Xfree86 4.2.0 Out 438
According to david_eliasson,
Xfree86 v4.2.0 is out, but it'll probably be awhile before all
the mirror sites have sycned up with the release, so you may want
to just enjoy reading that changelog for a couple days before you
bother getting the whole archive.
4.2.0, huh? (Score:4, Funny)
oh yeah! I have been waiting for this. (Score:2)
Re:oh yeah! I have been waiting for this. (Score:2, Informative)
Radeon support (Score:2, Insightful)
when will there be full hardware support for radeon 8500?
Re:Radeon support (Score:2, Insightful)
as soon as you write them. this is the point of the discussion - while there are folks like me and (apparently, correct me if i'm wrong here) yourself who don't contrubute source, it won't do everythhing.
in the closed source world, motivation is applied via funding: the customer's demand (supposedly) drives what's paid for. in the open source, the customer and developer are the same person, (supposedly) so its actually up to us to make it work. if we don't know enough c (my excuse) we should go buy orielly books
Re:Radeon support (Score:2, Interesting)
Getting the specs from ATI (without an NDA that would prohibit an open-source driver) is probably the hard part.
Re:Radeon support (Score:2, Offtopic)
Actually, the C For Dummies and C++ For Dummies books are pretty good for getting the basics. Then for C get K&R and for C++ get Stroustrup.
That all will set you back about $150, but not all at once.
Re:Radeon support (Score:2)
Well, remember, every last person who has written a slick 3d driver was a newbie at some point. Sure, most of the people who say they wanna learn C won't turn out much before getting bored and quitting, but there are always a few.
Re:Radeon support (Score:2)
Another good story down the tubes.
Are you kidding me? (Score:5, Interesting)
2) The truely high-end stuff tends to be done on unix type workstations. Perhaps this graphics card garbage is true in the home market, but not on the professional one.
3) If you're willing to pay for X (you're willing to pay for windows aren't you?) You can always buy implementations that support the latest hardware.
4) There are X-Servers/Clients with extremely advanced graphics features. Again, you generally have to fork up some cash, but you're willing to pay for windows, aren't you?
Re:Radeon support (Score:2)
2) Does it have dualhead support for the 8500 yet? I can wait months for 3D if it's coming eventually, but I'd very much like to hook up my second monitor tonight.
Re:Radeon support (Score:3, Funny)
In the future they may even come with DRM build right in. Think instant compliance no effort or even choice on the Linux users part.
They may not be open source, but I'll take features, speed, and stability over source anyday (if you really want source, you can always use the nv driver, too).
Microsoft and nVidia on Xbox:
nVidia: "But we don't want to change the Linux PC drivers to include drm. This wasn't part of the deal."
Microsoft:"Pray I do not alter the deal any further."
Is anyone else getting the feeling that ATI and their helpful specs are all talk?
Now that is a good question AC.
Aditionally does anyone know what state the open source driver is in? Is it developed more quickly or more slowly becasue of it's closed counterpart.
Re:Radeon support (Score:2)
That's true but, your bios chip can be replaced and MBs easily avoided but there are only two choices for high end graphics, and the HD thing would kill the industry and the economy with it (hell it might even piss off Joe Sixpack.)
So it may not be DRM, how about spyware or purposly breaking key versions of the Linux kernel (say the version Redhat 7.2 uses for example)
Microsoft broke Windows on DR DOS, why not strong arm nVidia to break on key versions of Linux.
Not everybody that can use linux can build a new kernel you know. I just don't them to be orphaned.
Fink (Score:2, Informative)
ICBW but this looks like primarily bugfixes (Score:5, Insightful)
The boring stuff (Score:2)
Re:ICBW but this looks like primarily bugfixes (Score:3, Interesting)
XFree86 lacks support for the hardware command buffering features found on nearly ALL modern graphics cards. These buffers can be very deep ( roughly 1 million entries). This allows you to batch up all your drawing operations in memory and tell the card to read and execute them without host CPU intervention. In the time you are waiting for the card to finish, you can call something like usleep, etc. to wait for completion. Many of the XFree86 drivers I've looked at do not do this. The driver just has a while() loop (or equivalent) to wait until the card has finished drawing. This sucks up CPU cycles and eliminates any possibility of concurrency.
With XFree, it's like having a dual CPU system when only one CPU can work at a time.
On the S3 Savage chips there's no need for DMA to do this, the hardware will buffer it in Video RAM. So it should not need a kernel module. I still don't understand why they haven't enabled it in the XFree86 driver. Once it's enabled, all you do is just write the commands to the BCI area (in register space, 128KB long) and the card will handle the FIFO in video RAM automatically.
Moving away from X (Score:5, Interesting)
Should the Unix/Linux world move away from X? Redesign a graphical layer from the ground up, supporting antialiasing, transparency, enhanced programming environment, and a new, well defined and examined user interface? This would be going the Mac OS X route. In this model, I am not advocating abandoning X completely, but instead for backwards compatability run a rootless X server.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
In other words, what you want is just a X + extensions + wm + destop environment combination.
