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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 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
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.
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.
What part of "This is code that was done entirely upstream in concert with the rest of the X community." do you not understand?
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
allowing any user to load and install any application or hardware accessory
Isn't that part of the reason Windows is so insecure? Any user can install an application (when using default setup, as most people use), so the exploits can do more than screw with the user's home directory.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
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.
Did you even RTFA? All the work was done upstream. Nothing's there that's Fedora specific.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
How is this an incompatible fork? According to the website, they're working with upstream X development to make this a part of or at least easily added to the regular X distribution. It's just that only FC5 has things setup just right so far.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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.
I'm not talking about just Fedora, but Novell/Suse also, they started the problem creating a XGL extension without X group collaboration, and now the answer is yet another fork (tm). I just belive this is a case of "everbody have a small guilty part" :-(
Um, how about you stop telling other people what "we" (who is this we you speak of anyways) should be doing. Why dont you go get started on that and stop setting priorities for OTHER people
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
"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.
I agree with above reactions to your question, and also you must understand that years ago it was do it all yourself or get a distro, they are the ones that made the platform Linux, the kernel is just the corepart.
So give them a break and time to merge their tech together, b.t.w. a lot of merging is being done through opendesktop.org last 2 years.
After years of relative standstill we saw a lot movement last 2 years. (especially since SCO reminded the world that Linux was worth a lot!)
Why would I want to work on Active Directory compatibility? Why should I care about the "casual office user"? For that matter, why should I care about Linux being a mainstream option for the corporate desktop?
These things are boring to work on and don't benefit me at all. If you think they're important, perhaps you could work on them or hire somone to work on them. In the meantime, I'll be working on things that are relevent to me, e.g. eye-candy and development tools.
The concept of a unified Linux community is an illusion largely created by the GPL. It's really just a bunch of different organizations and people with diverging aims that all happen to be working with the same OS.
While the article mentions that it was all upstream, I'll take a second to point out that it might not actually be in the individual distro's interest to always be the same as everyone else. If you offer something that's different and it catches on, you've differentiated yourself from the pack. That leads to increased market share and higher revenues. From a developer/user point of view, it's not a good idea. However, from a business standpoint, selling more and increasing your bottom line is eventually going to take precedent. The community mentality will only go so far for so long I think. I don't see Debian or Gentoo doing something like this, but I definitely see Novell, Red Hat, or even IBM eventually trying to do something to impress the shareholders. It's just human nature.
Any application? So it doesn't require a tech to install cygwin? Also, can a regular user (without admin privileges) install software without jumping through hoops?
As far as hardware goes, the Linux model is actually easier than Windows. If a piece of hardware is supported in Linux, it's easier to install than in Windows. There are problems with drivers, but that may be more in terms of getting specifications than in writing drivers. Also, to what extent is programming fungible? Are the people working on the GUI the best ones for writing drivers?
bugfix: read freedesktop.org where i said opendesktop.org.
I was sleeping...
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 |
Luckily in Unix, rogue apps can only mess with my home directory, because we all know I'd never store anything I care about there.
./configure --prefix=$HOME
Also, I've had 100% success in Linux getting apps installed in my home directory since I don't have root access to my machine at work.
"Allowing any user to load and install any application or hardware accessory" is one of the pitfalls of Windows. Why would Linux want to adopt that flawed idea? I think Windows could benefit from adopting the mentality of asking for an admin password only when needed. (Before someone points it out, I know that the problem WRT Windows is more the fault of the applications than the OS, but MS apps are guilty too.) As far a the eye candy factor being the last issue, again look at the success of Windows. Do you think they got everything right and worried last about how it looked? I don't think so. To non-/.'s to use Linux, it's going to have to look pretty, and minimize the CLI need. I think Ubuntu has gone a long way toward this, but there's still a lot of work ahead, judging by my wife's reaction to it (she's definately a non-/.).
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...
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.
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.
Nvidia is far from perfect, but they do a lot better than ATI when it comes to binary drivers and support.
Not sure why you are having a problem. I am using a 6200 on a x86_64(Intel in this case) system with the binary drivers, nvidia-glx-1.0.8178. I have a x86_64(Athlon X2) system at hoem with a 6600 using the binary drivers too.
