X11 7.7 Released, Brings Multi-Touch Input

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X11 7.7 Released, Brings Multi-Touch Input

Posted by timothy on Sunday June 10, 2012 @02:16AM from the nostalgia-for-moderns dept.

First time accepted submitter Jizzbug writes "The X Window System made release X11 7.7 last night (June 9th): 'This release incorporates both new features and stability and correctness fixes, including support for reporting multi-touch events from touchpads and touchscreens which can report input from more than one finger at a time, smoother scrolling from scroll wheels, better cross referencing and formatting of the documentation, pointer barriers to control cursor movement, and synchronization fences to coordinate between X and other rendering engines such as OpenGL.'"

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i thought xorg buried x a long time ago by steak · 2012-06-10 02:24 · Score: 1

i thought xorg buried x a long time ago. x is the cat with 11 lives. rimshot.

--
lose != loose
1. Re:i thought xorg buried x a long time ago by thopkins · 2012-06-10 03:52 · Score: 2
  
  You are thinking of XFree86.
Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 02:24 · Score: 5, Interesting

X virtualises user interface devices: mice, keyboard, display. Why sound has always been outside? Is not it another part of user interface?
Why we have these incompatible "sound servers", if the X protocol could be used instead? Tunneling a video with sound through X through ssh through Internet? No problem.
1. Re:Wht not sound? by For+a+Free+Internet · 2012-06-10 02:28 · Score: 1, Funny
  
  THIS is a very important idea. Sound is blocked from the X protolcol by an Italian-Apple conspiracy funded by the Vatican and the CIA to keep X from its rightful place as the Queen of Multimedia Web 3.0 Compurtrterizining.
  
  --
  UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
2. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 02:38 · Score: 0
  
  X with sound? It's hard enough getting sound to work well locally, and you want to mix things up with X?!
3. Re:Wht not sound? by KiloByte · 2012-06-10 03:03 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  It's hard enough getting sound to work well locally
  Nah, just try "apt-get purge pulseaudio".
  
  --
  The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
4. Re:Wht not sound? by Pecisk · 2012-06-10 03:04 · Score: 1
  
  Why sound servers shoud be compatible? Just stick with PA and be set. Or JACK with plain ALSA, if pro sound is your thing.
  
  --
  user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
5. Re:Wht not sound? by ChrisMP1 · 2012-06-10 03:24 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Am I the only one who's never had a single problem with Pulse? What is it doing for everyone else that makes it so bad?
  
  --
  <sig> </sig>
6. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 03:33 · Score: 1
  
  It was called 'NAS': Network Audio System. AFAIK it was output only, supported stereo audio, and had more or less died out by 2005. I used it a bunch prior to that as a much much reliable replacement to ESD/pulseaudio however. It just worked, allowed me to stream audio to remote X sessions, and did it with pretty low network overhead. As a bonus it used whatever your DISPLAY variable was set to as the remote end.
7. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 03:55 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  It used to be very crash prone, laggey and with a whole lode of audio glitch issues. It has not caused any serious issues for me for about 2 years now, and complaints form new users have dropped dramatically so it seems to have improved quite a bit. You do not want to use it for low latency audio and there are a few specific pieces of hardware that do not work but most complainers either oppose its design principles or still hate it due to long memories rather than current issues.
8. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 03:58 · Score: 1
  
  What makes it so bad, it sits between stuff that does something and the application your using, replicates functionality of pre-existing applications whilst increasing latency and when things do go wrong it seems that purging it from the system has so far done wonders.
  YMMV so enjoy, I haven't found a compeling reason for it yet other that its widely adopted and getting harder to avoid. That does not make me smile.
9. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 04:00 · Score: 1
  
  It still takes way too much CPU for what it does. ALSA is much, much better in that regard.
10. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 04:05 · Score: 0
  
  it keeps assigning channels randomly to my 5.1 setup, that's both bad and annoying.
11. Re:Wht not sound? by fa2k · 2012-06-10 04:05 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  I think the reason people don't like it is that it introduces a fair number of problems, and it only has benefits in some rare, specific circumstances
  Pulse seems to have been introduced at the wrong level, for what it is. Because it works on top of ALSA, it relies heavily on some little used functions, such as getting the true decibel level of the volume controls. (This causes the PA volume controls to fail for some hardware, such as muting the audio at 25 %). On the other hand, it doesn't make use of all ALSA functions, so it does resampling and mixing in software, instead of relying on (possibly superior) hardware. It also doesn't expose all functionality of the underlying devices, and I think it was difficult to get passthrough of digital audio to work about 6 months ago. So it's a rich API built on top of another rich API, offering little benefit, and introducing some bugs.
12. Re:Wht not sound? by fa2k · 2012-06-10 04:10 · Score: 1
  
  I shoud concede that it's a cross platform API, while Advanced Linux Sound Architecture doesn't work on things like BSD. Still, BSD people look at you strangely if you try to get Pulse working, and tell you to use OSS or OSS4.
13. Re:Wht not sound? by TheRaven64 · 2012-06-10 04:11 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Sound works fine on FreeBSD, no need for ugly hacks like PulseAudio, just in-kernel low-latency sound mixing and a full OSS4 implementation, complete with per-application volume controls, surround sound, and all of the features you'd expect of a modern operating system.
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
14. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 04:21 · Score: 0
  There are two answers to your question:
  