Please do your reading in the subject.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I want what would be today's X + ext + wm, but is this a good and efficient architecture, or piles of backwards compatability on top of each other? How about color matching of various displays and printers?
Re:Moving away from X (Score:3, Insightful)
And what makes you think it is bad and inefficient?
It is no backwards compatibility cruft -- there is a core API and architecture, and extensions; any part besides the core (which is clean and efficient) can be substituted, and even the core can be rewritten for efficiency if you like.
Color matching is also an extension.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, when X was originally developed Jim Gettys et al considered putting _all_ graphics rendering in an extension (leaving just the core windowing w/o rendering in the core). They fully expected the original rendering model to be replaced fairly soon, but that's taken a long time. XRender hopes to do that and probably will largely supplant the old rendering primitives for new apps in a few years. Maybe sooner for gtk/Qt/other whizzbang bleeding-edge stuff.
--Jim Gettys, 2001
--Keith Packard, 2001
From the thread [xfree86.org]
Proposal for server-side Anti-Aliased fonts
Sumner
With all respect (Score:2, Interesting)
OSX totally destroys it, even WindowsXP,
The Xrender extention is nice, but its going to take years like you said, just to get stuff like alpha channeling.
I agree X should use Xrender extentions however what are people to do in the meantime while OSX and XP kick our asses in the eye candy department and everyone says "Linux on the Desktop is dead" Before it even gets a chance to come out of the gates?
Whats wrong with having a directfb or berlin alternative which unlike Xrender, do the stuff you talk about RIGHT NOW.
I honestly dont think the media will sit and wait for 2 years or more while you slowly code Xrender.
So the option is, wait a few more years for Xrender to be completed, or check out stuff like directfb and berlin which claim to do what Xrender will do years from now.
Whats the best option? People want alpha channeling, scaling and OSX like effects, alternatives claim to be able to do it now, they port GTK and QT, and they claim to be compatible with X.
I think this should be discusssed more.
Re:With all respect (Score:4, Insightful)
>Xrender to be completed, or check out stuff like
>directfb and berlin which claim to do what
>Xrender will do years from now.
Well, Berlin is at 0.2.2, and requires some sort of underlying graphic system - directfb, ggi, sdl or glut.
Both sdl and glut require an underlying graphics system as well, usually X. So those two are out if you want to do away with X.
Now on to GGI - at least the library (libGGI) is release quality. This is actually just a userspace graphics library that sits on top of an underlying system - X, svgalib, fbcon or glide.
We'll assume you want acceleration, freedom from X, and reasonable hardware support. So out go X, svgalib, and glibe. FBcon can be accelerated, as long as it used kggi, which is currently only available from CVS.
DirectFB also depends on FBcon, but it is does at least have what looks like a near final release.
So, our choices are:
Berlin on DirectFB on FBcon
Berlin on GGI on FBcon
DirectFB on FBcon
We may want to nix Berlin on GGI on FBcon, if only for the sake of having something which is SOMEWHAT near completion.
I'm not sure where you're getting this figure of "a few years" for Xrender to be completed, as Keith doesn't have timeline information on his website at all, but alpha compositing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel positioning are all written and included in the current XFree86 distribution. As the primary author states, the big pieces left are polygons and image transformation. Given that the initial discussions were at the 2000 USENIX Technical Conference, I'd say their progress is remarkable.
>Whats the best option? People want alpha
>channeling, scaling and OSX like effects,
>alternatives claim to be able to do it now, they
>port GTK and QT, and they claim to be compatible
>with X.
Xrender is already able to do alpha channeling and anti-aliased text, which are a major part of the deficiencies. Image transformation for things like scaling are forthcoming.
The alternatives, as discussed above, are not at a final release stage, rely on a linux only graphics layer (FBcon), have a narrower range of hardware supported (or supported well), and have a signifigantly different paradigm, thus complicating porting existing toolkits.
So is moving to a completely different toolkit, possibly with an unsolidified API, with the added headache of bringing all the drivers up to the same level of stability and performance as XFree86 already enjoys the "best option"? Or is the best option really updating toolkits to take advantage of the features available in XRender now, and planning on supporting the upcoming portions of the extension as they become available?
Matt
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
Really, all those raging newbies that've heard 'X11 is shit!' running and screaming it to everyone.. "Scrap it!!!11!".. And the _never_ tell what's so much wrong with X11.
One 'minor' gripe I have with XFree86 (that is, implementation) is that it freezes all other windows while moving one. I've heard it's because XFree86 server is not multithreaded, and it's too much of a PITA to make it mt.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
Infact, what you described is exactly one of my big gripes I have with MS Window (NT4, to be specific). You just click on a window to move it (not even actually move it) and all other apps freeze. Quite anoying.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
You are right. I wondered why I have such a good feeling when working on my gateway machine.
It has a Matrox Millennium card (Matrox is still the best..) and X 4.0.2. It can move windows without suspending updating of other windows.
