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X GUI

Berlin 0.2.0 Released 188

Posted by CmdrTaco from the its-not-just-vapor-any-more dept.
starseeker writes: "The Berlin people have released version 0.2.0. Check out the new screenshots.Talk about your awesome graphics!" For a project that's had a lot of smoke over the years, it's pretty nice to see something tangible.
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Berlin 0.2.0 Released More

Berlin 0.2.0 Released

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  • it's nice to see transparency and multiple language support at the same time. keep up the good work.
  • Hmm.. not sure about this. Why would anyone want a terminal window that's tilted at a weird angle?
    I'd get a big crick in my neck trying to work that way. :)

    Fialar

  • Re:Transparent tilty windows (Score:5)

    by GRAMMERSoft ( 184119 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @02:09AM (#1003507)
    What if your monitor's fallen over? Seems like this would be a good way to get around the problem.

  • Maybe if your monitor stand is broken or your desk is sloping?

  • Berlin is not a window manager, it's a full blown windowing system. ie. it's a replacement for X not for fvwm! I don't know if it is API compatable or not, I hope so!
  • Haha! I got first "monitor at an angle" post!!

    Should I be saying something like "d sux0rs", now?

  • One word: cool focus/maximize/minimize transitions! (ok, 5 words).

    Minimize an app and it spins and fades to the bottom of the screen.

    Transparent windows: dont miss a second of your streaming video from behind a full-screen terminal.
  • This isn't "just" another window manager, this is a whole new graphics server.

    This isn't intended to run under X, it is intended to replace X.

    For more details, see this page [berlin-consortium.org].

    Cheers,

    Tim
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • A few words of `enlightenment' so to speak:

    Berlin is not a window manager, it's a windowing system. Berlin won't replace Sawfish, lwm, or even enlightenment. It will make them - initially - irrelevant.

    Berlin is here to replace X, and that's a very, very good thing.

    Some technologies have been surprisingly long lasting. X is good, but it's not one of them.

  • WAY better than that (Score:3)

    by FascDot Killed My Pr ( 24021 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @02:14AM (#1003515)
    Instead of a lame spin-n-disappear, how about "spin to get your attention"? Beats the pants off of "flashing title bar" or "tiny light in the corner of the window".
    --
    Compaq dropping MAILWorks?
  • Am I the only one here that likes his windows without any zoom/shear/rotate transformations, with readable text and contrasting background? If so, does this make me or you insane? :)

    Seriously, working on nice font renderer is A Good Thing -- X11 fonts always looked ugly, even with FreeType (X11 fonts will always be rendered to 1-bit bitmaps) -- but do you see any use (other than having a nice eyecandy) for those fancy transformations?
  • I couldn't agree with you more. There ought to bee like a hundred more exiting things to develop that yet another wm. Maybe I'm a bit drastic but sometimes I feel that the numerous vm's makes more harm than good to the OS...

  • Okay, it looks nice and has a lot of interesting effects, but I'm really wondering what the whole point of being able to do linear transforms on windows is, other than for purely cosmetic reasons. Who here would ever really need windows tilted at some neck-wrenching angle whilst actually trying to get something done?

    Apart from that though it looks like it'll be promising if it ever gets to a fully working state and people start supporting it. The idea of having its API exposed through a CORBA interface is interesting, though I do wonder at a possible performace hit there.

    Anyway, it's about time something took over from X, a system which is becoming increasingly aged and complex. I certainly hope this takes off in the next few years.


    ---
    Jon E. Erikson

  • Could someone explain (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What are the different graphics systems, and on what levels, and in what combinations? Where do things like X, xvwm, KDE, Berlin, etc fit in? What alternatives are there on various levels? What compatibility problems?
  • .... would people look at a product described as 0.2.0 alpha test and proclaim "Not Vaporware Any More"! The "community" does itself no favours by boasting about these promising but half-finished applications on public fora like sourceforge. Why not concentrate on products which are ready for primetime like (insert your favourite example here -- I'm not interested in flamewars). Taco et. al. have the right idea with the Slash code -- release reasonably early and often, rather than constantly crying wolf over a product that's still sucking nipples. The way some projects carry on, you'd think they were just playing the hype game to raise IPO capital -- even some of the much-reviled marketing droids would quail at the number of "launches" and "new releases" that these projects go through. Relax, guys, you're not in the commercial arena so stop huckstering like you're selling raw prawns from an unrefrigerated truck on a hot day.
  • Sometimes its good to start with a cleansheet. We can learn from the mistakes made in the past.

    Yeah, they could work on improving an existing window manager, but given the freedom would you create something of your own or pick up something thats not initially your work.
    I know what I would do.

  • Why is it similar to X? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    First of all, congrats to the team for all the hard work and concrete results. All too often, it must be discouraging for developers to work so hard and see the majority of posts bitching about things.

    Having said that, I have a question. I thought Berlin was to remake the graphics system from scratch. So why do the widgets, borders, etc. look so similar to stuff in X? In particular, I'm horrified to see the checkbox in the first screenshot which looks pretty similar whether it's on and off. In general, the looks are similar to X, so I'm a bit surprised.

    If Berlin can avoid going down the same look n feel of X, it would be great. We need change.
  • The two biggest things that Berlin seems to add are alpha transparency and 3d rotation of windows. Alpha transparency could be added to X (I'm not sure how easily), but transparent windows are harder to read than non-transparent, because the background is just visual noise. So its no big deal either. And the rotating windows look to be good only for cool demos. Can anyone think of real uses for this stuff?

    Their Berlin vs X document makes a big thing of pixel independence, but I see this as a disadvantage. Present displays, and future ones for that matter, still have pixels that are big enough to see, and the difference between a 1 pixel line and a 2 pixel line is significant. As a result I'm not ready to go for pure non-pixel metrics yet, although I grant that they are increasingly useful.

    I also worry a bit about the CPU/GPU overhead of all this stuff, although I grant that this is a pretty short term concern. Modern high-end graphics cards can do this stuff at the necessary speeds without problems, so its only 2-3 years until the bog-standard consumer PCs have this capability.

    Paul.

  • Maybe this [berlin-consortium.org] will help. Also the FAQ is here [berlin-consortium.org]. Personally I like the idea of someone working on an alternative/replacement for X, things change.
  • The idea of a 3d interface has interested me for a while ...
    Does anyone know of any windowing system that offers anything approaching this?
    I guess transparency and "weird angles" to windows are a start to this idea...

    What do /.'ers think of the concept of a 3d interface?
    Surely it must allow you to interact with more material allowing you to be more productive?
    Can it be done effectively on a 2D monitor or do we need new hardware?

    (I guess this is could be an "Ask Slashdot"?)

  • Re:Just what we needed! (NOT) (Score:3)

    by MartinG ( 52587 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @02:23AM (#1003526) Homepage Journal
    Berlin is not API compatible with X.

    If it was they wouldn't have been able to do some of the cool things they are doing.