  "Do one thing and do it well" is the Unix philosophy.
  It wouldn't work anyway
15. Re:Wht not sound? by aardvarkjoe · 2012-06-10 04:28 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  You do not want to use it for low latency audio and there are a few specific pieces of hardware that do not work but most complainers either oppose its design principles or still hate it due to long memories rather than current issues.
  I recently updated from debian squeeze to wheezy, and in the process it reinstalled pulseaudio. Surprise, surprise: my computer crashed frequently until I got rid of it again.
  Sound on Linux has been very problematic the entire time I've been using it -- since the late '90s. It's turned into this weird tinker-toy arrangement where nothing quite works right, and debugging problems when you have them is extraordinarily painful.
  Right now, the best solution I've found is to nuke all of the ALSA, pulseaudio, and other userland crap and go with OSSv4 -- it's been very stable for me over the last few years, and since it's self-contained at least solving problems doesn't take finding a needle in a haystack. The biggest downside is that (at least, AFAIK), it's not supported by mainstream distros, so if you're not comfortable recompiling your kernel and modules it's not usable.
  
  --
  
  How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
16. Re:Wht not sound? by Nimey · 2012-06-10 04:28 · Score: 2
  
  In my experience Pulse will sometimes not work at all, and other times when you change the system volume it will lag on changing quite a bit or make the sound mute briefly.
  I had a much better experience overall with ALSA and ESD.
  
  --
  Hail Eris, full of mischief...
  
  E pluribus sanguinem
17. Re:Wht not sound? by ffflala · 2012-06-10 05:15 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Pulse killed the possibility of multitrack recording studio on Linux. You can still look back and witness the dramatic die-off of multitrack Linux uses and discussion that coincide with the introduction of Pulse. It's like going back and looking at MySpace, or Friendster.
  
  Right before Ubuntu brought in Pulse, I'd finally hit a sweet spot with Linux audio. With ALSA + qjackctl I was able to manage low-latency multitrack audio recording, and simultaneously have discrete control over the audio of all media players. Before pulse, I was able to use my terminal as a giant mixing board, managing recording and various media playback simultaneously. Different mixes and levels for different apps -- I was able to discretely control the audio levels and mixes for *each channel* in surround sound.
  
  Pulse completely destroyed these capabilities, it eliminated the low-latency capability necessary for multitrack recording, and replaced it with frequent crashes, inconsistent behavior, and was tied in so deeply that Ubuntu has never since been capable of the audio layout I'd been using about five years ago.
  
  Pulse is the single worst Linux move I've ever seen. In the interest of removing audio from the kernel space (necessary for low-latency), it simply eliminated what used to be advanced capabilities. Lennart Poettering, author of Pulse simply disregarded these concerns, waved his hands and said "that's not the concerns Pulse was designed to address!"
  
  No shit, Lennart.
18. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 05:30 · Score: 0, Insightful
  
  So the same guy that made system boot configuration and init scripts a huge pain in the ass with systemd is also responsible for screwing up our sound support? Somehow I am not surprised by this....
19. Re:Wht not sound? by Tore+S+B · 2012-06-10 05:43 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Because the distros put it in way the hell to early, a point at which there were plenty of kinks, and the benefits had not been made visible in a meaningful way in any UI I noticed.
  There's only so many times you could end up with random sound problems which were solved - with no loss of functionality - by killall pulseaudio - or more permanently...
  rm /usr/bin/pulseaudio ln -s /bin/cat /usr/bin/pulseaudio ...without developing a certain animosity towards that binary.
  
  --
  toresbe
20. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 05:48 · Score: 0
  
  There might be someone else out there! keep looking!
21. Re:Wht not sound? by Hatta · 2012-06-10 05:51 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  It's really time for the kernel guys to take another look at OSS4. Fully GPL compatible, it belongs in the kernel.
  
  --
  Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
22. Re:Wht not sound? by RobbieThe1st · 2012-06-10 05:54 · Score: 1
  
  Compelling reason for it? It makes my microphone work right in TF2 via Wine(likely because of resampling - Audigy 2 sound card).
  For everything else on that system, ALSA is fine with defaults due to the hardware mixer on that card.
  On other systems however... I've had great luck with it on my laptop and it's crummy DAC, abd especially being able to hotplug a USB DAC and have the sound come out of there automatically. And I didn't even have to edit config files!
  Lag is still an issue, but there's a environment variable that can be set to limit the latency for Pulse, and it makes gaming doable with it(where the sound matches up with the picture...)
23. Re:Wht not sound? by RobbieThe1st · 2012-06-10 05:57 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  To be honest, I agree with it's choice to hardware mix/resample in software - Most cards(by volume) are just dumb DACs, and the few that aren't(like my audigy 2) have enough bugs to make it useless to try - Just use ALSA straight on those cards, or only use Pulse for that application(which works perfectly well when you have a hardware mixer).
24. Re:Wht not sound? by LizardKing · 2012-06-10 05:59 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  BSD people look at you strangely if you try to get Pulse working
  That's because Pulseaudio was designed to solve issues that for the most part have never existed on BSD systems. The BSD's evolved their existing OSS based audio subsystems to fix the few issues it had, whereas Linux chose to adopt a poorly implemented new system. I speak from experience, having tried to write an OSS shim for NetBSD that emulated the ALSA MIDI API, and became frustrated by the incomplete, innacurate documentation. I was also bemused by the ALSA API itself which looked like it was designed to be object oriented, but actually implemented by people with no real understanding of good OO princples.
25. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 06:13 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Since you're flaming, I can flame harder.
  Disclaimer: I've sent some patches to pulseaudio and alsa.
  Pulseaudio is possibly the best thing that has ever happened to linux, the introduction was unquestionably problematic, but dmix that it replaced will not be missed. It also contains features that decrease the amount of interrupts needed, and it didn't work around problems in hardware but fixed. If you feel like it you can STILL use jack, in fact with -rt kernel I ran pulseaudio on top of jack in a 2.5ms maximum latency configuration with 0 underruns for native jack clients.
  In the time that only dmix existed, a lot of features were missing and you couldn't guarantee that something that happened to work on your card would ever work on someone else's card and all names for the master channel was inconsistent and the dB levels were usually garbage. You have the people who worked on pulseaudio and fixed the upstream bugs instead of hacking around them to thank that those problems were actually fixed.
26. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 06:15 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Pulse killed the possibility of
  Why not use jackd directly on top of alsa and pulseaudio as a client for jack? You could use pulseaudio for all desktop stuff that doesn't need low latency which I believe would only use one jack slot (or whatever it is called) and all latency critically things could connect directly to jack.
  pacmd suspend true
  sudo jackd -d alsa
  pactl load-module module-jack-sink channels=2
  pactl load-module module-jack-source channels=2
  pacmd set-default-sink jack_out
  pacmd set-default-source jack_in
  pacmd suspend false
  Or something like that.
27. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 06:15 · Score: 0
  