My 'main' machine however has a GF2MX-PCI, and it cannot move windows without suspending everything else. X is 4.0.2(nv driver) too. That's not nice. I'll check settings.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
What I'm talking about here is what happens to the other windows in the background while moving a window. They don't refresh themselves. Could be a driver issue I guess.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
But, linux itself doesn't seem much faster either. Maybe I should go back to the 1.2 kernel...
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
For example there would be some view on forest, and there would be birds, monkeys, people walking.. And sound too. You know, all high-res rendered and stuff. I even wrote all the classes and data-types for it.. But I never got around to drawing and actual programming. Damn. What a fine programm would that be..
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
Furthermore, why isn't window management a part of the X server? Look at all the resources that go into the writing of window managers. There are scores of window managers, and they all really do the same thing. Okay, so WindowMaker's titlebars look different than sawfish's titlebars. The look of a window border would be better served by having an advanced built-in theme engine, rather than everyone having to create a new wm just to get the look they want. Window management should be something that Just Happens. After all, there is nothing special about putting windows on a screen. All of the other things that includes such as menus and docks are outside of the scope of window management.
In short, X is too low level and it needs a lot of things built in that are now floating around as extensions and outside applications.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:5, Insightful)
But what the hell, let's do it again!
There's nothing wrong with your suggestion. That'd be probably the right thing to to.. If we didn't have such a shitload of X11 applications.
Actually there is nothing _fundamentally_ wrong with X11. As you can observe, even that old architecture has lived far,far longer than anyone would have expected. What it is, 20-30 years now?
The power of X11 is in it's extensibility, XRENDER was added and traparency & antialization is now possible, Even over network, any network. TrueType fonts were needed and were added. XFree86 even had sub-pixel antialization before Windows ever had (those loonies just forgot to mention it anywhere).
X11 is perfect example of OO separation between different tasks. Server does drawing and client does it's own things. And message passing comes 'builtin'.
So what is really wrong with X11? You tell me.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:3, Insightful)
As everyone says, though, trying to get away from X11 is very difficult as practically every GUI application on linux/Unix uses X11, so it's got a lot of momentum.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:5, Informative)
The context switches aren't a significant overhead. They weren't even a significant overhead in 1986 when Sun first started spreading FUD about this (at the time, Sun was trying to push NeWs over X11). See e.g. Jim Gettys' posts in the "rendering model in X" thread in the Xrender mailing list archives [xfree86.org]
It's not all sunshine, he's willing to own up to places where X needs improvement (exposure lists are a big one, througput for e.g. texture mapping is another), but it's way better than a lot of people claim. And Xrender and DRI address the vast majority of the problem cases very effectively.
Sumner
Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware (Score:2, Interesting)
There are VERY obvious performance differences between any version of Windows and as new of version of X as you want. X Windows programs flicker like mad when moving or resizing, objects aren't responsive, the mouse frame rate is low, applications all have inconsistent look and feel, keyboard support is lacking... And if you say that I need to tweek it to get it as fast as MS, then MS wins.
I really want Linux and BSD's to thrive, but if they really want to become desktop operating systems, they need some fundamental changes to the GUI.
Here's what I suggest:
- Build new server built around a sort of COM (like ActiveX). If the COM objects are installed on the server instead of client, there will be less traffic going through pipes (less latency) and makes the GUI more object oriented at the root (remember NeXT?).
- Separate Server and graphics drivers. Why the frick is ATI Raedon changes in the X11 change log? They should be driver changes, not server changes.
- Design the GUI interfaces without a mouse. Everything should be accessible through a keyboard, no exceptions.
- And speaking of NeXT, they had some great ideas on how to take advantage of 8 of the 32-bits of color.
May the flames begin.
Ozwald
Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware (Score:2)
Design the GUI interfaces without a mouse. Everything should be accessible through a keyboard, no exceptions.
This is totally a toolkit issue. gtk/gnome2 has addressed this issue and everything will be easily accessible via keybaord. I'm not sure where qt/kde stand on this.
Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware (Score:2)
Have you any hard data to say your flickering X desktop wasn't misconfigured? Configuration is not tweaking, but most GNU/Linux distributions suck, and there aren't yet good autoconfigurators for dump people like you.
You fail to realize that the GUI not inconsistent, it is flexible -- if you install only Gnome, only GNUStep, or only FLTK apps you get a consistent desktop; the problem here is lack of enough well written applications, as most programming effort has been into either backend code or else wasted in forks and competitive efforts because of licensing or technical issues. But here X and POSIX are a good foundation, what still is missing is a popular enough GUI side combination of widgets, window manager and applications.
Drivers are there for performance and cleannes, and so are they there in Linux and BSD. Freezing drivers interfaces for too long creates cruft.
Keyboardability is arriving, at least in Gnome.
As for NeXT, have you heard of GNUStep?
Finally, I didn't quite got your COM rant... if you want things in the server, X terminals to you!
Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware (Score:2)
I think he means that for example toolkits should be moved onto server side, which could be potentially faster than what we have at the moment. This could probably also be handled by simple OpenGL:ish 'DisplayList', or 'Macro' which would expand into certain graphic shape.
This would potentially ruin much of the extencibility of X11 system as components should be installed on server before using it. So if You didn't have GTK-5 'extension' bolted on your server, you wouldn't get application to work.
Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not for destroying extensibility. Instead, I would love to see a system where objects are installed onto the server, maybe even at run-time off the web if an application needs it. Even better, a system where a developer can extend an existing control to add new functionality or build a new control off of generic objects.
Just a suggestion, if you guys don't like my ideas, I won't lose any sleep. Just trying to help.
Oh, and the driver thing too, don't forget that.
Ozwald
Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware (Score:2)
The driver thing is already there. NVidia, for one is doing it. Half-assedly, though =). (Matrox too??)
You are corect however, that maybe they should separate drivers from infrastructure a bit.
Actually the whole difference of XF86v3 vs XF86v4 was about it. (including binary compatibility accross OS). They have now all the possibilities to seperate drivers from other things.
Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware (Score:5, Informative)
If you had read the thread I mentioned in the article you replied to, you'd see the anser to this one:
> > Not to be too non-technical...
> > > > If the protocol overhead is so small, why can't my 1200 mips (600mhzPIII)
> > machine resize windows without widgets streaking? My 486 could do
> > this fine running MS Windows. Is this because many widget toolkits (GTK,
> > QT) use XPutImage? There must be some way to speed things up.
blame your widget set. basically (sorry owen and co on the list) gtk a
(and i presume qt) dont render optimially at all. the do a semi-decent
job.. EXCEPt for opaque resizing, and when redrawing is more than a few
lines and boxes... this is a toolkit issue and imho the current set of
toolkits (motif, qt, gtk etc.) do a god-awful job of this kind of
stuff. right now i have silky smooth "opaque resize" stuff working here
with enlightenment 17 - but i do the rendering completely differently
to gtk/qt - its all a canvas and thus the rendering happens in a
"backing" so updates are smooth. on todays hardware this is the best
way to do it and have almots no artifacts ANd retain speed.
> "Streaking"? Are these opaque resizes? Alot of apps aren't doing
> event compression. They repaint the whole damn window every time they
> get an event. They could have at least checked that there weren't
> more events in the queue and got rid of them instead of handling each
> one in turn.
true. its a very bad thing that there are a LOT of apps that behave like
this... a LOT. some of the most commonly used are guilty of this
(netscape for one....)
If you enable Silken Mouse in XFree86 4.0 and later, this should be fixed. Certainly an implementation issue and not an architectural issue (i.e. not a reason to throw out X and start over)
These aren't X11 problems but GUI problems, GUI standardization is certainly a huge issue. But, gtk-2.0's accessibility enhancements include excellent keyboard support and some steps toward simplifying and unifying look&feel. KDE is moving in that direction as well. Obviously you need to use a single unified UI on your desktop, but having two decent ones available to choose from is not a bad thing (not to say that either is decent yet, but they're both heading there rapidly).
Sumner
Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
While I do appreciate the flexibility of X Windows, I honestly DON'T think the windowing system and toolkits should be these totally orthogonal projects, and the toolkits just "draw as they see fit" on a canvas that they expect the windowing system to render dumbly. This is the X model, inherited from the dumb terminal days. I have had this argument out several other times here on
I certainly believe firmly in the benefits of choice and competition, and agree with most
I appreciate what X Windows does for us, I just don't think it's the right solution for a desktop operating environment. Because of all the X apps out there, I think anything that comes out needs X compatibility as a backwards compatible route, but I don't feel that we should look to X Windows for the future. Just my opinion.
Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope, read the thread I quoted and you'll see that gtk developer Owen Taylor agrees and that gtk 2.0 includes some of the optimization mentioned. The toolkit and X11 authors do work together on these things, and the toolkit authors have had a huge amount of input into the design of the XRender extension and the DRI infrastructure.
While I do appreciate the flexibility of X Windows, I honestly DON'T think the windowing system and toolkits should be these totally orthogonal projects, and the toolkits just "draw as they see fit" on a canvas that they expect the windowing system to render dumbly. This is the X model, inherited from the dumb terminal days.
Actually that's not the X model (BTW, X wouldn't run on a dumb terminal--even vi wouldn't run on a true dumb terminal (ie glass tty)). The X model is to provide high-level graphics primitives to the application, which then submits them to the server which can turn them into whichever low-level calls are most efficient on the hardware in question. Not only that, but the library used to submit those request can (and does) batch them together so that the application writer can have a simpler model and still get efficient code--for instance, multiple XDrawLine calls are batched by XLib into a single XDrawLines call that's sent on to the server, saving on round-trips and in some cases saving on bus traffic to the video card by eliminating redundant traffic. Or servicing those high-level requests in whatever manner is most efficient for the hardware in use.
Highly efficient graphics can be done this way. Witness SGI, who were for years the undisputed leaders in the graphics field. They used X11.
But think of X as being more of a device-driver with a unified API, the GUI is to be built on top of that. It's a highly reasonable and well considered model that is ideal for building the high-performance GUIS of the future on. Far better than e.g. a framebuffer, which is already obsolete (doesn't handle many 2D features like overlays & alpha blending, doesn't do 3D acceleration, doesn't allow for hardware security a la SGI, doesn't handle hardware video decoding, etc) and is low-level enough that you can't have the driver do intelligent optimizations without rewriting the apps. And designed with the foresight to be extremely flexible.