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 6200 TurboCache(TM) (rev a1)
Havoc Penington, the bane of my Linux desktop.
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!
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.
Umm, that implies that you would have Linux desktops and Windows servers (for Active Directory). That seems like a rather improbable and inappropriate combination. Novell's eDirectory woudl be a much better choice of directories. Novell has been doing the directory thing for more than 15 years. eDirectory will even run on Linux and Novell already has significant integration (ConsoleOne, Groupwise, etc).
Trying to play catch up with a company like Microsoft is just a losing battle. Nobody wants to run a system that only aims to be compatable with another. IBM tried that with OS/2. One of its biggest features was that it was a "better Windows than Windows." Be that as it may, most people would just ask themselves, "Why don't I just run Windows?"
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.
Actually it is the other way around. Linux has "zero-user configurablity." That means regular users can't install hardware or software at will. Windows is (by default) open to all kinds of user initiated configuration changes. In a properly managed office environment, users are not permitted to install hardware or software at will.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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
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.
It's not that ATI is getting OSS friendly, it's that the Xorg radeon driver works for those cards. As you may have seen, cards above the 9250 are not supported, as they still have to deal with the drivers that ATI releases in-house, closed-source.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
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...
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.
Why would I want to work on Active Directory compatibility?
Because it's the reason Unix is losing the market share against windows servers, integration with clients (which happen to be 95% windows users)
Interesting point, but consider this. I'm current running Fedora Core 4. The other day I thought about burning a CD to retain some backup data. Once again, I was confronted with the nastiness that requires me dork with kernal parameters, setting it to emulate SCSI. I've been through all this a couple times before, but I still haven't managed to burn the CD, because I just don't feel like messing with this stuff again.
We're LONG past this. A CD is so ubiquitous these days that there is no reason that it shouldn't be one of those things that "just work", or making it work should require a bare minimum effort.
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.
When I ran Windows I used to use oggcodecs: http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/.
You are right, we should forbid X developers from working on X until your issues are solved.
What we should do is grab the X developers ( which some are volunteers, which are giving this away for free ) and force them to work on a Microsoft Active Directory clone. Given the extensive experience X developers have in directory service, forcing them to work on it is a no brainer.
What should happen is that all development on linux should stall until we get your issues solved. People with no interest whatsoever in Active Directory should be forced to work on it. This of course should include Gnome, KDE, and all of GNU products.
Also, Microsoft Active Directory is TOP priority, nobody in their house can do anything usefull without it. And it is well known that 87% of the desktop computers are using Active Directory.
so I agree, STOP WORKING ON X, YOU ARE KILLING LINUX
It's amazing that when Vista has new eye candy its bad but when Linux has it it's good!?
"I was confronted with the nastiness that requires me dork with kernal parameters, setting it to emulate SCSI"
Fedora Core 4 is massively misconfigured. This stuff *does* "just work" on every other major desktop distro. I dropped Fedora after Core 2 sucked so much it made me want to puke. Suse was a breath of fresh air and now Ubuntu makes me dance with glee.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
What's also missing is the "zero-user" configurability that Windows has
Just because Windows tends to be easier to configure than Unix/Linux/BSD, doesn't mean that it has "zero-user" configurability. If you buy an OEM machine with an OEM Windows, then you don't need to configure it. But anything else and you're going to have to occasionally put on your "tech" hat.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
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
Ummm...doesn't Winamp play ogg just fine? Isn't Winamp what most Windows users use to play media? I was under the impression this was the case...
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.
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
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.
The ide-scsi module has been deprecated since 2.6 came out. Everyone apart from Jorg Schilling has moved on to more modern ways of working. :)
"News for nerds". Heh, how times change...
This sig is intentionally left blank
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.
Yeah, you're better off with nVidia. I've had nothing but extremely bad experiences with my X800.
I'm not saying nVidia is doing a great job or anything, but it's a bit better than ATI.
Yes - what a fantastic idea. Why not make a video about a technology relavant to Linux, *BSD and Solaris really difficult to access on Linux, *BSD and Solaris machines. Brilliant.
