X11 7.7 Released, Brings Multi-Touch Input

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.'"

Comments

Wht not sound?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wht not sound?

[KiloByte]

It's hard enough getting sound to work well locally

Nah, just try "apt-get purge pulseaudio".

Re:Wht not sound?

[ChrisMP1]

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?

Re:Wht not sound?

[fa2k]

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.

Re:Wht not sound?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Wht not sound?

[aardvarkjoe]

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.

Re:Wht not sound?

[ffflala]

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.

Re:Wht not sound?

[Tore S B]

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.

Re:Wht not sound?

[Hatta]

It's really time for the kernel guys to take another look at OSS4. Fully GPL compatible, it belongs in the kernel.

Re:Wht not sound?

[RobbieThe1st]

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).

Re:Wht not sound?

[LizardKing]

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.

Brings as in it's now part of....

[Lumpy]

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

Re:Why not sound?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Using X's power?

[Hatta]

Despite your dig at the command line, it really doesn't get any simpler than 'ssh -X remotehost remoteapp'.

Re:Wayland

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Using X's power?

[Greyfox]

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.

Its a pain to set up if you're an idiot

[Viol8]

"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.