    What I hope though is that some stuff can still be ported to it quite easily. For example. I don't know too much about it, but since the GTK+ ppl make the (IMHO) brilliant decision of writing GTK+ for GDK and GLIB rather than making it depend on X, they may now be in a position of writing an alternate gdk library over the berlin APIs and suddenly gnome works on Berlin!

    Okay, I have made it sound simpler than it is (not least because I don't really know how complicated it is) but hopefully it's possible.

    wow. just imagine that. a CHOICE of windowing systems to run a choice of desktops on might be a reality in the near future.

    I like choices.
  • How about for being able to fold windows back out of the way why working in another window.Unlike just iconising the window, you could still keep track of things happening in it, even if you couldn't really work in it.

    At least if the text in it stopped scrolling you could tell that your program compilation was finished, which you couldn't tell in an iconised window except by opening it up again.

    Also, if windows are really 3D, you could push them back into the screen to get them out of the way (they'd shrink smaller the further you pushed them back) and then drag them forward to the front of the screen to use them.

  • Yeah, I would love to have a cube with a window on each side! :)
  • How do you define a "bog-standard consumer PC"? I just checked Gateway [gateway.com]'s cheap boxes [slashdot.org] (I've never bought anything from Gateway, it was just the first mainstream consumer box vendor that popped into my head). It turns out that these machines, which retail from $799, include integrated Intel 3D graphics hardware. Without a doubt, that hardware doesn't exactly compete with the big guys [nvidia.com]' stuff, but it might be able to handle the probably rather modest fillrate requirements of a GUI. Then again, it's a completely different question when we can expect to actually find this kind of hardware in the homes of the consumers... Hm.
  • There must be oodles of folks out there with high end graphics cards who never use the 3D facilities. Surely the logical progression of the 2-D desktop metaphor is something with a little more true depth. I'm not talking about a VRML office here - just something a little less flat. Definitely a good question for 'Ask Slashdot'.
  • Nice screen shots. The only problem is that beauty isn't really what Berlin aims to fix. The weaknesses in X are well known but I will list them here for those who are unaware.

    1. Size. X 3.x eats up 16 megs of RAM If you run it on 8 MB ( I have ) you will notice a distinct crawl caused from swapping.

    2. Speed. X is fast but not quite fast enough. On a low end Pentium Linux runs wrings around NT or 95 for most things. The GUI is only a little faster however. I won't be happy until the *nix GUI is 3X the speed of the Windows GUI on the same Hardware.

    3. You can't resize the desktop without shutting down X. Yes I know you can switch resolution but the Virtual desktop size will remain the same. I.e. this is good for Zooming in on fine print or small pictures. Nothing much else. If you use Mac, Windows or OS/2 you know why someone would resize a whole desktop.

    4. X is not stable. Sure most of us hardly ever get a GUI lockup or spontaneous X server termination. Too many of us have seen this though. I have never seen an E-Smith server go down without massive hardware failure. Same goes for Cobalt Cube. X doesn't approach the stability of Linux or Apache or SaMBa. Bad Applications can't take down the Kernel. It can take down the GUI however. I.e. Sometimes Alpha quality KDE from CVS dose this for me.

    Everything else that people see as wrong with X can be fixed at a higher level. If these problems can be fixed without ditching X then by all means do so. If X must be replaced then so be it. Berlin will still run X apps. It won't matter if it doesn't.

  • release reasonably early and often, rather than constantly crying wolf over a product that's still sucking nipples

    That's the only real way to gather support/bug-trackers/coders/zealots etc. In the Open Source world it seems necessary to do this so that the really good projects get plenty of eyeballs.
  • A nice feature that Alpha transparency allows is antialased text. I think that is useful.
  • Present displays, and future ones for that matter, still have pixels that are big enough to see...

    I think this is why pixel independence is so important - think anti-aliasing (and we all know how good X is at that). Represent the data as unlimited (or very large) resolution and resample to the actual display. This would be very cool for CAD, wireframe 3D (i.e. all the content creation apps), proper AA fonts, etc.

    Jon.

  • > does itself no favours by boasting about these promising but half-finished applications

    I wouldn't describe it as boasting. More like informing interestied parties of a projects existence or progress. If they hadn't posted this info, how would I or others know a new release was available to test/debug/contribute to?

    I can't speak for the Berlin developers, but I think you will find many development projects who will tell you that they are not thinking so much about the image of their project when they post this kind of information. They are thinking more of their devepopers/testers and potential users. They are releasing early and releasing often to encourage as much testing/fixing/contribution as possible. It's a system that works.

  • Re:Nice idea, but... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @02:43AM (#1003536)
    The transparency and transforms on the windows are (mostly) a nice way to show off, but they are down there in the drawing kit so will be extremely useful for other purposes.

    I'm quite sure CORBA does create a slight performance hit when making calls to the display server, but the architecture should more than compensate for this. X (to a first approximation) simply handles drawing stuff on the screen and sending events to the client application, whereas Berlin handles selection, scrolling, resizing etc. on the display server, so you make a couple of calls to open a dialogue, and the next thing you have to worry about is when the user has clicked on the Ok or cancel button.
  • If the sourceforge site is getting a bit slow, then try this [berlin-consortium.org] for the screenshots.

  • It is not about usefullness... (Score:4)

    by Gwarlak ( 168402 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @02:45AM (#1003538) Homepage
    One of the philosophies behind Unix is not to create things that are useful... but to not hold back features because you think they are not useful. Or in this case... create a bunch of cool features and let others find uses for them.

    Microsoft thinks, "Well the command line is not very useful to the average computer user, let us do away with it."

    Unix programmers think, "Well I do not think rotating windows in 3d is useful, but let us keep this feature, someone else may have a use for it."

    Keep this in mind... it is hard to find a use for something that does not exist!!!


    --
    May the source be with you!

  • Their Berlin vs X document makes a big thing of pixel independence, but I see this as a disadvantage. Present displays, and future ones for that matter, still have pixels that are big enough to see...

    I also worry a bit about the CPU/GPU overhead of all this stuff...

    Actually, your comments have made me realize why Berlin is a good thing!

    Think of Berlin as something that is rather useless right now, given current hardware constraints, but will become a very nice graphical interface once we have monitors with pixel spacing more comparable to paper.

    Given a future world where such hardware exists, it's easy to see where current windowing systems (X and MS Windows in particular) are woefully inadequate. Anyone who has a high-end monitor and has set the resolution to something like 1600x1200 knows what I'm talking about. All the fonts are way too small. So then you go and change the default font size. *Then* you find out that there are a lot of application developers who never tested their applications with a larger font size.

    Berlin will be a good basis for a future windowing system. It's time will come.

  • well, GGI offers a way to do that... I've seen screenshots with a 3d cube, an X server on the sides and a terminal top and bottom... pretty keen, but with the damnable transparent backgrounds, and nothing -in- the cube, pretty distracting... now, with solid backgrounds, or 3d graphics in the cube, imagine the possibilities ;-)

  • Re:Only in the world of open source . . . . (Score:4)

    by phurley ( 65499 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @02:48AM (#1003541) Homepage

    Hyping this as ready would surely be a mistake, but I am not sure you quite "get it". SlashDot is not a marketing forum. I don't expect my manager to come up to me later today and say, "Hey we really need to start using Berlin, I was reading about how it is no longer vapor on slashdot".

