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Kororaa Releases XGL LiveCD
Tony Tony Chopper writes "The team from Kororaa who brought us a GUI based Gentoo installer have just released the first live CD to use xgl technology. From Kororaa.org, the lead developer Chris writes 'Today I am happy to release a Kororaa Live CD showcasing Xgl technology.' The response so far have been incredibly positive, an article at tuxmachines.org is glowing with much praise and few complaints. For those who love eye-candy but don't want to mess with their existing installs, this is the perfect opportunity to see what Xgl is about. The torrent can be downloaded from LinuxTracker."
The main site is down for some reason (slashdot does that). The torrent is mirrored at: http://mirrors.atarack.com/Kororaa-Xgl-Live-CD-0.1 .torrent
We have ISO mirrors here for the impatient:
(thanks to softpedia)
here (thanks to rdt1.org)
here (thanks to Mudrii)
here (thanks to Hotel Peter)
here (thanks to Over Confident)
here (thanks to sefcom)
here (thanks to Digital Extortion), and
here (thanks to Chris Peters from Canada)
here (Atarack VDS/VPSes who are our proud sponsors)
(To buy an atarack VPS e-mail us at sdhillon@atarack.com or at ndevito@atarack.com)
"Well the graphics are cool, but does it actually increase how useable my computer is?"
Yes. Of course not automatically, but it does provide a technical means that makes things possible that will increase usability. Take the expose like feature, or live previews when alt-tabbing, for example. And will of course make implementing accessibility (sp?) like zooming much easier to implement.
"Not to mention the obivous questions like "will my crappy integrated graphics card even come close to running this?""
I think one of the best things about XGL (and AIGLX for that matter) is that the hardware requirements for this are actually pretty low. So if you integrated graphic chip does do opengl, it should work.
Of course keep in mind that this thing is still in beta and that many drivers still lack the opengl extensions needed, so that many things that later will be done in hardware are now actually done with mesa in software.
That said, despite these problems, XGL runs very smooth on my quite old and not very powerful Geforce.
I liked how in one of the videos apps that freeze or are unresponsive turn black and white to indicate they're "dead". It seems that with depth of field and lighting you could do quite a bit with the UI to hint at an application or window's state.
For example, as a dialog boxes pops up, at the same time the underlying windows might drop back and fall into a zone that is out of focus, or perhaps individual windows might literally "pop" up (growing larger with larger shadows). The shadows themselves could be "real" I would imagine, and the shadow could be generated via a virtual light source which could be moved manually or automatically throughout the day.
In short, some of the stuff I've seen seems to have been brought over from OS X, but the power of GLX and AIGLX seem seem to open up a whole new world of GUI possibilities. The zoom effect, combined with vector graphics seems to offer quite a bit to those with visual impairments, for example. Is there a place where UI gurus are talking about new effects that may not only provide eye candy, but increase the usability and even suggest new analogies or interactive effects to make computing easier/better?
I've always wondered, with usb many drives having greater capacity then CDs, why not setup LiveCDs to be run easily from a USB drive and also allow for some configuration data to be saved there?
I'd love to be able to test out distros on a thumbdrive...maybe it's just me though.
The effects are cool and all GL stuff flies with speed, but basic xlib stuff in XGL is slow. Very slow. Resizing windows seems like 10 times slower than xorg, for a good test try opening a complex webpage and resize the windows. Is this something being worked on?
Always when I bring this up it gets dismissed as a configuration error. No, I don't think so. It's the same with this LiveCD as my own compiles before. I have tried on 3Ghz+ computers with Nvidia 6600gt and 6800 cards. In all these demo vides we have seen I have never seen a window resize. If it's just my computers than please upload somewhere a video where resize flies and let me see.
Before this is fixed all this is just a showcase toy. I understand it's new and not optimized but can we at least agree on that some REAL optimization is necessary? Because before it is as fast as xorg it's just useless for real work, and I would really like to have this.
http://en.opensuse.org/Xgl http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_XGL#Prerequisites