Fresco M1 Released

rajan r writes "The first release after 18 months, Fresco, previously known as Berlin, released M1 or Milestone 1. The release notes here, screenshots here. The original 'press release' follows: 'I'm proud to announce that milestone 1 of Fresco (formerly known as Berlin) has (at long last) been released. A lot has changed since the last release, but this isn't that surprising, since the last release was more then 18 months ago; most of the real work for the past few months has been behind the scenes (changing hosts, a new web site infrastructure, improved build system, an issue tracker (hooray!), better documentation (and more to come), etc.). Source (no packages at the moment, but debs will be available soon, and the tree contains .spec files for building your own rpms) The name change. Enjoy! -- Nathaniel '"

Berlin

[CanadaDave]

I'm wondering why they changed their name from Berlin to Fresco. Why was it called Berlin in the first place, and what made them decide to change it? Kitchener, Canada used to be called Berlin prior to around 1910 or so. Why is everyone dissing Berlin?

Berlin

[MORTAR_COMBAT!]

I had some early failures trying to get Berlin up and running on my system -- just compiling the (highly unstable) prereqs was a chore, let alone having to upgrade my compiler to compile Berlin. I hope this time around it doesn't take me a week to even "try" it, because I've been a steady believer in the project (well... any project to replace X).

Why...?

[bsDaemon]

How does having a bunch of transparent spinny window thingies solve the issues with X that people are always bitching about? I think i'll pass. I love X. It is, always was, and will be.

Re:good thing

[Ponty]

Network transparency is the only thing X has going for it. In fact, it's the only thing I miss on my Mac. DPS can do it on my NeXT and X can do it in Linux, I wish Apple would implement something like xhosting or NXHosting in Quartz.

Re:Why...?

[King of the World]

You know those window shadows on OSX that everyone regards as a great way of showing windowing order? You need transparency for that, and while we have X's XRender we also have Berlin.

Transparency is also a big part of anti-aliased text. Some people like that.

Spinning window thingies isn't so important, but it shows the flexibility of Fresco. Although a window at a 45 degree turn isn't easy to use there's talk of using something like that to grab user attention. When an application needs your input rather than flashing on the toolbar or taking focus it could appear for a few seconds slightly transparent and rotating slowly - you know, like out of the Exorcist. Features like that are what's bring ing Hollywood to Linux, and I for one welcome it.

Re:CORBA?

[khuber]

I understand the design reason, but in practice it seems like you'd mostly be rendering to your local screen. In that case network transparency is just a performance burden.

Besides, we could debate whether network transparency even exists since local and remote resources are fundamentally different (network glitches don't affect local resources, and you generally need retry and error logic for networked resources).

I'm not trying to dis Fresco here, just think about the design tradeoffs. The problem with the X protocol is that it's low level, so even though it's a more efficient TCP-based protocol, you would be sending many more low level packets. In the end it could break even with the IIOP and marshalling overhead of CORBA since Fresco is high level.

-Kevin

When will Xrender be completed?

[HanzoSan]

I bet Fresco will be finished before Xrender has image transformations, true hardware alpha channel, etc.

X is just now getting anti alaised fonts and everyone is saying X is so great, we are about a year away from the release of Xfree5.0 which is supposed to have the finished Xrender, only one guy is working on Xrender (Keith Packard)
The founder of the X project Mr. Dawes claims they are just now beginning to focus on

Quotes from David Dawes David Dawes: There has been some work on a new rendering model for XFree86 that provides some more advance composition techniques (including transparency), this currently being implemented in software. For XFree86 5.0 we'll be investigating this as part of our review of rendering models, and seeing if a hardware implementation would not be more appropriate.

Currently Xrender is still in the planning stages, its at about the same level as Fresco, not really useable to anyone but perhaps Keith Packard and a select few developers, its unfinished, its beta but to users and not so skilled programmers its vaporware.

I'm looking towards XFree86 5.0, which will be the next significant step in XFree86. We're only just starting to think seriously about it. We'll start by re-evaluating what we would like from a graphics/windowing system, and not limit ourselves to the ones that currently exist. With XFree86 4.0 our main focus was on the device-dependent component of the X server (DDX), and to do that we needed to provide a more modular infrastructure. The features that came out of that process showed how much it was needed, and it has given us a solid DDX base from which to expand into other areas. For 5.0 I expect that we'll move more into the device-independent (DIX) and protocol areas as well as making some adjustments to the DDX area based on our experiences with 4.x.

Ok so for Xfree86 5.0 they will focus on improving the rendering, and bringing X to the levels of Aqua, but by the time 5.0 gets here expect Longhorn to be released, and expect OS 11 to be released by Apple which takes things to the next level.

Linux needs to do more than just keep afloat and compete, Linux has to dominate to beat Microsoft.

Currently the only thing preventing Linux from taking the desktop market, is the fact that the currently Linux interface doesnt look polished enough, theres enough programs for grandma, theres games, theres plenty of office apps, the casual user can use Linux, the only reason they wont use Linux is because OSX is better than Linux.

Why buy a Linux dell laptop for college when you can get an Ibook thats just as powerful but better?

Why get Linux if its just like Windows? This is why Windows users would sooner switch to Mac.

X is now one of Linux's biggest bottlenecks, along with the fact that they have no music apps and not enough file sharing apps.

Re:Some basic facts:

[khuber]

The only useful form of communication that CORBA supports is synchronous.

Well, you could do one way calls with callbacks, or you could create an event queue on the client side to batch up API calls before doing a CORBA call. I don't see this as a CORBA-specific issue or a fundamental problem any more serious than how a TCP/IP based protocol would have to deal with asynchronous issues.

I think 20ms is on the cynical side. On a good local network it should easily be < 5 ms, don't you think?

-Kevin

Re:deeper issues

[curious.corn]

You end up with an awful and awkward looking experience just for this "feature" which actually isnt all that important.
Just as sub pixel AA aka cleartype you love so much, rinse the m$ propaganda off and reconsider. This stuff really gives you headaches: the sides of a font have different tints, everything looks like your monitor blew a fuse and no pro graphic will ever have this crap interfere with the color calibration system. Need better edges? Buy a 1600x1200 monitor and stop whining; the fonts are ant like? Increase size; the GUI is screwed Redmond hardcoded the widget sizes? I pity you. BTW, OsX is all about vector based formats from the truetype fonts - oh, but your rest of the computing world doesn't use them - to svg resizable icons and widgets (where the difference between pathetic winblast theming progs and the original really shines)
I hate to be hard but... are you shure you're a nerd?

what about audio?

[EdIsSoKewl]

okay, maybe this is a little off-topic, but what about audio support? these network-transparent windowing systems are great and all, but it only stands to reason that if a program i'm running produces audio output that i'd want that output directed to the same host that is managing my display. with all the current implementations that i'm aware of, redirecting audio to follow the display is a huge pain in the ass. i wish fresco or x had an integrated audio mixer and transport scheme to transparently sent the noises to the same place as the pictures.