecandy.
The truth: Never use ide-scsi. Never use the -scanbus crap. Simply specify a normal device name and it will work. Basically, ignore the dishonest man page and web page.
Monkey Spooge with lighting, db pie charts and graphs, superimposed transparencies (2 read 3-4 or 5 charts in a single area of the screen, or holographic or hud, or whatever), etc... All done without ever touching the mouse. I think it's about time somebody began introducing intuition into /var/, eh?
I'd mod your comment insightful, but you don't explain why. Window managers would have to work significantly differently from how they currently work. Window managers typically can only display fonts at fixed point sizes (9,12,14,24), and all window elements are at a fixed resolution.
Here's how scaling a window would appear: User interface widgets (close boxes, scroll arrows, etc.) would become blurry and/or pixelated as they scaled up, and onscreen fonts would jump in incremental sizes, so that what you print would not match what you see. This is an unfortunate consequence of raster-based display rendering. This gets even worse when you have a bunch of windows of different sizes and differing legibility onscreen at the same time.
To get what you would want, window managers would need to become vector-based (like graphics in Illustrator or Flash). I'm not anything like a real programmer, but I imagine that making X vector-based would not be easy in the least.
A rolling stone is worth two in the bush!
I just needed to tell you this.
Most of X already has the capability to go vector based. Widgets can now be drawn in cairo and text is of course truetype. The problem is rerendering the truetype is very expensive. It's not like it's possible to vector render every character every frame (there are probably ~5000 visible characters in your browser window as you're reading this). In desktops typically a font is rendered into one pixmap per character when the app is first started, and then those pixmaps are used. The font is 'cached' at one resolution.
Constantly changing resolutions would be a huge load, so it's not at all practical.
Other than that it's theoretically possible, X would just need extensions to indicate when a window was being resized and when it was being 'zoomed'. And window pixmaps would keep having to be reallocated at different sizes.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
What we should do is grab the X developers and force them to work on a Microsoft Active Directory clone.
:-)
A great example of toilet humor, I really cracked up at that.
Nice one.
You're supposed to feel like this is the last pointless comment you're going to write at slashdot. I hope it sticks, kthxbye.
Hmmm... how unfortunate that the 3 files people want to play can crash the player sometimes :(
If you had hardware acceleration turned on in WMP, version 0.70 would crash on all three of those demo files. I have fixed this problem, and a few others and made a new release. V0.71 should play those files ok. www.illiminable.com/ogg/
You're absolutely right in that a lot of the effects present server no real purpose other than showing off capabilities, but you're missing the bigger point here.
The point of all this aiglx/xgl/etc stuff is not so that we can have drop shadows and transparency. The point is having hardware accelerated X to take load off the main CPU, making UI interactions faster and more efficient. It's about taking advantage of the hardware that we have instead of relying on the CPU to do everything. All the visual effects are just gravy.
And I gree that some of the effects are a bit garish and overdone, but I like a lot of them. You can expect that within a few months, there'll be third-party compositing managers come out that do all kinds of crazy, experimental effects, most of which would make a normal person hurl. But I expect that both Fedora and Ubuntu will be in a race to create a very coherent desktop experience, using only subtle eyecandy where it makes sense to improve usability (such as the minimize animation showing where the window is actually going).
One effect that I'd really like to see is desaturating inactive windows. A lot of windowmanagers do this with just the titlebar, for example, where the active window has a blue title bar and inactive ones have grey titlebars. Imagine if this desaturation was applied to the entire window and not just the titlebar. That would convey useful information (the active window is the only one that has any colour in it), while not being garish or overdone. Perhaps only desaturate to 50% instead of all the way to 0%, just to retain *some* colour for applications where colour conveys important information (I'm sure most applications use colour to convey information, such as link colours in a browser).
I'm running a Ubuntu beta release, DapperFlight4 [...] This thing, (a damn BETA release!)
Alpha release, even. A beta release of Dapper won't happen for another month. Of course, that only makes your experience even more impressive.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
Look at www.psycho-project.org/mintop.html
It looks like a good idea on making a revolution on desktop