  Exactly. The PA developers told the distros PA wasn't ready for mass adoption yet. The distro guys took it anyways and it was a big fuckup. The distro guys then kept their mouth shut while the user community grabbed their torches for the PA developers.
  Basically, if you've ever been mad as PA, especially in the early days, chances are extremely high you blamed and cursed the wrong people. You really need to be kicking the balls of your favorite distro maintainers. But since people blindly fall in love with their seemingly dumb-ass maintainers, I guess its easiler to blindly and dumbly blame PA, not matter how inappropriate it is to do so.
28. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 06:23 · Score: 0
  
  Maybe it works in some distant universe, not in mime. It's usually 20% CPU on a quad core.
  I'm unable to configure it to work in a simple 2.1 (using center as the sub woofer as God intended)
  environment. When I do an install, I just remove it after the install. Things seem to work better.
  Honestly, I really don't know what it brings to the table.
  Actually, it's sad that the X windows system did not pick it up. Probably would have been much
  better of an implementation than the current state of Linux audio.
  CAPTCHA = exploits
29. Re:Wht not sound? by MrHanky · 2012-06-10 06:34 · Score: 1
  
  If PulseAudio can make your computer crash, then you've got bigger problems than PulseAudio. Probably broken audio hardware drivers.
30. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 06:55 · Score: 0
  
  "Do one thing and do it well" is the Unix philosophy.
  "Do one thing" => "Provide an interface between the application and the UI hardware"
  "Do it well" => "Support all the UI hardware" (since X already handles both graphics and input, claiming sound should be handled by some other component is rather peculiar)
31. Re:Wht not sound? by zixxt · 2012-06-10 07:10 · Score: 2
  
  Sound works fine on FreeBSD, no need for ugly hacks like PulseAudio, just in-kernel low-latency sound mixing and a full OSS4 implementation, complete with per-application volume controls, surround sound, and all of the features you'd expect of a modern operating system.
  That's one thing the BSD's got right. However Linux had an old and unmaintainable version of OSS, so ALSA had to kill it off in Kernel. PulseAudio is a nasty bloated buggy piece of crap, even old ESD works far better IMHO.
  
  So the same guy that made system boot configuration and init scripts a huge pain in the ass with systemd is also responsible for screwing up our sound support? Somehow I am not surprised by this....
  Amen!
  
  --
  ---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
32. Re:Wht not sound? by jedidiah · 2012-06-10 07:13 · Score: 0
  
  >> It's hard enough getting sound to work well locally
  >
  > Nah, just try "apt-get purge pulseaudio".
  Nah. Just use "apt-get remove lemming-trolls"
  
  --
  A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
33. Re:Wht not sound? by jedidiah · 2012-06-10 07:14 · Score: 1
  
  They don't whine and bitch and moan. So they are far less visible. That's the problem with stuff in general. Most people that aren't having problems simply aren't motivated to declare that things are fine.
  
  --
  A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
34. Re:Wht not sound? by Lanteran · 2012-06-10 08:07 · Score: 1
  
  Some years back it was quite tricky to get working in distributions that didn't pre-configure it, required equal proportions of skill and dumb luck. If you stuck to the more user friendly stuff like ubuntu, mint, etc. it's likely you never would have experienced issues. I remember a great deal of frustration before finally just going back to alsa with arch. Damn thing was impossible...
  But, like the former difficulty of wifi, it's mostly a distant memory. Mostly...
  
  --
  "People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
35. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 08:49 · Score: 0
  
  OSS3: Everything is a Soundblaster
  OSS4: Everything is a Soundblaster 16
  In case you haven't been paying attention, the world moved on. Nobody has a Soundblaster 16 any more. People expect USB speakers and Bluetooth headsets to Just Work. PA delivers all that functionality. If OSS4 had arrived 10-15 years ago it might have been worth a look but it didn't.
36. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 08:54 · Score: 0
  
  I will start using it as soon as my microphone actually works with Skype and it stops crashing when I use Audacity. So far the only advantage I've seen is the ability to change the volume of individual applications, which is something I never need because all those applications already have their own volume controls. The disadvantages are easy to find: it increases the latency (rather significantly for some applications), the internal microphone only works half of the time (I can get it to work again by launching Audacity and recording a few seconds of sound, hoping it won't crash) and it's not exactly stable. I really don't see what's wrong with ALSA + dmix, I'm using it now and it works just fine.
37. Re:Wht not sound? by marioinutil · 2012-06-10 10:09 · Score: 1
  