    There may be a growing number of non-programmers on slashdot, but many of us code (and code and code). Interesting product announcements draw the interest of programmers, which in turn increases the speed of development (slashdot/freshmeat you decide :-). In a sence you are correct to say this is similar to trying to raise IPO capital, projects are trying to raise intellectual capital of programmers (and testers/documenters/etc) who can make a contribution.


    My name is not spam, it's patrick
  • So, in other words, it's all about marketing? But if the secret of a successful open source project is good marketing, why is everyone on /. so hostile to professional marketeers? Surely the "multiple releases of vaporware" tactic is just an amateur marketing strategy dreamt up by non-marketeers, and as such is likely to be worse than code written by non-experts.

    There used to be a marketing guy who posted here, offering maretking advice for free. He was a bit clueless, but he could have been helped and recruited for a "good" project like Berlin (if it is any good, I don't know), and showed them how to get these eyeballs in the best way. Instead, the SlashBots decided that their fantastic wisdom was too great to need help, and flamed him off the forum. Wasn't this a mistake?

    Given that the main marketing effort of Open SOurce appears to be self-appointed "advocates" like Raymond and Stallman, who surely put off as many people as they attract, wouldn't some of the IPO money, or O'Reilly's be better spent on good marketing advice rather than yet another Perl wizard? Linus Torvalds is an exception to this; as someone who cut his teeth at Nokia (a company which knows the value of marketing), he seems to have an instinctive understanding of the science.

  • Well exactly. I'm one of those non-programmers -- I'm a lawyer, but that puts me in the commercial world, and I can recognise a fucked marketing strategy when I see one. I personally wouldn't try to devise a plan for a new product without the assistance of a marketing professional, for the simple reason that they can tell you whether this "plenty of announcements" model is effective or not. What if it's actually the case that nobody on Slashdot is going to be able to help the Berlin project (wrong demographic), or nobody wants to be part of it (wrong branding), or people think that the existing window managers are good enough (bad user needs analysis), or people are just pissed off at hearing yet another press release (wrong brand values)?

    If projects like this are just going to be released onto the market without a proper marketing strategy, they should expect to succeed or fail on the basis of pure luck rather than anything else. Look at Linux, for example. All my software colleagues say that BSD is better, but Linux is the fashionable product, and it has the cool penguin branding, so it dominates the market ... remind you of anything? You may not like marketeers, but they are scientists just like computer programmers, and the science of persuasion is something that shouldn't be ignored.

  • Some recent Slashdot articles on 3D monitors and 3D window managers: My own take on 3D interfaces is that although everyone seems to look at them as the wave of the future, I think they will probably be relegated to a small niche of specialized use, for example, in medical fields. The 3D interface just doesn't make sense to me from a desktop/home user perspective. What could the average user possibly gain? I suppose it would allow one to interact with more material, but probably at the cost of confusion for the end-user. Hell, my mom still has trouble with the concept of double-clicking -- I wouldn't want to see her try a 3D interface. But maybe that's just FUD, and given time, most users will be sufficiently advanced to take advantage of such a thing. More on topic, though, I am glad that Berlin is making progress; there needs to be some healthy competition for X.
  • I can understand why many hackers feel GUIs aren't very useful, they haven't changed much since they were invented. I think we could do much better and it wouldn't necessarily take more rendering power.
    I remember seeing on CONNECTIONS how people in the middle ages would imagine a cathedral to memorize large amounts of data. They would form this 3D construct in their minds and then "place" facts in each room. Why couldn't that be done on a screen, a 2D construct which you could move through as if it had depth?
    There seem to be all kinds of possibilities, but we're stuck in the GUI-as-a-desktop paradigm. Check out AskTog.com [asktog.com] for a lot of interesting ideas on usability. The one thing that I read there that I thought was fascinating, was the four spots on the screen that have "infinite depth," so you can hit them easily with a mouse (You know where they are :).
    I use autohide toolbars whenever I can because I want to be able to use all of my screen real estate. Those four spots seem like perfect places to anchor some. But that's just one possibilty. Why do our files have to act like folders? I'd like to see some of that innovation we keep hearing about.
  • The Icon for this article is wrong.

    It should, if it must incorporate the X Logo, have a circle-slash over it. One of the main points of Berlin is to finally kill the X Window System dinosaur. I mean, really.
  • If you want a real 3D interface, check out http://threedsia.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]. This is a truly 3D evironment that allows for file management, chatting, and network "travel". It is only partly functional as of right now, but very cool.
  • well, from the comments I've read it sounds pretty cool, but I have yet to see the screenshots since the site seems to be suffering the infamous /. effect. anyone got a mirror we can look at?
  • Present displays, and future ones for that matter, still have pixels that are big enough to see..
    Have you seen the Roentgen [ibm.com] display from IBM? 200ppi 16.3" 2560x2048 pixels. I'm sorry but future displays will be more like going from dot-matrix to laser in the print technology. I can't wait!
    J.

  • If its gonna replace X.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    shouldn't be called Y?
    Just to head off confusion.
  • Well.. first off... the fact that these things are mentioned so much is that for alot inside the opensource community seeing progress is vital. If you start a project and need more developers you have to create some noise to get attention. And to be frankly.. we did not hear from Berlin for along time accepts occasional mentionings in threads.

    The fact that 0.2.0 has been reached is, at least for the tech savvy few, good news.

    For joe sixpack though it means diddly. But it's the same when concerning kernel releases. the 2.3 series is not meant to be used by average users. Yet the release for a new developers kernel is News for Nerds. So why not the release of alpha stage code for some other project?

  • Re:Could someone explain (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'll give it a shot. Most any application program you're likely to use runs on top of X, which is a windowing system. You can imagine X being at the lowest level, as it is written specifically for the hardware it runs on. Interfaces like KDE or GNOME run on top of X, usually written in XLib, X's programming API, or XT, the X Toolkit, which provides basically an abstraction and a set of "widgets", or common programming components, for XLib. Then, you have your window manager. This would be kfm, if you're using KDE, or you might be running twm, or fvwm, or Enlightenment, or about a hundred others. Berlin uses GGI for graphical display. GGI unfortunately doesn't contain native hardware support, to the best of my knowledge. It's a library which utilizes several different existing graphical display libraries for output, such as svgalib, X, and fbcon (frame buffer console). Though I haven't researched this myself, I would expect that you need to be running fbcon in order to get any usefulness out of berlin, but I could be wrong. Anyway, I hope this has been at least somewhat helpful. -Dan J. "Hrothgar" Rempe

  • Re:Open source marketing (Score:3)

    by teraflop user ( 58792 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @03:13AM (#1003553)
    Not so much marketting as communication.