Sumner
Vi is *for* dumb terminals (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, even on a fast connection, it's painful to run vi on a terminal that lacks cursor addressing. But there's a slightly improved version of the ADM3 (the ADM3a) that has this feature. And it just so happens that the ADM3a was the standard terminal at UCB when Bill Joy was there. Which is why the first version of Vi only ran on the ADM3a. And Vi still has minor ADM3a-specific features, such as using the h, j, k, and l keys for cursor control (the ADM3a had little arrows painted on these keys).
Come to think of it, here we find the whole origin of the Vi/EMACS divide. Twenty years ago, UCB was a state institution with cheap "dumb" terminals, and MIT was a private institution with expensive "smart" terminals. Each institute produced a corresponding text editor.
Re:Silken Mouse? (Score:3, Informative)
(==) R128(0): Silken mouse enabled
or similar in the XFree86 output.
If you're running a kernel with good latency (e.g. 2.4.17 + Andrew Morton's LL patches, I use 2.4.17-jl11 [pp.song.fi]) you'll no longer see any mouse cursor dragging/skipping/etc problems. If the kernel has bad latency, there's nothing X can do about it.
Sumner
Re:Backing store vs Double buffering (Score:3, Informative)
Backing store (as used by X) copies the part of the screen that is being hidden by a new window to an off-screen area. It can then copy parts of it back when that obscuring window is moved or removed.
Double buffering lets the program draw into the offscreen area, and then it copies that offscreen area to the screen (either automatically or on a program command).
Backing store sounded like a good idea when most overlapping windows were assummed to be pop-up menus. It does not work if the underlying window changes (which almost all modern toolkits do, due to them copying Windows's highlighting of menu titles, or due to the focus moving to the window). If the underlying area is drawn to, X is supposed to forget the backing store, but XFree86 seems to not do this, this indicates how little backing store is used that nobody bothers to fix this.
Double buffering is much more useful, though it uses a lot more memory. If the entire image of the window is stored then transparency of the windows is possible without having to draw them all from back to front. For this reason all X and Windows hacks that produce transparency of all windows use double-buffering, also OSX uses it. NeXT used it too. It is also possible and useful to double-buffer only the visible portion of the window, this is what OpenGL and probably DirectX and all other 3D systems do because the offscreen area is the same size as the screen, but you lose the ability to move or composite transparent windows without redrawing.
Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware (Score:3, Interesting)
Those are problems with the toolkits. None of the modern toolkits (Gtk+, Qt, wxWindows, FLTK, Mozilla, etc.) use X11 very efficiently. The redraw logic in Gtk+, Qt, and Mozilla is, in fact, in violation of X11 guidelines. The reason is that these toolkits are mostly written with a Windows GDI mindset, either because that's what their authors are familiar with, or because they want to achieve cross-platform compatibility and it's easier to treat X11 as a second-class citizen.
applications all have inconsistent look and feel,
X11 is not a user interface or desktop, it's a network transparent windowing system. If your user interface is inconsistent, you only have yourself to blame for it: don't run X11 applications written for different toolkits or desktops. You get similar inconsistencies if you start running Motif or FLTK or wxWindows or Mozilla applications on Windows or MacOS.
And if you say that I need to tweek it to get it as fast as MS, then MS wins.
I'm posting this from Galeon running on a vanilla Debian installation on a 200MHz Pentium with 64M of RAM and a 5 year old graphics card. Windows wouldn't even boot on this configuration without excessive paging, and IE is a dog. In the past, all the graphics benchmarks I have done ran faster on good X11 implementations than on Windows. So, I challenge your implicit the claim that Linux+X11 is less efficient than Windows. But even if that were the case, on 1GHz machines with 512M of RAM, any such differences are academic.
However, the Gnome and KDE desktops are comparatively slow and resource intensive, probably similar to recent versions of Windows. I couldn't run them very well on this machine (although they do run). That is something you will have to take up with the authors of those desktops. But they, too, are designed for modern machines, where it really doesn't matter.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
AFAIK, any _decent_ windowing system has this problem. It comes with clean seperation. Even WinNT with it's bolted-in-kernel vid drivers has to tackle this. On every windowing system the 'client' and 'painter' run in different processes, so evryone is doing context switches.
As everyone says, though, trying to get away from X11 is very difficult as practically every GUI application on linux/Unix uses X11, so it's got a lot of momentum.
Well, amount of _clean_ GTK+ & Qt applications is rising, and both of them can be rather easily ported to different windowing systems. And they have been (Embedded qt, framebuffer GTK+..).
One day if someone will get really annoyed and does something about it.. Well get new windowing systems with GIMP in it =). That'd be nice. But I really doubt any performance gains.
Slightly OT, I was really impressed by Rasterman's evas -thing, It's such a shame he left it in middle (again
only poorly written applications are affected (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, about latency. If you compare local access to X11 with local access to, say, Windows or OSX, I don't think you'll see practically significant differences. (Well-written applications will use shared memory for any kind of bulk data transfer.)