  I've been using Ubuntu/Xubuntu for the last 6 years, and I like playing games in emulators like MAME and Mednafen. Pulseaudio causes delays, sometimes of several seconds, with the libsdl pulseaudio package installed.
  I have a simple 14 dollars Sound Blaster Audigy SE PCI card.
  Purging Pulseaudio and using plain ALSA makes all of my sound problems go away.
  The sound lag in some emulators is gone. I can even watch movie files with 5.1 surround sound without any problem, and several sound outputting applications such as the flash plugin under Firefox work simultaneously.
38. Re:Wht not sound? by Grishnakh · 2012-06-10 10:13 · Score: 1
  
  I use pulseaudio on two different computers, on Linux Mint and Kubuntu. Never had any problems with it.
  That said, I don't know that it's the greatest solution to the problem. It seems like OSS4, where multiple programs can write to /dev/dsp simultaneously (as I understand it), is an architecturally superior solution to doing this in userspace. Then again, it seems like it'd make even more sense to build sound into X (or its successor), so that people running remotely will have both video and audio redirected to their workstation automatically. Imagine 4 people logged into one system, all running applications with audio; with them all writing to /dev/dsp, you'd have a bunch of different sounds coming out of the speakers on one system that there might not even be any local users on.
  But again, pulseaudio seems to work just fine for me.
39. Re:Wht not sound? by Grishnakh · 2012-06-10 10:15 · Score: 1
  
  Maybe, maybe not. Depends on what someone means when they say "crash". For instance, suppose your desktop environment suddenly crashes, leaving you back at a login prompt and losing all your work. To most users, that's a "crash", even though there may be no problem at all with the kernel or drivers, only with the desktop environment which runs in userspace.
40. Re:Wht not sound? by MrHanky · 2012-06-10 10:29 · Score: 2
  
  Yes, but I don't think those users would compile OSSv4 to get around ALSA and PulseAudio's failures.
41. Re:Wht not sound? by Grishnakh · 2012-06-10 11:17 · Score: 1
  
  Hmm. This sounds a bit like the KDE4.0 fiasco, except there the KDE guys stupidly said it was ready for mass adoption, even though it clearly wasn't. And then they did the exact same thing with GNOME 3.0.
  It seems the Linux distro maintainers really don't bother to test their builds very much.
42. Re:Wht not sound? by rec9140 · 2012-06-10 12:06 · Score: 2
  
  So... do what every one else does.... DONT USE IT!
  I removed it via a hack... by doing a force hack mv on the pulsecrap bin... hackish very hackish.
  Now I just remove the packages in synaptic and let ALSA take over in Phonon like it should.
  So just remove it and go back to doing what you were doing.
  Yes its an uneeded and annoying to have to do this, but just like the other PITA project, WAYLAND, the too young to have been alive when X or ALSA came about have their heads buried on what is the "better path."
  
  --
  1311393600 - Back to Black
43. Re:Wht not sound? by smash · 2012-06-10 13:08 · Score: 2
  
  You do not want to use it for low latency audio
  So, what are you supposed to use it for? Given that gaming isn't exactly Linux's forte, and audio production is a more likely niche, which requires low latency audio, what problem is pulse trying to solve. Having multiple audio solutions because the primary one can't do low latency is retarded.
  Meanwhile, FreeBSD has done multi-channel audio out of the box without any grief since at least 2005.
  
  --
  I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
44. Re:Wht not sound? by smash · 2012-06-10 13:12 · Score: 1
  
  Exactly. I've had multi-channel audio working almost out of the box on BSD since at least 2005. It was a breath of fresh air after trying to get audio working *properly* on Linux in a multi-channel, multi application aware manner, dealing with enlightenment sound daemon for some stuff (but games wouldn't work with it), etc.
  BSD = load appropriate sound module. Run application. Enjoy multi channel sound.
  
  --
  I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
45. Re:Wht not sound? by smash · 2012-06-10 13:14 · Score: 1
  
  Try FreeBSD. Multichannel audio just works.
  
  --
  I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
46. Re:Wht not sound? by ffflala · 2012-06-10 13:52 · Score: 2
  
  I started learning *nix w/ FreeBSD back towards the end of the 4.x series, and stuck with FreeBSD through the beginning of 6.x. As fond as I am of the BSDs, they are fundamentally incompatible with multitrack *recording*.
  
  Multitrack recording is where you record a track or tracks while listening to and playing along with a prerecorded track. This requires extremely low latency -- you need to be able to play something and hear it back as close to instantaneously as possible. Latency needs to be at a lower time threshold than you can perceive, and about 6 microsecond is the threshold (though that's pushing it.) Any latency larger than that, and the newly recorded tracks will be noticeably out of sync with the playback tracks.
  