The (patent encumbered) middle ground would probably be MPEG - but for goodness sake, anything but WMV or AVI. X(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).
maybe that was the case 4+ years ago. now most windows users use media player (now those that know better probably use something else, but most windows users don't know better).
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.
I've just installed that and these files crash whichever player I choose - MediaPlayerClassic, VLC, WindowsMediaPlayer, Winamp.
.ogg audio just fine. Never mind.
Weird. Winamp can play
Good job, guys. Edgy.
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.
WMV, AVI and DiVX are all technically patented encumbered on Linux. DiVX (and hence XviD) is probably the safest bet, but OGG is free (as in beer and speech).
Does it really make sense to distribute Linux videos in a format that violates the law if you want to view it on Linux? No, I think not.
Just install OGG already. Don't tell me you didn't have to upgrade your "Winders" box Windows Media Player half a dozen times since you installed XP.
Go here. It just takes a little bit of time.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Enlightenment 16 has different backgrounds. E17 has animated backgrounds.
Gotta love the eye candy.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Let's be realistic - for a moment, that's all I ask.
/etc/sane.d/mustek.conf. OOps, nope that firmware doesn't work. What chipset does this scanner use? Oh great, you need a DIFFERENT firmware file because there were three revisions of this scanner" whereas on Windows you click "setup.exe" -- bang! Dead! Done!
Installing hardware in Linux is easier? Is installing say, the latest ATI card in a system then installing ATI's driver and tweaking xorg.conf easier than on Windows where you click "install driver" when you put the ATI CD in the drive?
Is installing a Scanner easier in Linux, in general? "Oops, you need the firmware file. Oops, you need to edit
Reliability? Sure, Linux will be a heck of a lot more reliable once it's set up but to be fair, hardware from some vendors is a royal PITA to configure in Linux, and a relative breeze in Windows.
Now, if you want to bring up motherboard or other hardware UPGRADES, sure! You won't run into stability issues on Linux if you switch from say, a VIA chipset with a Pentium III to an Intel chipset with a Pentium 4 - at worst you might have to recompile the kernel before the swap if you don't have the modules for the Intel chipset already installed. I've taken drives out of a Pentium II and Pentium III and put them in a Dual Xeon box and had the system boot right up without any problem - and no fuss with having to run driver cleaners, manually remove drivers, or worst case, OS reinstall. None of that BS. Granted, to get X up even with the same video card I have to lspci and edit one line in xorg.conf but that's a far cry from changing motherboards on Windows. Also, I shouldn't even NEED to mention this, but I will for the anti-DRM crowd. Linux won't accuse me of being a criminal and require a phone call to a Microsoft phone grunt to reactivate because I decided to upgrade my entire system but use the same OS instance in the new machine.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Fedora Core 4 is massively misconfigured. This stuff *does* "just work" on every other major desktop distro.
It does "just work" on Fedora Core 4, too - and cdrecord (a build which works on IDE drives without ide-scsi), nautilus-cd-burner, xcdroast and k3b all come with the distribution.
Perhaps the grandparent post has some particularly weird hardware, but I suspect he just tried to follow an out-of-date HOWTO without realizing it was unnecessary. The CD burner bearing computers I've used with FC4 all worked with no hand-tweaking after the install.
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
You're looking to ATI for better support on Linux? BWAHAHAHA! Thanks, I needed a laugh. I really did. You just made my day!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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
But to the OSS zealots (not the normal OSS proponents - the extreme fanatics e.g., Stallman) are always great because it means more choice. While it may be a nice ideal that is true in some areas, when it comes to a core component getting everyone to come together and come to a consensus - even if it means two "official" forks - is much better than two completely different solutions that have no hope of interoperating with the same apps with the same level of functionality.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
What we need is a concerted effort from our worldwide developers to create better interoperability with Microsoft's Active Directory structure ...
No thanks.
It depends on the codec used inside the AVI file. I'm running Linux on PowerPC - so I can't use the Windows DLL hacks a lot of Linux on x86 folks use.
i agree ...
;)
...