    Of course, there is a lot of overlap between the two concepts - good communication can often be good marketing, and vice versa. Occasionally good marketting is bad communication - e.g. selling a bad product by lying about it, or even bad communication is good marketting - selling a product by failing to explain what it is.

    Whatever the terminology though, open source software is foundationally dependent on lots of communication to link developers and projects. If a project does not have a web page and obtain links from the relevent forums, then projects can never get off the ground.

    If open source were to take your advice it would cease to exist.
  • > they should expect to succeed or fail on the basis of pure luck ...

    How about succeeding on a basis of technical merit or usefulness rather than a "proper marketing strategy"?

    The people who (IMO) this announcement is aimed at probably couldn't care less about marketing strategies. They are interested in good products.

    Additionally, you seem to have assumes a great deal about what people see as a successful project - not everyone thinks that success==commercial_success. If I write some software and nobody uses it because it has a "fucked marketing strategy" it hasn't neccesarily failed as long as myself and others involved in the project had fun writing it. For me and many many others, that is what open source development is about.
  • Don't make the mistake of trying to represent the whole of slashdot by remarking:

    why is everyone on /. so hostile to professional marketeers?
    or:
    Instead, the SlashBots decided that their fantastic wisdom was too great to need help, and flamed him off the forum. Wasn't this a mistake?

    Some people on slashdot might do these things, but not everyone. If you want good marketing, you either have to be good at it yourself, or you have to pay for it. Now, it is unfortunate that this "marketing guy" has been flamed off the face of the earth, he could perhaps have helped people out. However, if I start a project, and decide I need a hand then I put it on sourceforge and if it shows promise, then hopefully a forum like slashdot can draw attention to it - I might get some help. I agree that this is marketing, it might even be crap marketing, but it's also cheap and easy and it seems to work for a lot of projects.

    Given that the main marketing effort of Open SOurce appears to be self-appointed "advocates" like Raymond and Stallman, who surely put off as many people as they attract, wouldn't some of the IPO money, or O'Reilly's be better spent on good marketing advice rather than yet another Perl wizard?

    O'Reilly's have their own marketing (not just a word or two in Slashdot's ear) which they can afford. On the matter of Raymond and Stallman - well it's all a matter of personal opinion. I agree with yours.

  • Y is a different X replacement I saw a while back. I can't find links to the project webpage, but I know that Y is out there.
    --

  • Low bandwidth protocol (Score:4)

    by bockman ( 104837 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @03:19AM (#1003557)
    Personally, I don't care too much about graphic improvements over X, though I like eye-candy, so be it.

    The most interesting Berlin idea IMO is the change in the client-server protocol : in Berlin protocol, ASAIK, the presentation details (like repainting a window when exposed ) are in charge of the server. In X, they are in charge of the client ( though they are handled by the toolkit for standard widgets ).

    This should greately reduce the communication flow between client and server, therefore making it possible to implement it over low-bandwith connections ( as is the Internet for most people ).

    Also, this should also make possible for applications to be truly and easily toolkit-independent.

  • The simple fact is this is /. and this is geeks talking to geeks we do not want to be sold to we want to be told that something that might be cool is out there and given a link we can then go look at it and decide what we think. The simple fact is they are not trying to sell Berlin to us but rather inform us that it is there this is a big diff. Think about it /. is all about news not selling THIS IS NOT A E-COMMERCE site.
  • The people who (IMO) this announcement is aimed at probably couldn't care less about marketing strategies.

    This announcement hasn't been "aimed" at all. It's been floated out into the ether in the hope that the right people will hear about it and, having heard, care about it. Which seems like a drastically inefficient way of communicating the information and of persuading people to join the project.

  • Re:3D style Interface is interesting? (Score:3)

    by Lonesmurf ( 88531 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @03:22AM (#1003560) Homepage
    My personal take on a 3d desktop is such:

    The only advantage that you get from having a third dimension (to some extent, we have a z axis.. but not really) would be in adding more desktop space.

    Imagine having just one desktop with DEPTH. You want that ETerm that you started up earlier? Reach down to 30% and pull it up. It zooms into view. All the 'icons' on your 'desktop' (which is just the lowest point of the desktop) are actually just windows that appear small from perspective.

    You are up here.
    /..................\
    /...-----------......\
    /.....Close App........\
    /........................\
    /..........................\
    /..................---.......\
    ===============================
    Desktop \
    Far App

    (Sorry if this won't render on non-fixed width fonts)

    Neat huh?

    The only real problem with this is the clutter that occurs in the back ground. My solution to this is that windows in the background are shaded 30-50% darker.

    Rami James
    GUI Guy
    ALST R&D Center, IL
    --
  • Dynamic scaling of windows is possible if you can apply an arbitrary transform to something before displaying it - which would make it possible to zoom windows in and out fairly trivially.
    And it's transparency in general, not transparent windows, which is useful - this allows antialiasing, among other things, to work properly.
    (Not that I'm a Berlin programmer or user, just an observer...)
  • Can I put it on my HPUX or Solaris box?

    Then again, last time I asked this simple question, I was told that HPUX and Solaris is going away, and Linux will take over everything.

  • Berlin vs. Slashdot (Score:3)

    by AndyElf ( 23331 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @03:32AM (#1003563) Homepage

    This is strange: this seems to be the same crowd that not so long ago has been actively discussing just how much X sucks: it is ancient, does very poor job displaying fonts, curves, is all crufty, etc., etc., etc.


    Now, here comes the news of a project [long in development and refered to a number of times in the previous discussion] making a new (though pre-pre-pre-alpha) release, boasting numerous new advances, done in the [so much adored] OS way. And what do we see? Sceptical "well, this is all so nice but it is nott even close to become a replacement for X" or "WTF do I need those rotating/tilted windows for?".


    Folks, this is about developing new things! This is about a brave new world. There were so many people who were going ooh!... and aah!.. about Apple's Aqua -- Berlin can almost do the same sort of thing (correction may be able to do the same sort of thing in future)! Why on Earth does it produce so much scepticism?

  • OK, Why are people marking these FUD posts "Insightful"? All the way up to 4? There is no insight into the open source process, in fact, these people don't even remember the release early/often strategy that open source is about! Not only that, but this person seems to have neglected to read the web page at all. Otherwise, he would know more than the screenshots tell them. A non-retard would look at the page, and see that Berlin has a dramatically improved architecture over the kludge that is X, including a brilliant corba based inmplementation and a far superior, unified API.
  • Thanks. That was one of the most useful responses I've ever seen on Slashdot.
  • Please don't put MS Windows in there. Windows has been pixel-independant from way back as far as I've known (back to the 3.0 days) and maybe even further. Yes, you can still use pixel alignment, but non-pixel based measurements are built into the GUI.

  • Re:3D style Interface is interesting? (Score:3)

    by Lonesmurf ( 88531 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @03:55AM (#1003567) Homepage
    I gave this some more thought. One of the main reasons that we, at this point at least, don't need programs like 3dWM [3dwm.org] is simply because all of the CONTENT is 2d.