  This part is beyond my knowledge (please forgive and correct any inaccuracies, respected kernel hackers) but I'll share my understanding: Linux achieves low latency with real time interrupts -- several years ago Ingo Molnar created the first RT kernel patch for Linux. However, real time interrupts also, unfortunately, provide a vector for instability and insecurity, and BSD architecture intentionally disallows real-time interrupts to kernel space, from user space. Because of this, BSD latency is not low enough to allow for multitrack recording.
47. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 14:21 · Score: 0
  
  the KDE4.0 fiasco, except there the KDE guys stupidly said it was ready for mass adoption, even though it clearly wasn't
  No, the KDE guys clearly said that the 4.0 release was not ready for mass adoption and was only intended for developers to learn the platform; the distros f'ed it up in their mad dash to be the first to have something new.
48. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 15:59 · Score: 0
  
  Try listening to stuff! low latency recording needs specific hardware and a lot of manual tuning to do right either way so an interface that just works on the maximum range of hardware, at the expense of performance, was the intent. Whether or not it succeeds is a different matter but it does have its purpose.
49. Re:Wht not sound? by FauxPasIII · 2012-06-10 16:28 · Score: 1
  
  Not the only one. Hell, I was setting up pulseaudio by hand for a year or so before it became the standard on Ubuntu, just because it made things work _so_ much better.
  However, the reports of it borking things are consistent enough to convince me we might be in a minority.
  
  --
  25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
50. Re:Wht not sound? by FauxPasIII · 2012-06-10 16:37 · Score: 1
  
  >> Different mixes and levels for different apps
  Weird... I wanted that feature, and that's exactly why I was installing PulseAudio for a year before Ubuntu picked it up as a standard. PulseAudio makes per-app mixing just work, whereas before Pulse came around I had never seen any OS do that since the BeOS.
  
  --
  25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
51. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 22:18 · Score: 0
  
  Obviously the KDE guys never said that, because clearly it wasn't. Unfortunately only SuSE understood that, most other distros didn't.
52. Re:Wht not sound? by Freultwah · 2012-06-10 22:19 · Score: 2
  
  Are you daft? Even the supported devices list from 2009 proves you wrong: http://manuals.opensound.com/devlists/Linux.html. In case you haven't been paying attention and are just trolling.
53. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 23:27 · Score: 0
  
  +1
  Pulseaudio made linux audio work well on things that are not Soundblaster Live or equivalent.
  Unfortunately, for a while it made SB work worse (or not at all, in the first versions),
  so many people still hate it.
54. Re:Wht not sound? by adri · 2012-06-11 00:43 · Score: 1
  
  BSD architecture allows real time interrupts to kernel space. It's just that almost all the drivers these days use ISR threads that are woken up by an interrupt.
  There's nothing stopping a carefully written driver doing everything in the ISR.
55. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-11 00:45 · Score: 0
  
  There are latency problems with the X11 protocol, which is not packetized. That means large X11 commands cannot be broken up into smaller chunks that can be neatly interleaved with an ongoing audio stream. For this reason, makers of audio-enabled X terminals have in the past opted for separate, out-of-band audio protocol (like NCD did with NAS).
56. Re:Wht not sound? by fnj · 2012-06-11 00:52 · Score: 1
  
  So you really think a human can perceive a sound desynchronization of six MILLIONTHS of a second? That's a period in which sound travels two MILLIMETERS. You could move the position of your head imperceptibly and incur a delay of that much. Do you really think moving the violins 2 mm with respect to the horns is going to be perceptible in a concert hall?
  Do you want to try that again?
57. Re:Wht not sound? by micheas · 2012-06-11 00:54 · Score: 1
  
  Blue tooth audio devices?
  I realize you don't have any, but if you try getting it to work you will discover that pulse audio is the only solution on linux.
  Pulse audio exists because OSS, ESD, ALSA, jack, and whatever else there is cannot provide universal plug and play audio for linux. Pulse Audio has had a long road to travel, and it is not truly finished, but it is getting close to plug and play audio in a lot of situations.
  
  --
  Work bio at MMWD
58. Re:Wht not sound? by fnj · 2012-06-11 00:58 · Score: 1
  
  Here's a hint. X is a visual interface and ends up on the monitor. Sound is audio and ends up in the speakers. Keyboard and mouse are completely inseparable from the visual interface and sound is not.
59. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-11 03:00 · Score: 0
  
  I use the pulse-module-jack which runs pulse on top of Jack... So I can do my ardour/jack recording without interference from pulse...
60. Re:Wht not sound? by ffflala · 2012-06-11 03:14 · Score: 1
  
  Rats. Good catch, I used the wrong metric unit. That should be *milliseconds*, not microseconds. The abbreviation is ms.
61. Re:Wht not sound? by SiChemist · 2012-06-11 03:54 · Score: 1
  
  They said that after the users raised hell about the alpha quality of the software. It wasn't mentioned on the KDE website because I looked when I first upgraded.
  
  --
  God is imaginary
62. Re:Wht not sound? by SCHecklerX · 2012-06-11 03:55 · Score: 1
  
  Indeed. Fuck Pulseaudio.
  It lies at the majority of the problems I have with my WebOS phone. Why they chose pulse on a device that DEPENDS on doing audio with multiple sources and outputs simultaneously is beyond me. Buggy and unreliable as hell.
  Fuck pulseaudio.
63. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-11 04:25 · Score: 0
  
  What happens when you plug in a set of USB speakers? Or a USB headset?
64. Re:Wht not sound? by jc79 · 2012-06-11 04:48 · Score: 1
  
  I've never had a problem with it either. I also quite like Gnome 3, systemd, etc. Satisfied people are less likely to make a song and dance about their experiences though, so the moaning always dominates.
65. Re:Wht not sound? by fikx · 2012-06-11 04:58 · Score: 1
  
  X / desktop isn't the only thing that makes sounds....
  
  --
  AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
66. Re:Wht not sound? by DaVince21 · 2012-06-11 08:04 · Score: 1
  
  X already handles too much, and you want it to handle more? Also, what if I want to use sound outside of X?
  