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windows in year 2006 is a lot different than just starting up win 3.1 ten years ago
a zero user may get notepad running, but he will hardly manage to configure his topnotch wifi card running on ad-hoc mode just to exchange the data with his neighbour
if you got a windows installation that works, then you're all set as a dumb user. but when you want to do something nonstandard (run a simple bash script as service that puts up images from your "easy-to-use" webcam to your website via copy on ssh), you are so scr*w*d
it's easy to buy a bus ticket and avoid driving yourself, it's also easy to be a dumb serial worker instead of being the boss who has to make decisions. but some people want something more and just hit the walls on windows. it has certain barriers that are really hard to beat down.
as for messing on the X opengl stuff - i don't know what you see here, but i see just a linux company running a campaign against another one. so while microsoft kicks opengl in the n*ts with vista (read on opengl from wikipedia), the linux people are just making things messier than they are right now.
i think that setting up a proper installation of xwindows and a desktop stuff on it (i use kubuntu with kde over here, on an nvidia graphilized notebook with xinerama (since twinview isn't what i want or need)) is already complicated right now. and another version of configuring it will just create more confusion on the already confused userbase.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Works fine on my Windows machine. Maybe you should download the codecs. Even better since Ogg is free maybe Microsoft should include the ogg video codec.
BTW why make it hard for Linux people to view videos about Linux? Kind of like using an AVI on a Mac site or Quicktime on a Windows site.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The AVI container format is not patented and should be well supported on Linux. AVi is an open, unencumbered format that works well with free codecs like XviD and DivX.
Fringe formats like MKV or OGM have greater technical merit but for this article's purpose, are completely unnecessary.
$
NO NO NO
Did you know: X1x00 series of ATI cards don't have drivers yet (3 months after release!) and won't for the next 3 months?
Did you know: ATI driver's performance on Linux is ~ 1/5th driver performance on Windows?
Did you know: ATI's DRI driver is based upon outdated docs ATI released along time ago with all the performance stuff torn out (no pixel shaders, for example).
At least Nvidia's closed source driver tends to work. Have you tried the latest nvidia drivers? They do list support for your NX6200. Perhaps try sending them a bug report, or posting on NVNews.net's forums (official Nvidia Linux support forums).
Nvidias drivers are closed source, but they are 98% feature complete with Windows. ATI's drivers suck, both the open and closed source ones.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
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.
Then disable the Linux section in your slashdot main page and stop complaining.
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
Miguel de Icaza? Is that you?
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
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'
Why would I want to play AVI?
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.
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.
Gark. I see this raised again and again here. GNU/Linux isn't aimed at Windows Users specifically! A surprising ammount of people seem to think that this the whole point of GNU/Linux! It's not! Simply trying to beat Windows isn't the point. The point is to write a good Operating System, and we're sustaining ourselves fine as it is. FOSS doesn't have much to gain from attracting "casual" users who have no interest in learning how _we_ do things.
The Free Unixes really aren't competing with anyone. It's getting done because it should be done, not to beat anyone else.
Your post assumes the same either/or logic that people use when they talk about "why are we doing X when there is still world hunger to solve?" It's not as if the Linux community is a single monolithic group that only works on a single problem at a time. The reality is that the people who are interested in Active Directory will work on that in parallel with the people who are interested in OpenGL acceleration. Trying to force people who are interested in volunteering for X to work on Y because Y is "more important" would only alienate them, so neither X nor Y would get done.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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).
Perhaps they were thinking about ASF? Microsoft patents ASF media file format, stops reverse engineering Is there anything to stop MS from patenting the avi format now? What would happen to software that had already been written that used the avi format, if MS did patent the avi format now?
While I agree with some points you raise, I don't think that it's the 'ability to install any piece of hardware' that is really holding people back. Or rather, it's not holding anyone back who's really a candidate for switching. There are always going to be people who have one little dongle or something that's never going to work with Linux, that will give them the excuse to stay with what's familiar.
I think having a good, centralized HCL for each distribution is the biggest missing "feature" right now -- with most distributions, it's difficult for me to figure out and purchase hardware that's guaranteed to be compatible. It doesn't necessarily have to be what I already own. Even RHEL, which you'd think would be the best around, is pretty weak.