About the graphics model. The X11 graphics model is complex. It really does expose a lot about the underlying graphics hardware to you and it gives you pixel accurate rendering. That was crucially important in the 1980's and has served X11 extremely well for nearly two decades. Today, it's less important, since you don't get a lot of low-depth screens anymore. I would expect that in the future, the RENDER extension will become the predominant graphics API and the core X11 graphics APIs will receive less attention. Implementing the core X11 graphics doesn't need to be a lot of code, and you don't have to worry about all the oddball bitmap formats if you don't want your applications to run with oddball display devices. But in some markets, that kind of control is important, and X11 provides it in a portable and network transparent manner.
Overall, X11 is an old system and has accumulated some cruft. It's also a complex system because it does some really nifty things that neither Windows nor MacOSX have really tackled well. On balance, I think it's still a very modern network transparent windowing system, and if you were to design something with similar functionality today, it wouldn't look all that different or be all that much simpler. So, I vote for keeping X11, not because it's widely used, but because it's actually quite good. And I hope people will spend the time to understand X11 better. The people who designed it were very good; give them the benefit of the doubt.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
Re:Moving away from X (Score:4, Informative)
Its really easy to fix: webfonts-1-3.noarch.rpm [rpmfind.net]
Make sure to read the MS Eula included.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:3, Informative)
The reason for this is that there are simply no good fonts under a sane license out there.
If you find any good fonts that are at least freely redistributable for both commercial and noncommercial purposes, please let me know and I'll make sure they get into some distros.
Why doesn't some one pay? (Score:2)
Re:Why doesn't some one pay? (Score:2, Insightful)
(So am I, and I don't know anyone who is capable of doing this. Raph [advogato.org] may, though -- he's discussed it before.)
Re:Moving away from X (Score:3, Informative)
"ttfonts" package in Red Hat Linux. (Taken from
OpenOffice CVS a while back).
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
You are confusing the window manager with X11 (Score:2, Informative)
I agree that it is obnoxious when windows and icons are not placed where you want them.
But get your facts straight dude! It is the window managers fault and not X11's. The X server just does what it is told, layout policy is handled by the window manager just like the widget policy is a function of the toolkit (gtk, Qt, motif,
Re:Moving away from X (Score:3, Informative)
Actually there is, as long as you don't want to rotate the text or anything like that. However there is a font server that the X server normally uses to get fonts, that only supports bitmaps. That could be fixed without impacting too many apps.
There is an X extension to do antialsiased text, in part to get sub-pixel addressing, and in part (I assume) to avoid finding some long dead application that would break... (like something that relies on XOR to erase things, or...)
Re:Moving away from X (Score:3, Interesting)
I see the need for two things:
a) a new windowing server supporting partial transparency, anti-aliased text, non-horisontal text, virtual colour-depths (that is, that the app wouldn't know what the real colour-deph was, so that they could be moved between displays with different depths without noticing it) and moving of clients bweteen servers.
b) a client-server (or just back-end/front-end) aproach to the widget-set too, so that the programmer could use any widgetset library he/she wants, and the user still be able to switch the look and feel of the app to match the rest of his/her apps.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
I meet this situation every day -- I can't run X clients in my (sadly) Windows desktop. I can run a X server in Windows, but Windows makes a good integration impossible.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:5, Informative)
There are people working on adding a new rendering model [xfree86.org] that does antialiasing and sub-pixel addressing. "People" being mostly Keith Packard [xfree86.org].
There is no reason you can't do that to X, in fact if you compare things like xlib to Gtk--, or Xt to Qt there has been huge progress. Oh, and there is GNUStep too, which is mostly like NeXTStep which is what OS X is based on...
That is the hard part. In part because backwards compatibility works against you.
I think OS X has a lot going for it, but the biggest thing really is that the apps do mostly work alike, which is rather unlike X11. I know I'm partly at fault since the X11 apps I worked on (xtank and w3juke [sourceforge.net]) are not much alike :-)
Re:Moving away from X (Score:4, Informative)
No. Antialiasing and transparency are most of the way into the X server already. Any enhanced programming environment or better user interface is unlikely to be more difficult to implement on top of the X server than atop some from-scratch thing.
Basically, the X protocol does all the hard parts of a window system fairly nicely. Its rendering functionality was until recently unfortunate, but Packard's client-side rendering via the Render extension appears to be adequate for anything anyone wants to do with GUIs these days.
The current client-side libraries are not so good, but this can be fixed without changing the X server or protocol. See XCB [pdx.edu] for one proposed step in that direction.