    Any applications that you run are built around the paradigm of a 'window' and content inside a 2 dimensional box. While this idea works well for flat screens and flat OS's, this does not apply in any way to a OS(or wm) with that added dimension.

    How useful is it to compile a kernel in a window that is floating at some odd off angle in the middle of virual space? Not very helpful at all. Now, imagine a program that is built with the Z in mind: my example is a file manager that has it's branches in all directions. I am POSITIVE that it is more intuitive to a user to think to himself, "I know I put the file over there, in the back to the right," over the tree system that we have now.

    There are some things (most things, IMO) that work well in 2d specifically because we are used to writing in 2d. Other things (organization and such) are more suited to oriented positions and such.

    Rami James
    GUI Developer
    ALST R&D, IL
    --

  • looks nice (Score:3)

    by jilles ( 20976 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @03:56AM (#1003568) Homepage
    This really looks nice. I'm not sure how much berlin can be compared to apple's aqua but it looks like it has rather similar capabilities. For those who are wondering what to do with all this functionality: it makes it really easy to write graphical applications. Graphical applications generally display lots of 2D shapes which need to be manipulated in arbitrary ways. A GUI library like Berlin does all the difficult transformations for you. Since it's all integrated, it works fairly transparently too. I admit that rotated, translucent X-terms are not a particularly exciting example (I wouldn't want one on my desktop) but you have to realize that it is only an example of how easy it is to make such graphical objects (in any case, what would make a terminal window exciting?). Note that these transformations can also be applied to objects inside a window.

    Having resolution independent graphics is a particular nice feature which can for instance be used to add high quality printing functionality to applications in a very straightforward way but also allows for zooming functionality etc.
  • Scepticism is the nature of geeks these days. That and a crushing cynicism. Geeks refuse to believe that anything touted as good is, indeed, good. They refuse to believe any statement of faith. And absolutes (such as my statements here) are to be questioned to death. The geek mindset and attitude is driven by cynical mistrust. Marketing lies, media is owned, and the internet is a vast miasma of idiots....so anytime a claim is made, a hundred million geek voices will shun that claim, destroy it, and create an air of threat around anyone who attempts to bring new solutions to old problems.

    And that's *not* my two cents. It's the truth.

  • Not quite (Score:3)

    by SimonK ( 7722 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @04:00AM (#1003570)
    The basic difference between X and Berlin at this level is that the Berlin system stores representations of all graphical objects on the server, whereas X only stores windows. There are swings and roundabouts here, but one of the swings is that, as the parent message points out, that Berlin does repaints on the server. However, the downside of this is that the server's memory usage is dependant on the complexity of the display, and probably higher on average than that of an X server.

    This does not have much impact on bandwidth use - all display changes still have to be sent by the client to the server, and these are more frequent by far than window-damage repaints. Oddly, remote UI graphics are not especially bandwidth hungry - both LBX and Citrix's ICA use roughly modemeseue amounts of bandwidth. It does, however, have a positive impact on latencies and Berlin, if done right, should be usable over much higher latency connections than X (like the internet).

    Simon

    Disclaimer: I work for Citrix, but am not speaking for my employer.
  • I refuse to respond to this obvious troll...


  • ... or maybe i don't

    IIRC I thought what was really revolutionary about Berlin was that the _server_ had more or less control over where and how to put things. Programs would just say what to display and the server decides on the best way to display it, basically allowing thesame programs to be run on a variety/several kinds of displays (Palmtop, lowres LCD, highres CRT, etc etc) Don't like the way programs look and are arranged? get another server(plugin?)

    Basically you could use thesame program on Pixelscreen(tm), or in vectorspace (postscript) or even in 3D (opengl), and each time it would probably use features available to the best of its abilities, no lowest common denominator stuff. (i guess they could even make a text based server or something :)

    This isn't another XServeralike with the windowmanager layered on a toolkit layered on X etc. It's conceptually different.

    Of course i might be totally wrong cause it's a real long time ago that i actually looked into it.

  • Orthagonality. (Score:4)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @04:08AM (#1003573) Homepage Journal
    Sure, the effect is silly, but what it says about the software's architecture is not.

    What this is meant to demonstrate is that the software design is highly orthagonal -- that you can make a list of objects going down the page and a list of operations going across, and if you checked out which operations apply to which objects, nearly all the cells would be checked.

    Orthagonality is a desirable property for two reasons. First, it implies flexibility. One of the most frustrating things when using other peeople's designs is to find out you can't do x with y because the developer never thought anyone would need to. Secondly, it eases the learning curve. When you wonder "Can I do x with y?", the answers is likely to be yes and you are less likely to have to refer to the manual on a regular basis.

  • I understand what your saying, I am sat here with lots of 2D pieces of paper on my desk (as is normally the case :-). The pieces which I have read/used more recently are closest to me, those less useful or not immediately needed are further away and one or two are pinned up as I refer to them regularly.

    I think there is a lot of scope for 3D environments allthough I suspect the killer app will not be like anyone expected.
  • Only in the world of open source .... would people look at a product described as 0.2.0 alpha test and proclaim "Not Vaporware Any More"!

    You're forgetting one small detail. The difference between open and closed source is that the source code is available to view/edit/compile/etc. (Of course, duh!). But the point is that the source projects offer proof that the project is in the making, and progress is occurring. Conversely, the source can also show that progress has stagnated. Either way, the public can tell what's been occurring.

    Closed source projects offer no such 'proof'. So you must take the company's word, usually in the form of product releases and marketing hype, about the status of the project. And as we've seen many times over, companies are usually apt to market their products to give the appearance that they're much closer to a release, as well as over-stating the product's usefulness and functionality.

    So that's the main difference between open source and closed source vaporware. I've always thought of vaporware as a product which has been announced and hyped, but currently does not exist. Since with open soure you can grab the code and (try to) compile it, the product (semi) exists, albeit not in it's final form. Since there is some substance with the open source vaporware, perhaps a term like fogware would be better suited to describing it.

  • For an interesting take on "rewrite it from scratch" software development, check this out:

    http://joel.editthispage.com/st ories/storyReader$47 [editthispage.com]

    Talks about Mozilla, Borland, and other projects that have had serious problems rewriting from scratch. Also,

    http://joel.editthispage.com/2000/05/26 [editthispage.com] (scroll down)

    A great quote from Lou Montulli of the original Netscape team.

  • Gah. Over the weekend, I made myself a CD (at work :) of all sorts of neat things to take home. Things like new OS's, new windowing systems, and a few other things that I want to play with. Berlin was one of them.
    And of course, to follow with murphy's law, several of them have to post updates within a day or two after the CD is burned and at home. Plan9 even had a patch that covered my hardware setup. Boy I wish I had a fast connection at home...

  • Microsoft thinks, "Well the command line is not very useful to the average computer user, let us do away with it."


    1) Microsoft are good software engineers, they know they can't do everything for everyone. No one entity can do everything for everyone. It doesn't mean other windows software developers can't do it though.

    2) Microsoft has not 'done away' with the command line. The latest version of Windows NT and 9x(Windows 2000/NT5 and Windows 98) still have command lines. There's heaps of powerful stuff you can do with the Windows 2000 command line (many people don't bother to learn commands beyond dir and del though).