Software installation is what Linux (at least the debian based distros, I don't use anything else) do right. You want this new "Foo" thing that your friend just told you about? "sudo apt-get install foo" I could teach my mother to do that, provided the sources.list file was set up correctly. Or there are lots of great graphical package managers. This is how software OUGHT to work: one place where you get and install software. No downloading anything from manufacturers sites, no compiling, no keeping executable files in weird places (unless you know how to choose the path and really want it). Everything is signed, dependencies are automatically fixed (which allows for efficient shared library use), the user is prompted for configuration options as required.
The apt system is one of the biggest things that Linux has going for it, to replace that with the Windows like "anyone can install any software and install it anywhere they want" is a mistake.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Why should I care about the "casual office user"?
Because, when you have the casual business users on your side, it's harder for anyone to play legalistic silly buggers (software patents, IP "contamination" etc) with Linux.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
There are already ass-loads of games that are Direct3D only. But most good developers keep a couple code-paths, so things like Doom3 and so on can all be ported to Linux/OSX/whatever with minimal fuss. Besides, Apple moving to faster hardware and their increasing adoption rates will do nothing but make the OpenGL market more attractive to game developers who want to target users across platforms.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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."
RMS doesn't support OSS, but rather sees Open Source as diluting (if not peverting) the Free Software movement. If you want to call a man a zealot, consider putting them in the right category :-) Would be like G.W.Bush a Jew, since GW is "born again", and Jewish and Christian religions share some history...
No, but it means that Nvidia and ATI should consider cross-licensing with Transgaming.
ATI/Nvidia fund Transgaming's Direct3D on Linux development, and Transgaming directly contributes code to both Wine and a libdirect3d. This would allow ATI/Nvidia to keep a firm grasp on both OpenGL (which they have now) and a firm grasp on Direct3D (which Microsoft is doing its damndest to take away from them).
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
OH WHY can't they work together on the underlying front??
Because the People's Liberation Front of Underlying (or is it the Underlying People's Liberation Front) is far superior to the just the plain Underlying Front. Jeez, some people.
Let's see. The GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap extension was developed jointly by David Reveman and some guys from nVidia, according to the credits on the spec. So not Red Hat. Reveman and Matthias Hopf have been everywhere on the X/Mesa mailing lists developing Xgl. The discussion and debate on the xorg list was all about Xgl and whether it should be the main focus instead of Exa. People who don't seem to be associated with any corp like David Airlie and Jon Smirl have been working on Xgl. The plan had seemed to be to move various parts of the driver code to do with initializing the cards into the kernel, use EGL as a simple GL interface that Xgl then ran on top of, with Xglx being a short term hack until that work was completed.
Now Red Hat appear, apparently with the backing of nVidia, saying that actually this plan - which had been discussed for ages - is a bad one, and they have a brilliant new plan. Oh and by the way Evil Novell have been hoarding code and not working with the community.
So when did this AIGLX work appear in CVS then? I don't recall reading about any such branch. Let's find out shall we? Hmm, looks like it was committed in a massive checkin about a month ago. Did Kristian just magic this out of thin air one afternoon? I rather hope not.
So anyway, my point is that from my perspective what Red Hat are saying appears to be the exact inverse of the truth. Novell have been far more visible in the X community doing this sort of work than Red Hat have, they've done a lot of the upstream Mesa work necessary for it to be efficient, they've been demoing it at conferences and so on. And now Red Hat is here trying to claim they went off and did their own thing, with no real evidence to back it up.
And it's not just Red Hat, somehow Novell went off and created an entirely new window manager as they were testing what Xgl could do instead of extending an existing one. Oops! Bah. Huge, massive communications failure at best. Blatant NIH at worst.
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.
Which is exactly the attitude the OP was complaining about.
Look, the fact of the matter is, Microsoft responds to its users, particularly the OEMs, IT decision-makers, and yes, even the enthusiasts. Why? Because it has to, or the money stops flowing. Say what you will about MS, at least they have an incentive to make their users happy.
On the other hand, if you want to persuade someone to join your camp, you don't make it difficult for them to evaluate your offering. I'm not saying that the video should have been in WMV format (why alienate your core audience?) but the attitude of "this is how we do things; if you don't like it, go away" is NOT the way to win any converts.