IMHO, if one-tenth the energy that was put into whining about X and flailing at never-quite-ready replacement rendering systems went into these sorts of things instead, we'd have a nicer-than-Mac/Windows desktop GUI for free by now.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
This would require three things: consistancy, usability, and testing. All applications would need to look the same, behave the same, and the overall environment would need to undergo massive usability testing. Right clicking would need to preform the same action in every program. Most of all, someone would need to write up a user interface guidebook that the application developers would adhere to and follow exactly (much easier said than done in the open source world
Re:Replace X with what? (Score:2, Funny)
she has too much to display perhaps...I'm gonna need Xinerama.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2, Informative)
Enlightenment 0.17 is built upon Evas, and from my experience with it, it does run very fast.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
So yes, let's see someone put a non-X desktop out there, and we'll see how it competes with X-only desktops.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:4, Insightful)
There is one major reason people bitch about X: t's big.
They're right that it is big and complex. That's they way it's supposed to be. X is a network GUI. You can run your application on one machine and have it display on another (or multiple machines). This is a very powerful feature. It's awesome. But it makes X big and complex.
If you're running a standalone desktop it doesn't do you any good. If you've come from the Windows world and think that standalone desktops are the only thing that exist, then you begin to question the sanity of using X at all. But Unix (including Linux) is not a standalone desktop OS. You simply CANNOT replace X11 because to many people are dependent upon it.
Adobe Framemaker doesn't exist on Linux or FreeBSD. But I use it on my FreeBSD box anyway. How? By logging in remotely to my Solaris box at work. Now I get to use the world's best desktop publisher at home on my PC. All because of X.
X11 isn't going to be replaced. But there is something that could happen. There could be an XFree86-Lite. An X with the same API as all the other X's, but designed and optimized for a non-networked standalone desktop. Strip out all the stuff that home PCs would never use. But make it compatible with the existing X. Hell, you could write it all as a kernel mod for all I care. But at least you would get your tiny weakling X for your desktop and I would still have my big and powerful X for my workstation and we could still use the same X applications.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
MS Windows 3/95/NT do not have this feature out of the box, and yet it wasn't a huge issue for administrators or especially the users. Plus things like PCAnywhere or Timbuktu let you do screen sharing when needed.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
pcAnywhere and Timbuktu are hacks, X is the real thing.
But the sum of the history is that client-server was a mistake, terminal-host still works better and with the free software resurgence, Java, Windows Terminal Services and thin clients, it is returning in full force. Terminal-host is cheaper, faster, more manageable and easier to upgrade than client-server.
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
To sum it up, Adobe and Quark could already recompile their apps to any POSIX system using GNUStep.
Please check http://gnustep.org./
Re:Moving away from X (Score:2)
Berlin + X (Score:2, Interesting)
Berlin will be good if its compatible with X but the problem with berlin is its so new that its dangerous.
I think something more like directFB will be fine, however if berlin development gets some kinda boost, well ill switch to berlin as long as it runs all my programs.
At the top of the change log (Score:3, Informative)
Mirrors for Xfree86 (Score:5, Informative)
Let's make the slashdot effect on xfree86.org a little more bearable
ftp://ftp.calderasystems.com/pub/mirrors/xfree86 [calderasystems.com]
ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/XFree86 [psu.edu]
ftp://ftp.cs.umn.edu/pub/XFree86 [umn.edu]
ftp://download.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/XFree8
ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/XFree86 [freesoftware.com]
ftp://ftp.infomagic.com/pub/mirrors/XFree86 [infomagic.com]
ftp://mirror.sftw.com/pub/XFree86 [sftw.com]
ftp://phyppro1.phy.bnl.gov/pub/XFree86 [bnl.gov]
ftp://ftp.rge.com/pub/X/XFree86 [rge.com]
ftp://ftp.valinux.com/pub/mirrors/xfree86 [valinux.com]
ftp.freesoftware.com (Score:2, Informative)
Cursed be Wind River for all eternity.
Great news for laptop users! (Score:4, Informative)
So... those with laptops give this option a try in XF86Config:
Option "UseBIOSDisplay"
Re:Great news for laptop users! (Score:2)
Re:Great news for laptop users! (Score:2, Interesting)
Do you know how it will handle different resolutions per monitor on laptops?
On my thinkpad I can have a max. resolution of 1024x768, whereas on my external CRT monitor it's 1600x1200.
In order for me to get 1600x1200 res. on my crt monitor on my laptop was to add a special directive in the XF86Config file (usecrt or something), but that meant that I had to change the XF86Config file everytime I switched to and from my LCD and CRT.
Windows however does this automatically.
README, Release notes, etc. (Score:5, Informative)
I found additional documents looking through the website. These are much more interesting to read than the changelog.
The README [xfree86.org]
The release notes [xfree86.org]
Installation details [xfree86.org]
Driver status [xfree86.org]
Enjoy!
Re:README, Release notes, etc. (Score:3, Informative)
Driver status [xfree86.org]
Xfree is sufferring from poor PR (Score:5, Insightful)
LKML has 1-2k emails per week. We have Kernel Traffic, Linux Weekly News kernel summary, kerneltrap.com, #kernelnewbies and there is generally one kernel update per day on linuxtoday.com. There are tons and tons of other articles about kernel development on Linux websites.
Compiling and installing a new kernel is easy enough that people are doing it on linuxnewbie.org
As a result the Linux kernel is one of the greatest pieces of software that exists today. People are willing to do a phenomenal amount of work to have their code included into the kernel.