    3) Microsoft have been researching and developing [microsoft.com] 3D interfaces and sound feedback systems for a while.
  • >>
    Okay, it looks nice and has a lot of interesting effects, but I'm really wondering what the whole point of being able to do linear transforms on windows is, other than for purely cosmetic reasons. Who here would ever really need windows tilted at some neck-wrenching angle whilst actually trying to get something done?

    The advantage is saving screen space. A straightforward application would be apps with layout managers (top/left,center, right, bottom regions as in Java), and multiple frames/dockable windows where the region under the mouse automatically flattens, and the other regions tilt automatically to accomodate the increase in size of the active region.

  • Importance of Berlin (Score:4)

    by mfterman ( 2719 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @04:16AM (#1003580)
    Berlin is not a replacement to GTK/Qt or to GNOME/KDE or to any of the window managers that run on top of any of the previous. It is a replacement for X, an attempt to redo what X did, only more intelligently, with a knowledge of the limitations of X and taking into account the developments of the computer industry and for that matter the new needs of the computer industry.

    X is powerful but there are several areas where it cannot be revised and extended without breaking all the other applications which currently depend on X. Sooner or later you need to throw out the old software and do a clean start.

    The real significant developments in Berlin are the fact that it uses CORBA for brokering the API, a well thought out approach to client/server distribution of resources over the network and the support of resolution independent graphics as well as other features of modern graphics hardware.

    Why not use X? Because X was designed in a far more different era than the one we have now. It is better to have a system that is optimized for modern computing uses and has room for growth.

    Why would anyone switch from X? As has been commented over on the Berlin site, one can create an XLib compatibility layer, and between that and ports of GTK and Qt, which are designed to be insulating layers between programs that use a GUI and the underlying graphics API, running existing software on Berlin shouldn't be that difficult. Modular software design in the Unix world has its overhead but there are advantages to it.

    Unix needs to evolve with the times. Yes, there is power in continuity and well-hammered tools that have survived the test of time, but that should not be a barrier to progress. That includes things that are technically separate from Unix but closely associated with it, such as X. Apple keeps pushing the standard for graphics forward and OS X has raised the bar for graphics technology. The Berlin people have a moving target to hit.

    People may wonder at the hype of a 0.2 release, but the fact is that Berlin is slowly starting to move from the 'interesting toy' level to something more along the lines of a serious prototype for a new windowing system. Hopefully it will start reaching the point where it attracts more developers interested in a cool windowing system.

    The second step is the XLib and GTK/Qt porting support, at which point the number of applications that can run on Berlin shoots up dramatically.

    The real goal is to get software driver support for Berlin on the order of support for XFree86. That is going to be a pain in the neck unless someone can figure out a brilliant way to get device drivers for X to be used by Berlin. Those systems with open source drivers will probably have drivers written by motivated developers.

    I'd like to see a real competition for developer mindshare between Berlin and XFree86 on the order of GTK/Qt or GNOME/KDE. Competition can only benefit the consumer.
  • Sort of correct - but you don't need Alpha Transparency to do Anti-aliased text - look at the Acorn Archimedes machines which had anti-aliased text years and years ago.

    For antialiased fonts, the font bitmap is basically the alpha transparency. There is no real image bitmap to speak of. Normal X fonts have alpha transparency, only it is either 100% opaque or 100% transparent. A 4-bit bitmap provides more than adequate anti-aliasing.

    But Berlin looks like a dog. I know that it is version 0.2.0 and very prototypical, but I would prefer them to work on the underlying stuff rather than generating their own widget sets which look really foul and basic. I approve of the other posters idea of porting GTK+ to Berlin just by rewriting the underlying libraries - that would make things look a lot nicer immediately.

    Anyone who doesn't know what use Alpha transparency in windows does not have an imagination. Subtle drop shadows for active windows is one UI prettification, fading backdrop windows is another.

    Does Berlin allow for affine transforms of windows at all? Does it allow for basic image processing of windows (that would be great!) such as tinting them, or greyscaling them? If you are going to do transparency and rotation, then these other things should be done as well.

  • YOUR TROLL SCORE IS (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    8.5

    Nicely done. Very nicely done. The fact that you got moderated up to a 3 shows that you put some thought into it. (Sadly this is also a sad comment on the state of moderation) Your ability to mix some truth in with your troll really shines on this one. As all good trolls know that is the key to a good troll and easier said than done.

    You do lose a little by coming off just a little angry. If you toned it down just a bit here you would certainly have been in the 9's for this one.

    Your troll score: 8.5 out of 10. Nicely done indeed.
  • However, the downside of this is that the server's memory usage is dependant on the complexity of the display, and probably higher on average than that of an X server.
    On the other hand, application footprint will decrease, so I believe the end result is the same [but I wonder, would it possible to optimize memory storage in the server, e.g. commonising static pixmaps storage?]

    This does not have much impact on bandwidth use - all display changes still have to be sent by the client to the server.
    Last time I read Berlin FAQ, they were speaking of 'high semantic API', so I figured high semanthic == lower bandwidth [since X request/events are very low-semantic].
    I never checked the actual API's, however, so maybe you're right.

  • Re:Berlin needs to "fix" what's wrong with X. (Score:3)

    by mikpos ( 2397 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @04:31AM (#1003585) Homepage
    What you've listed are the vices of XFree86, not X11 per se. In other words, you could find an X server implementation and/or X library implementation that would solve those problems you listed.

    Berlin goes far beyond that. It fixes many of the problems of the X wire protocol itself. These changes are given in great detail on their site and have been repeated by a lot of people in this article, so I'm not going to spend a great deal talking about them. Basically many of the fundemental problems in X (2-colour fonts, no alpha channel, horrible with low bandwidth (I used to run some X programs over a 10K/s link, so I should know), brain-damaged pseudo-OO fucked-up C library (believe it or not, there are ways of making OO usable in C)).

    Many of the problems of X can be summed up in one simple exercise: write a program using only Xlib (or using raw sockets if you prefer) that creates a window will minimal functionality (i.e. a "quit" button) that displays the message "Hello World!" How many lines of code did it take? How many times did you cringe? Exactly.

    Now Berlin is using CORBA for *everything*, and it's yet-to-be-seen whether this will be practical (i.e. not too slow). I was running 0.1.5 (I would be running 0.2.0, but I haven't got my hands on the latest CVS version of libArt yet) and it looked promising.

  • Re:Wow... wow? (Score:3)

    by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @04:33AM (#1003587)
    The transforms are not that useful when applied to windows, but the same transforms can be applied to any visual in the berlin system. For example, you could have a really spiffy nested list widget (think MacOS finder), and when you click on the button to expose another sub-level, the button rotates in a visually pleasing manner, instead of simply switching to another state.
  • Totally agree. Remoting the widgets is a big win for usability through improved bandwidth and perceived latency. X, Citrix and m$ terminal server all end up doing painfully too much. The remote widget approach wins handsomely at the scalability stakes which is always handy if you think you might have customers one day ;-)

    I would like to see a wxWin, qt or GTK remote. Is the qt netscape/ie plug-in such a beast already? When encapsulated as a browser, I hear this approach called a metabrowser.