The people who put those videos up probably weren't even thinking about these sorts of issues - they simply used whatever tool they had at hand. Perceptions, however, DO matter, and that appears to be the reasoning behind the OP.
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
If a piece of hardware is supported in Linux, it's easier to install than in Windows.
Bullcrap. Only somebody who's never tried to install the IVTV driver for Hauppauge video capture cards can say that.
Or the driver to a Netgear USB wireless ethernet adaptor.
Or the driver to an ATI video card.
Bullplop. I hope nobody's buying this statement, because it's about the dumbest thing I've ever read. You must really be drinking the kool-aid if you actually believe this enough to type it as if it were fact.
Comment of the year
Why does one have to tweak xorg.conf to get the 2D stuff working with ATI cards? Also, I've found hardware such as printers easier to set up in Linux than in Windows.
How can XGL/AIGL make editing *.tex files WYSIWYG? Even Lyx won't let me edit *.tex files.
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.
You are going off on a tanget and deliberately misquoting the gp. Perhaps you should take a course in journalism?
The GP was not referring to permissions when he said "any user" he obviously meant "any idiot".
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.
"confronted with the nastiness that requires me dork with kernal parameters, setting it to emulate SCSI"
"We're LONG past this."
You're right. This hasn't been neccesary in years.
I don't need a course. I've obviously got the basics down :P
Either way, most distros have their own fancy packaging mechanism that allow any idiot to install applications. YaST works well for Suse. I'm not sure Red Hat/Fedora have a GUI-based tool, but RPMs are fairly well known for ease of use, and yum is a good CLI tool for installation. Ubuntu/Debian has Synaptic. Gentoo is extremely easy with portage, and there are several GUI frontends to it. Point is, it is possible for any idiot to install an application. They just have to learn a different interface than what they're used to.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
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.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
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.
Ok, that covers *one* of the products I mentioned on *some* distributions. Now how about an equally easy solution for all of the products that works on all distributions?
Comment of the year
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.
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.
Just download VLC player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/). It has more features that WMP, is smaller profile, and is multiplatform.
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.
Wolf tits, anyone?
I am currently on FC4, and I know of no "Fedora Control Center", unless you are refering to system-config-*
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
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
Aren't you assuming here that people are tring to persuade Windows users to join the Linux camp? I have long since stopped this personally. I consider Linux to be a party where everyone brings something to eat/drink. As such, I see no need to persuade anyone to come. Do you? and if so, why?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
AVI may not be, but it doesn't do any good without a codec, and MPEG-4 is patented regardless of the implementation, xvid is just as bad as the others, no matter how nice and open it would otherwise be.
Which completely open and unpatented video codec would you recommend? All the unencumbered ones I've seen are pretty useless.
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Well, unfortunately I'm inclined to agree that they don't quite cut it - yet.
So, fortunately for now living in non-patent zone I just use the patented ones (not that they would go for an individual anyway), but I can see why redhat wants to use theora, since neither happens to be true for them.
How comes then the first the world hears of AIGLX was on OSNews, but I've been reading about XGL on the Xorg mailing lists and development forums for literally years.
Lucky for us that world doesn't depend on your knowing.
http://anholt.livejournal.com/29633.html
From blog
"For the last 2 days, I've been here in Santa Clara for XDevConf. It's been a good time -- three straight days of everybody talking about the exciting things going on in the X world, and nights of fun and hacking. David Reveman showed off the shiniest bling I've seen on any OS yet, using Xgl and his new "compiz" compmgr/wm. That GL ninja, krh, showed off the accelerated indirect rendering work he's cranked out in the last month or so (for reference, A.I.R. has been on the TODO since DRI was first created what, 5 years ago?). Dave Airlie talked about all the horrible brokenness with drivers, and ajax talked about all the horrible brokenness in X configuration. These talks are a good motivation to go fix broken junk."
A.I.R. stands for accelerated indirect rendering, meaning plans were there, but nobody implemented it.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
Obviously, you haven't installed a current version of Linux, or used a current version of Knoppix. I run Fedora, CentOS and Kubuntu, and with all three, my desktop and laptop hardware "just works". Digikam recognizes both of my digital cameras when I connect them, unlike Windows, driver installation is not required. Same for my flatbed scanner and all the various USB storage devices, including my USB DVD burner. Speaking of DVDs, I recently installed Windows MCE 2005 for a friend, and would you believe, it won't play encrypted DVDs out of the box? She had to purchase a $20 codec! At least with Linux, all you do use yum or apt to install libdvdcss. I switched four years ago, and never looked back.