  --
  I am not devoid of humor.
67. Re:Wht not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-11 10:04 · Score: 0
  
  X already handles too much
  No it doesn't.
  
  Also, what if I want to use sound outside of X?
  What if you want to use the monitor or the keyboard or the mouse outside of X?
68. Re:Wht not sound? by cthulhu11 · 2012-06-11 10:28 · Score: 1
  
  I installed OSS on an AXi-based system running Solaris. Sound stopped working, and I never could get sound to come out of the audio card again, even after an OS reinstall.
69. Re:Wht not sound? by DaVince21 · 2012-06-11 11:24 · Score: 1
  
  Which is exactly why X is doing too much. Why should it be handling the keyboard and mouse all over again in the first place? Just for its server-related purposes?
  
  --
  I am not devoid of humor.
70. Re:Wht not sound? by nobodie · 2012-06-12 11:54 · Score: 1
  
  ditto, it works
  
  --
  Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
Please Specify which X implimentation by kassah · 2012-06-10 02:36 · Score: 1

Only way I figured out it was X.org is clicking the link.
1. Re:Please Specify which X implimentation by Alex+Belits · 2012-06-10 02:41 · Score: 1
  
  There is only one X implementation that makes new versions of X.
  
  --
  Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Ahh yes, jizzbug by tapspace · 2012-06-10 02:44 · Score: 1

Wise words from a wise man
Isn't it a little late? by mitzampt · 2012-06-10 02:44 · Score: 2

Coordinating with other engines? Isn't that the kind of thing that lets one use Wayland partially as a standalone server side to side to X? Is this the 'feature' of stepping down and letting other servers or engines develop?
Maybe we'll evolve this way past the Xorg.conf and its documentation, good riddance, moving from a wrinkled legacy to a more sane and friendly approach. I love X when it works, it's unbearable when it doesn't.

--
uhm...
Too slow and too late? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 02:55 · Score: 0

Several years for making a new feature into X, and then several months for making it into GUI frameworks, and then more months for apps to finally utilize that particular feature.
Brings as in it's now part of.... by Lumpy · 2012-06-10 02:56 · Score: 4, Informative

X has had multi touch for YEARS. It was a patch. it's only now that it's a part of the official.

--
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Re:Why not sound? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 03:34 · Score: 5, Informative

The X Consortium (the follow-on to the MIT X Consortium, i.e. the original x.org) started to do audio back around 1994.
Nobody gave a toss then and the project died when the consortium folded at the end of 1996.
And BTW, before that there were two competing audio extensions, one from DEC and the other from NCD IIRC, and neither one caught on.
Wayland by unixisc · 2012-06-10 04:26 · Score: 1

Anybody know what is Wayland's status at the moment? When will it be ready to be bundled w/ the likes of FreeBSD, Debian, RedHat, Gentoo and other leading base Linux distros?
1. Re:Wayland by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 05:04 · Score: 0
  
  I thought Wayland depends on the Linux kernel. So I can't see it running on FreeBSD unless they copy the necessary parts out of the kernel into Wayland or the FreeBSD kernel.
2. Re:Wayland by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 05:15 · Score: 0
  
  Parts from the Linux kernel? Parts that are licensed under the GPL? Do you honestly think those have a snowball's chance in Hell of being ported into the FreeBSD (or any *BSD) kernel?
  If Wayland truly relies on things in Linux – i.e. in the kernel – that will be its downfall.
3. Re:Wayland by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 05:34 · Score: 0
  
  I'm not so sure. The UNIX world is becoming very Linux- and GNU-centric.
4. Re:Wayland by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 06:01 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Wayland's current status: it continues to be the vaporware windowing system that is the darling of people who have no idea about what X really does or what its problems might be.
5. Re:Wayland by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 06:09 · Score: 0
  
  This is the best, most informative, most insightful post I've seen on slashdot in months.
  Too fucking true.
6. Re:Wayland by MrHanky · 2012-06-10 06:44 · Score: 1
  
  It depends on kernel mode setting. There's nothing Wayland depends on that can't be implemented by FreeBSD.
7. Re:Wayland by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 08:55 · Score: 1
  
  Except one of the biggest contributors to Wayland is Keith Packard, the guy who forked X.org from XFree86. I'm pretty sure he has a good grasp on windowing issues. Not sure he's the person to write something from scratch, though, especially when all the low-level I/O details were already worked out decades ago; they don't have any experience with viable alternatives. The RPC mechanism in Wayland is truly horrendous.
8. Re:Wayland by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 09:20 · Score: 0
  
  It's true that the contributors may have some clue, but most people boosting it on places like /. do not.
9. Re:Wayland by celle · 2012-06-10 10:15 · Score: 2
  
  "The UNIX world is becoming very Linux- and GNU-centric."
  So much for being portable and flexible.
10. Re:Wayland by smash · 2012-06-10 13:19 · Score: 1
  
  Hopefully they publish an API that can be reimplmented by BSD. But of course that doesn't seem to be the GNU way.
  