    Bullant use this remote widget idiom in their remote player which is kind of neat. You can see this idiom in action through their developer site at http://www.bullant.com if you download their player.

    Remoting the UI via Berlin's kind of approach will lead to improved UI with better scalability. Great if you want to vulture capitalise your ASP model. Even better if you want to use an ASP.

    An image is still an image and bandwidth gets clobbered no matter what.

    matt hurd.
    perception is reality

  • Re:Importance of Berlin (Score:3)

    by Syllepsis ( 196919 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @04:47AM (#1003593) Homepage

    Berlin is not a replacement to GTK/Qt or to GNOME/KDE or to any of the window managers that run on top of any of the previous. It is a replacement for X, an attempt to redo what X did, only more intelligently, with a knowledge of the limitations of X and taking into account the developments of the computer industry and for that matter the new needs of the computer industry.

    Actually, Berlin chose to implement its own widget set, so it does try to replace gtk/qt. Unfortunately, the widgets look just about as pretty as motif widgets, and theming is going to come in the future. The name of the Berlin widget API is Warsaw. The Berlin people describe their consistent user interface policy as follows:

    One of the problems with the X Window System's flexibility was the accumulation of several inconsistant GUI toolkits. New users are often puzzled when they see that their Netscape window looks different than there Gimp window, which in turn looks different than the rest of their KDE desktop.

    Berlin takes care of the user interface by itself without calling upon the use of GUI toolkits to render buttons, menus, and scrollbars. This way, all widgets in the applications on the desktop look alike. Eventually Berlin will support theming which will be truly universal theming.

    I dunno how I feel about this. Although I dont know much about KDE, as of GNOME 1.2 the UI is simply incredible in terms of configurability and usability. By the time these people get anywhere near 1.0, GNOME 2.0 should be out, and programmers will be loathe to redo everything in ugly Warsaw widgets.

    I wish the Berlin people had designed gtk+ source compatible widgets (which look the same as in X) rather than try to reinvent the wheel in every aspect of the desktop.

  • You make two points: utility of transparency (or the lack thereof) and utility of non-pixel dimensions. I would like to address both.

    I think that Apple's Aqua--as bad as I think it is on some points--demonstrates the utility of transaprency and translucency in a GUI. It cna be used to give the user the feeling of being immersed--almost a 2 1/2D experience. Transparency is not the most useful of features IMHO, but translucency can be used to great effect. There is no good reason that a window should not very faintly show up behind another. It gives the user more information, in a controlled fashion. This is a Good Thing.

    It can also be used to make an interface more attractive. This is not as immediately useful, but it is a fact that we are more comfortable with attractive things than with those which are, shall we say, ugly. Why is it that every few years every GUI gets some sort of facelift? Because people want an attractive interface. It's the same reason that car interiors change. It's Style.

    As far as pixel-based vs. measurement-based systems go, I think that it is pretty unarguable that measurement-based systems are superior. The only reason for being pixel-based is that it removes a layer of processing. But wiht more powerful computers, this is not such an issue. It just makes more sense. Granted, individual pixels are still visible (at least on screen; try seeing one dot in a 600 dpi printout), but this will not be so forever. Resolution-independence is a Good Thing because it simplifies printing, because it simplifies changes in monitors and monitor parameters and because it uses a scheme which is familiar to users (whether that scheme be inches or centimetres, we've grown accustomed to using them). In addition this solves the problem of screwy fonts (can you say Windows?). Fonts are defined in points, which are 1/72 of an inch; with a measurement-based system, fonts will display perfectly, and at the exact size specified, both on-screen and printed.

    BTW, for those who hate metric and those who hate English units, I imagine that any display scheme is going to use its own internal measurements, translating to the user's preference. So the rest of the world need not worry about font sizes measured in old-fashioned points screwing up their displays, and I don't need to try to think in millimetres. This way we're all happy and all compatible. What a thought!

  • Microsoft has not 'done away' with the command line

    Well, no, they havn't gotten rid of it completely, but come on. They've done everything they could to act like it doesn't exist. They've not only stopped developement on it as an interface, but they've also diked out many useful features. Not that Dos was ever all they great--I've come to think of it as a Bourne shell with Down's Syndrome. But Microsoft has pushed the "one size fits all" mentality for interface design--how configureable is the Windows UI? Not at all. And While Dos may still be around, they've pretty much made it next to useless.

    Here's my [radiks.net] DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?

  • What you've listed are the vices of XFree86, not X11 per se. In other words, you could find an X server implementation and/or X library implementation that would solve those problems you listed.
    Maybe so, but I doubt it. X is, IMHO, engineered wrong. The X Server is run as root, even though only a portion of it needs this permission. As a result, highly complex parts of X have the ability to take down the computer (or the console, which is often the same thing).

    Also, hardware support is at way too high a level. Something like GGI/KGI [ggi-project.org] is a much better system. With that sort of seperation, one set of people could debug the hardware support, while another set of people could debug the graphics server (X) support.

    X11R6 has been X11R6 for a long time. So why can't they do it right? Why can't XFree simply figure it out, get to a completely solid foundation, and then start adding more features? I think it's because of the hardware -- it muddies the waters. It also hurts anyone who wants to make an alternative to X, or (imagine) write a completely new version of X.
    --

  • Re:Could someone explain (Score:4)

    by starseeker ( 141897 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @06:22AM (#1003612) Homepage
    I think this is a reasonable summary:

    X and Berlin are the core graphical interface programs which allow graphics to be drawn on the screen, although that isn't even a sketch of the multitude of capabilities they offer. See their documentation for a detailed description.

    Things like icewm, windowmaker, twm, enlightenment, qvwm, etc. are window managers, which provide basic functionality such as windows for applications, logout prompts, menus, etc. and run on top of something like X. (Right now, most run ONLY on top of X, but that may change.)

    KDE and GNOME are desktop environments, not window managers. This means that they provide advanced hints for applications which allow for a common look and feel, and advanced interface features like the GNOME panels and menus and providing common functionality to programs that request it. KDE contains its own window manager, but GNOME requires a window manager in addition to itself to function properly.

    Basically, X is the only viable alternative at the low level right now. In the case of window managers there are an enormous number of choices. Right now KDE and GNOME are the two major desktop environments.

    Compatibility is largely a question of having the necessary libraries for KDE and GNOME applications. You can run KDE apps under GNOME, and vice versa, if your libraries are in place. At the window manager level there shouldn't be a problem - the applications are normally seperate from the window manager and work within its framework.

    Hope that is of some help. Look around the internet for more complete listings - some good initial places to start are freshmeat.net and linuxberg.com
  • I'm not sure where you got that idea from. The original developers of UNIX, who went on to Plan 9 and Inferno, were religious about removing features they didn't consider useful. Programs and system calls that they considered useless would first go onto a DEPRECATED manual page, and eventually be removed unceremoniously.