We are at the point where even the most excelent code has to compete to be included. There were at least three different scheduler implementations for 2.5, two different VMs, and two different asynchronous io implementations. It is very good to be in the position where you can pick and choose what code will go into the kernel at this level.
On the other hand for Xfree had a closed email list until a year or so ago. There are about 250 emails per week to the Xpert mailing list. There are few websites with Xfree development articles.
Compiling and installing Xfree is difficult.
People constantly complain about X needing to be replaced. While there are real problems with Xfree, most of the stuff that people complain about to slashdot is complete crap.
To me this suggests that Xfree needs to concentrate on their PR skills. Xfree guys need to make development easier for newbies. Key developers need to have more interviews. They need to prove that developing X is just as cool as developing the kernel. There need to be more frequent updates--posted to linuxtoday hopefully.
Compiling and installing Xfree needs to be easier. I think about it this way, once you compile something, you are only one step away from developing. All it takes after that is to open up an editor and change something.
To me Xfree is as important as the kernel. Without it I would not use Linux. This is true for the great majority of Linux users. Xfree deserves more attention and credit than it currently gets.
Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR (Score:2, Insightful)
I nominate you. Find out all you can about XFree86, watch the changelogs, write stories for Linuxtoday or wherever, and spread real information about it. Open up an editor and start developing.
If not you, who will do it?
compiling and installing (Score:2)
Amen, brother! My most recent attempt to install Linux was completely successful, except that I couldn't get X to work. Very frustrating.
How much of this is an issue where the companies that make monitors refuse to open their specs? The proliferation of hardware is insane. The Mandrake distro I was trying to install had a list of hundreds and hundreds of monitors -- a list which didn't include my monitor. When I searched for my monitor's model number in Google, nothing even came up! You'd think there would be standards, but even old standbys like SVGA didn't work for me. Seems like the lack of standards might be one side-effect of the MS monopoly -- hardware manufactures know that as long as their product works with Windows, it doesn't matter if they conform to any standards, and it doesn't matter if they publish their specs.
Apple sure has it easy. They only have to make Quartz run with their own monitors.
Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR (Score:5, Informative)
I looked at the make files for a _long_ time before I though "hell, let's just do make World and see what happens".
X built without a single hickup. Why doesn't the README say "If you're using Linux, just do make World and it'll work" ?
Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR (Score:3, Interesting)
I like a lot of things aobut Plan9, and eight-and-a-half (the windowing system). However I do want to point out one disadvantage of how they handle mouse events. If all you care about is "has the mouse moved into/out of this box" you still have to use a ton of bandwidth to track the mouse. In X11 if you make that box a sub-window you can ask for enter/leave events and not consume 56+Kbits watching the user twiddle the mouse around.
Other then that eight-and-a-half rules. I really like that the same devices it offers to client apps are the ones that appear on the bare machine so (a) you can run a window app full screen without the other stuff, and (b) you can run eight-and-a-half inside eight-and-a-half without doing anything special like you need to with XonX or the like.
Plus Plan9 is cool, so I am compelled to like everything about it :-)
Mr. Taco Effect (Score:3)
--Andy
hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Drivers for my laptop! (Score:3)
I need this version, as it should have accelerated drivers for the Radeon Mobility chip that came in my Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop.
I just wonder how long it'll take to whip up a Debian package for it
Re:Drivers for my laptop! (Score:4, Funny)
Could you possibly download the CVS of Enlightenment 17?
;o)
which card does xfree86 love most? (Score:2, Insightful)
That is, what card to choose for setting up a system that it would take a concerted effort not to get right just by installing, say, Mandrake 8.1, that will run GLTron and Tuxracer without hiccoughing, that will never call attention to itself, at least in the bad way?
timothy
One thing omitted in the Release notes... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:3.x (Score:4, Informative)
I know that Debian people are patching 3.3.6 continuously. I get -v3 updates pretty often. And that is good, because 4.0.2 didn't support my crappy TP560+trident. (AFAIK Debian people fix X themselves, and port fixes from XFree86 CVS).
Re:Yessss!!!! (What about trident?) (Score:3, Informative)
I compile CVS version about every week or two. Not many tdfx related changes (I have Voodoo3), but 4.1.0 was worse (Xv _and_ OpenGL). You should upgrade if you have ATI card (for example Radeon VE works only with CVS). There are still problems with Radeon - for example - anyone tried to run RTCW multiplayer demo 1.1 on Radeon? Whole system hangs (every time) !
(Sigh) here we go again ... (Score:4, Informative)
This is of course completely dependent on whether your window manager "grabs" the X server while doing a 'move window'. Switch that off, and your windows will update asynchronously. There is a minor performance hit on some (mainly older) graphics cards when this option is selected. Personally I can't tell the difference on my G450.
The other thing of note is how
(above) appears to sound knowledgeable whilst being completely and utterly wrong. (S)he is simply spreading FUD (why, I don't know - perhaps (s)he likes to appear clever when (s)he isn't). Don't you just love it when people try to use stuff they don't know about to advance their personal agenda ?
Almost as much foot-in-mouth as Simon.