  --
  I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
11. Re:Wayland by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 14:24 · Score: 0
  
  Anybody know what is Wayland's status at the moment? When will it be ready to be bundled w/ the likes of FreeBSD, Debian, RedHat, Gentoo and other leading base Linux distros?
  For the love of all that is good, please let the answer be: never!
12. Re:Wayland by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 23:59 · Score: 0
  
  Whooosh!
13. Re:Wayland by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-11 10:08 · Score: 0
  
  But of course that doesn't seem to be the GNU way.
  What makes you think any of this has anything to do with GNU?
14. Re:Wayland by mitzampt · 2012-06-12 02:02 · Score: 1
  
  I don't know about problems with X windowing system, but I bet some of them will stick with Wayland even though it's supposed to be new stuff.Still I really hope I'll never have to dig trenches just to get it back running, or at least running it in some kind of fallback/safe/minimal mode.This is my only hope concerning vaporware and (may I add) pink unicorn glittering p(h)ony features
  Even though my sarcasm didn't climb this tree of comments, I'm happy I got to read a comment to he point. Thank you.
  
  --
  uhm...
Does it only record multi-TOUCH events? by mark-t · 2012-06-10 04:33 · Score: 2

Or can it also record things like multiple hovering events?

--
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
1. Re:Does it only record multi-TOUCH events? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 16:21 · Score: 0
  
  X Input 2 introduced MPX (multi-pointer X) that allowed multiple pointers on the same display. That was a precursor (rimshot) for the multitouch support. So yes.
2. Re:Does it only record multi-TOUCH events? by mark-t · 2012-06-11 03:09 · Score: 1
  
  Cool.... so based on nearby multiple hovering events, combined with touch events, it could even detect which finger you were touching the screen with. That has possibilities.
  
  --
  File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Using X's power? by identity0 · 2012-06-10 05:20 · Score: 1

I've actually played around a bit with X Windows's remote windowing feature, which was around years before MS put similar functionality in Windows, but it was a pain to set up and get it working.
Are there any window managers/desktop environments that can utilize X's more esoteric features like these in a simple, uncomplicated fashion? Preferably without messing with the command line.
1. Re:Using X's power? by Hatta · 2012-06-10 05:53 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Despite your dig at the command line, it really doesn't get any simpler than 'ssh -X remotehost remoteapp'.
  
  --
  Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
2. Re:Using X's power? by Greyfox · 2012-06-10 06:22 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  It's so not complicated to export a window to another display. Just set an environment variable to tell it where to display and authorize the machine on the remote display. Nothing to it. Despite that, the companies I've worked at that have needed to do this just set up VNC and work on the machine remotely instead.
  If you want to do something like Sun, where you authenticate and it finds your session out there and pops it up on your machine, that's a bit more complicated. Pretty cool, but more complicated.
  
  --
  I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
3. Re:Using X's power? by karzan · 2012-06-10 09:02 · Score: 1
  
  'remote windowing feature'? That's like saying http has a 'remote web page download feature' because you can connect to an http server from another machine. The whole point of X is that it is a network protocol from the ground up. It's designed for environments where applications are run over networks; unfortunately nowadays the PC model of computing has won, which is why 'remote windowing' looks like an extra 'feature'.
4. Re:Using X's power? by rec9140 · 2012-06-10 12:22 · Score: 1
  
  'remote windowing feature'? That's like saying http has a 'remote web page download feature' because you can connect to an http server from another machine. The whole point of X is that it is a network protocol from the ground up. It's designed for environments where applications are run over networks; unfortunately nowadays the PC model of computing has won, which is why 'remote windowing' looks like an extra 'feature'.
  It MAY LOOK this way, but "cloud" computing is nothing more than the resurection of time share systems of the past on mainframe and minis.
  XDMCP and X via SSH will play an even more important role in this "new cloud" world.
  The fact that the developers of certain software, cough wayland cough, was not even alive when X and thin computing or using a TTY60 on a dial up modem, shows that forgetting history is just as applicable to computer/technology as it is to the real world.
  And NO the "PC model" has not won.... I just took an agency back to thin computing clients using X/XDMCP on local LAN, and remotely via VPN for their day to day ops. All the issues with slow PC's went out the door when Linux was installed and none of the wasteful resource hogging "security" software was no longer needed! Add in the cost savings... HUGE WIN.
  
  --
  1311393600 - Back to Black
5. Re:Using X's power? by rrohbeck · 2012-06-10 14:02 · Score: 2
  
  I'm sure you can write a wrapper where you have to click at least a dozen times to select the remote host and app.
  
  --
  thegodmovie.com - watch it
6. Re:Using X's power? by Pseudonym · 2012-06-10 14:03 · Score: 1
  
  It MAY LOOK this way, but "cloud" computing is nothing more than the resurection of time share systems of the past on mainframe and minis.
  Only if you define "cloud computing" as "running jobs on shared infrastructure with quotas". Mainframes and minis of the past didn't have replicated filesystems, didn't scale to multiple sites and certainly didn't let you run potentially untrusted code in a sandbox.
  Cloud computing is to car pooling as a mainframe is to mass transit. It's certainly cheaper and more efficient to send 1000 people from A to B by bus or train than to use the equivalent number of cars, but it only works if a critical mass of people all want to go the same way.
  
  --
  sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
7. Re:Using X's power? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-11 09:04 · Score: 0
  
  Well played.
Direct video access? by Dwedit · 2012-06-10 06:12 · Score: 1

Did Linux ever get an equivalent to DirectDraw? I know there is svgalib, but I thought that was equivalent to full screen DOS programs on Windows 98, since it could not share the screen. The news about coordinating rendering engines sounds neat, like you could safely get access to video memory and bypass any windowing systems, but still cooperate with a windowing system.
1. Re:Direct video access? by maxwell+demon · 2012-06-10 06:51 · Score: 1
  
  Did Linux ever get an equivalent to DirectDraw?
  Does DRI qualify?
  