    Berlin is about as far from the philosophy of the original UNIX developers as a window system can be, with its extensive use of C++ and distributed objects. If you want to see how UNIX folks design a window system, take a look at 8 1/2 and rio in Plan 9.

  • X11 can make fonts large enough if you configure it correctly. In any case, when hardware becomes good enough that pixels don't matter, adding a resolution independent imaging API to X11 is easy. In fact, people are already working on it.
  • There's a much bigger problem with putting more functionality on the server in the way Berlin does: how do you add new widgets? Since Berlin is written in native code, you'd have to upload native code into the server. Now that isn't exactly safe.

    The only sensible way I find of implementing that kind of design is with a safe, platform neutral language, like PostScript or Java.

    In fact, most of the goals of Berlin seem already satisfied using Java as a display server: widgets run in the server, a resolution independent API, etc. I think the Berlin effort might be better expended on implementing AWT and the Java2D imaging API on raw hardware in an open source project.

    The X11 folks weren't stupid, and design like Berlin's were around before X11 even was created. To me, it really appears that the Berlin model is fatally flawed.

  • You make good points. They are sources of frequent complaints about X11. It's not clear how well they can be addressed, though, by any system.

    In terms of speed, you are not going to see a 3X improvement because both Windows and X11 run fairly close to the speed of the hardware.

    For resizing, the current approach clearly isn't optimal, but it isn't entirely clear what needs to happen. Windows just rearranges everything. We could have the same for X11 by introducing a "desktop changed" event and updating the X window manager. Is it worth it? Is it the right thing to do? Who knows.

    As for stability, I have yet to see X11 crash, and I run some pretty weird stuff. It may be unstable on some specific hardware, but bad drivers can happen on any system, including Berlin. Most problems that look like "taking down the GUI" in X11 are simply misbehaved applications that grab the keyboard and mouse and don't release it; you can fix that by switching to a text console and killing the offending application. Perhaps X11 could add a keyboard combination to release all grabs or to do a "warm restart" to get out of misbehaved applications.

  • The parent post is quite correct that getting new code onto the server is a question the Berlin team have not yet addressed - though if I remember correctly there are a number of approaches that might work, including adding new widgets as remote CORBA objects. Allowing Java, or better (though probably not appropriate to Berlin) Postscript, code to be downloaded to the server would certainly be a big plus. Probably there are other configuration management issues to tackle in the system (as there are in X).

    I'm not sure comments on how other people choose to expend their free-time are really appropriate, and Berlin is at the very least interesting, and at best possibly very useful.

    I'm not at all sure how one could "use Java as a display server". You could provide remote access (using, say, RMI) to the AWT or Swing, and this has indeed been done for the AWT, and works. Kinda. You still have the same issues with getting new graphical objects from client to server as you do with Berlin. Remoting Java2D would really only give you a "better X", or really a "better ICA" since it has no windowing primitives. Nor am I sure what is meant by "implementing AWT and ... Java2D ... on raw hardware" - they already use acceleration where it is available, what more is needed ?

    Finally, while the design of X has much to commend it, the protocol itself is by no means the last word in how to design a graphics system. It has no support for, for instance, vector based fonts or antialiasing, and these problems do show increasingly as the protocol is used more and more to push bitmaps and nothing else in systems that try to get more out of it than it was designed to provide (eg Englightenment).

    Simon
  • It's not as if Berlin just pulled this code out of its collective ass -- a good chunk of it is mature work from the Fresco project, of which Berlin is essentially a continuation.

    A lot of the Fresco code was 13 years in development. The only relatively immature code in Berlin is the underlying graphics subsystem, the CORBA stuff, a few aspects of layout, and the new event/input model.

    So, they're buliding on an existing system, rather than just trying to redo EVERYTHING from scratch.
  • I have; I just don't like the answers they came up with.
  • I think window managers need this kind of functionality, and there would be race conditions if they lost the grab and needed to regrab.

    However, maybe X11 window managers could monitor grabbing and override the grab from any misbehaved applications. That way, they could implement appropriate policies for their environment (hotkey fix, timeout, clicking-clears-grab, etc.).

  • I believe you're referring to XCruise [freshmeat.net]. It's pretty useless as a file manager, but fun to play with and show off to non-X friends. You don't even need an expensive graphics card, OpenGL or Mesa to run it.
  • Is this why the creat(2) system call, which can be duplicated with open(2)'s O_CREAT flag, no longer exists in modern *ixs? Funny, every system I've got seems to still have it.

    There is no system call from V7 Unix which is no longer supported. I can't think of any library calls which were dropped from V7, but it wouldn't suprise me if there weren't any either.

  • Size. [XFree] 3.x eats up 16 megs of RAM If you run it on 8 MB ( I have ) you will notice a distinct crawl caused from swapping.

    Keep in mind that when you start an XFree X server, it maps the video card's address space into system virtual memory. This makes it look like it is using a lot more memory then it is. You need to look at the RSS (Resident Segment Size), or how much physical memory it is using.

    In most cases (on Linux, mind you -- commercial UNIXes are another story), I've found it isn't the X server that eats up memory, but the desktop manager, window manager, Netscape, terminal program with translucent inverse rotated backgrounds, and that sort of thing that really chew up memory.

    Try just running "X" (not "startx", not "xinit", just "X", the server itself) and compare memory usage to a full blown X desktop. I think you'll be surprised.
  • Your sizeand speed arguments are wrong. From both a computational and memory point-of-view, X is *much* lighter than Windows. How do I know? I run Linux and X on several machines at home that are not capable of running Windows 95: one is a 486SX/33 and another is a 16MB Toshiba Libretto 50J. Both of these run X fine but wouldn't stand a ghost of a chance running 95, much less 98 or newer.

    The real memory hog is the window manager - go back to slim WM's like twm or fvwm and you'l be surprised how much you can do with very little CPU and memory. If you want something piggish like GNOME or even KDE, though, all bets are off, but that's NOT the fault of X!

    As for stability, xfree isn't quite up there with commercial X implementations (one of the reasons people still willingly pay $$ for Suns), but it'spretty good and getting better.

    As I've noted several times lately, the biggest reason X needs overhaul or replacement is multimedia: support for motion video and, particularly, audio. In addition, there needs to be some standard way of sharing X displays ala HP's Shared X. (This would let you do cool things like send stereo from your central computer to simple, cheap "X-terminal" devices (which could in fact be headless) in various rooms in your home. Not to mention the cool telephony apps you could do with that sort of capability. This needs to be added or X, and consequently Linux/BSD/Unix will yet lose the war.)
  • This is strange: this seems to be the same crowd

    It isn't. It's a different crowd, which has a different opinion than the crowd you were hearing from last time. Both of these crowds happen to post on Slashdot.

    I'm getting sick of constantly pointing this out. At least you didn't use that "same crowd" fallacy to insult Slashdot as a whole like the "hypocrisy trolls" do, though.
    --
    No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.

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