This isn't the sig you're looking for... Move along.
I've found that NICs are easier to install in Linux than in Windows. Just plug them in and let Linux autodetect. Similarly with printers. I once plugged my laptop into an HP 4100 (4200?) using a USB/Parallel printer cable. Before I could do anything else, the printer was printing a previously enqueued file. And connecting an external modem? Plug it in to serial port and set the proper symbolic link to /dev/modem. Oh, the horror!
Did your Hauppage card say it was Linux compatible? Did your Netgear USB wireless card? Your ATI video card? I may have had trouble in 3D, but never in 2D.
It's unlikely to work for all distributions as some distributions are intentionally scaled down. I estimate that there are some 300 distributions listed at http://distrowatch.com/stats.php [distrowatch]. I doubt that all of them have the level of autodetection that you want.
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?
When Microsoft took the DirectX route instead of implementing more of OpenGL (they had a poor implementation in Windows NT), it was because they wanted to control over the APIs. This is the route they've taken time and again.
With success I might add. So DirectX is the predominant API for games development (and covers more than just graphics), but OpenGL has a very good standing in professional 3D work. You know, like CGI, 3D animation, and stuff. You know, Shrek. And guess which OS is the more dominant in those environments?
Don't worry, OpenGL isn't going away anytime soon.
Lately, every time I see a new linux "feature" (or whatever) announcement on /.
/. , please STFU
some asshole tries to be smart and says "Linux never will make the desktop because is lacking on blah blah blah..."
Well, I have news for you, the only ones that wants "Linux on the desktop" are RH/Novell/etc...
The average Linux user could not care less about Joe Sixpack and Grandma using linux, windows or OSX.
And this are the same people that are running linux at the desktop 24x7 NOW, and don't care about Linux taking over the world. They just want Linux to improve, as it has been doing since I can remember.
So, next time some news about Linux appears on
Btw, my Mom and little brother are using linux and they dont even know the difference.
Could they have installed it and configured it?, probably not, but they probably can't install windows anyway...
Bullplop indeed. You must be talking about unsupported ATI video cards because the ATI Radeon 7500 that I use is supported out of the box with RHEL3,4, CentOS3,4, FedoraCore 1,2,3,4,5. I'll bet the other pieces of hardware that you mention are reliant and closed, proprietary and therefore UNSUPPORTABLE drivers.
That says nothing about the original statement that you're replying to, but your own is wildly misleading, uninformed and foolish. Buy supported hardware with open drivers or shut up. (Unless you're complaining to the hardware manufacturers.)
What could a flood of Windows users contribute?
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
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.
That's KDE's Control Center, not redhat.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
You forgot to add "in my humble opinion".
You have a point, though.
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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!
So what? How does the number of windows users affect linux developers? We're not using windows. Linux does what I need it for
It affects linux in the server market. Linux servers need to deal with windows clients, period, and if it doesn't do it well, nobody will choose linux even if it's a good OS.
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.
So you're saying an item in the DRI to do list is somehow a replacement for widespread discussion in the mailing lists?
True enough. Unfortunately the same can not be said of all common hardware. Uncommon hardware could be forgiven to a degree, but you can go buy plenty of items on the shelf in Walmart right now that work under linux but require substantial tweaking.
You're supposed to feel like this is the last pointless comment you're going to write at slashdot. I hope it sticks, kthxbye.
Do you think NASA or Sandia National Laboratories (both running very large linux systems/installations) worry about market share? If they were the only users of linux in the world, would it make their supercomputers obselete?
If anything, I dread the day Linux takes over the desktop. At least now I can shrug my shoulders and pretend I don't know how to make your Windows box work like it did yesterday. :-) Seriously, I think it's inevitable that OSS will take over the world eventually, but people should realize that few people contributing to linux are going to be interested in making wizards and help pages.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
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.