  --
  The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
2. Re:Direct video access? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 07:01 · Score: 1
  
  Not exactly, but the concept of direct access to video memory became unimportant. There's really no use for it at this point. Graphics hardware is sufficiently complicated that there is no useful way to "just get a pointer to video memory." The concept really no longer exists. If it did exist, it would be completely different on different hardware. And, it would be horribly slow.
  Instead, you have OpenGL. You can make a texture on the CPU, upload it to the GPU, and draw it while "cooperating with the windowing system." Better yet, you can try to actually use OpenGL to take advantage of the GPU. The GPU will be much faster than trying to build an image on the CPU and write it into the GPU memory. Even Windows no longer has a concept of DirectDraw the way that we talked about it back in the days of Windows 95. The fact that Linux never had a direct analogue was never an omission, as much as a slightly more forward looking perspective.
3. Re:Direct video access? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 07:02 · Score: 0
  
  It did. It was called DGA and it was removed because direct access to video memory by applications is slow.
4. Re:Direct video access? by Viol8 · 2012-06-10 07:26 · Score: 1
  
  That would be why X running with framebuffer runs slower than X talking direct to hardware on both of my machines I suppose? (X is an application btw)
5. Re:Direct video access? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-10 10:02 · Score: 0
  
  Not sure whether you're being sarcastic or not, but the framebuffer is the equivalent to DirectDraw. The Linux framebuffer is a way to write directly to the video framebuffer. X "talking direct" to the hardware is like the OpenGL solution, where instead of drawing directly into the frame buffer it's sending abstract compositing commands to the accelerator. And because those commands are comparatively low-bandwidth (excluding the times when you need to send images), it hardly matters how many layers of software there are between the sender and the hardware.
6. Re:Direct video access? by Viol8 · 2012-06-10 21:10 · Score: 1
  
  "The Linux framebuffer is a way to write directly to the video framebuffer"
  No , the linux framebuffer is essentially abstract video hardware so the video drivers can be moved into the kernel instead of X windows having to have them. Unfortunately this means every write to the display now has to go via the kernel instead of going direct. X using its own specific video card graphics drivers avoids this and is in consequence a damn sight faster. And the programs I tested were using base Xlib on a raw X server with no window manager running or compositing in sight.
7. Re:Direct video access? by ppc_digger · 2012-06-11 03:43 · Score: 1
  
  Unfortunately this means every write to the display now has to go via the kernel instead of going direct.
  No, if you mmap() the framebuffer you (as in the application) write directly to video memory (of course, what you say is true if the application uses lseek() and write() instead, but why would it?). The reason it's slower is because drivers make the GPU do all the heavy lifting. The only abstract thing about the Linux framebuffer is that you don't have to map the memory yourself, the kernel drivers do it for you.
  
  --
  Of all major operating systems, UNIX is the only one originally meant for gaming.
Its a pain to set up if you're an idiot by Viol8 · 2012-06-10 07:23 · Score: 3, Informative

"but it was a pain to set up and get it working."
Yup, I mean look at these examples for how devastatingly complicated it it:
"xterm -display [host ip]:[display id]"
or if you're feeling even more l337:
export DISPLAY=[host ip]:[display]
xterm
But I guess if you wet the bed at the thought of having to use a keyboard instead of a mouse then you're pretty screwed.
1. Re:Its a pain to set up if you're an idiot by DiegoBravo · 2012-06-10 12:07 · Score: 1
  
  Maybe the OP is talking about enabling incoming X connections. This varies with the display manager and its release, and sometimes does require the edition of a non obvious configuration file.
No it doesn't by Viol8 · 2012-06-10 21:04 · Score: 1

"xhost +"
Sorted.
1. Re:No it doesn't by Shimbo · 2012-06-10 21:46 · Score: 1
  
  "xhost +"
  Sorted.
  Except that current distros tend to have -nolisten tcp by default.
2. Re:No it doesn't by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-11 00:13 · Score: 0
  
  Might as well enable root login via telnet while you're at it.
  Setting "xhost +" allows anyone who can send tcp packets to your host to completely control your display. In particular this could mean silently recording all keystrokes.
  Even using "xhost +remotehost" isn't great as it allows any user at that host to control your display (admitted not as much of an issue as it was with multi-user systems in the 90s).
  xauth helps by allowing per-user access, not per-machine. But it's a bit more tedious to work with than xhost.
  And neither of those does anything to protect your content from sniffing. If you display an xterm remotely, everything typed or displayed in that window is vulnerable to eavesdropping.
  As others have posted, "ssh -X remotehost app" is better. For better performance, try "ssh -Y -c arcfour remotehost app".
3. Re:No it doesn't by drkstr1 · 2012-06-11 21:22 · Score: 1
  
  "xhost +"
  Sorted.
  This blatant security wole should be down-modded. You sir, should be ashamed of yourself. (unless you were just trolling, in which case, well played).
  
  --
  Fanboy Status: Apache Flex, C#, Eclipse, KDE, Pirate Party, Ron Paul, Slackware, Windows 7
NX technology? by rockytopchip · 2012-06-11 01:58 · Score: 1

I remember a few years ago hearing that there were plans to incorporate NX technology into X, what's the status for that? I run NX sessions over a slow internet connection to a remote machine and it works well, standard remote X is unusable for me.
1. Re:NX technology? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-11 06:18 · Score: 0
  
  ssh -X -C ?
  The compression helps.
Compiz by SCHecklerX · 2012-06-11 03:50 · Score: 1

Maybe we will get some active development on compiz, or something equivalent again to take advantage of all of the cool things you could do with this.