http://www.osnews.com/ Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2013, David Adams OSNews version 4 donotreply@osnews.com (Adam Scheinberg) donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Sat, 18 May 2013 19:35:45 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com/ 120 http://www.osnews.com/story/26738/How_to_move_a_cursor/ http://www.osnews.com/story/26738/How_to_move_a_cursor/ Any modern operating system consists of layers upon layers of systems, services, and libraries. Increasingly, no one can possibly have full understanding of all the layers of the cake. Here's RedHat developer Peter Hutterer's description of what it takes to move the cursor on your screen. Interesting to get back to the basics, and a good reminder of how complicated this stuff really is. Tue, 29 Jan 2013 00:20:57 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) X11, Window Managers 5 http://www.osnews.com/topics/56 News the_randymon http://www.osnews.com/story/26678/Compiz_Lead_Developer_no_Compiz_on_Wayland_/ http://www.osnews.com/story/26678/Compiz_Lead_Developer_no_Compiz_on_Wayland_/ Lead developer for Compiz, Sam Spilsbury, says he sees little need to develop Compiz for Wayland due to the increasing fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem. Spilsbury writes "What does compiz actually provide to users of these systems? [...] None of this functionality that user wants really depends on our compositing engine. There's nothing so special about our compositing engine that gives it a reason to exist [...] This is the real practical toll of fragmentation amongst the Linux ecosystem. It's not just that there are multiple implementations of the wheel. There are multiple implementations of entire cars which do almost the same thing, but a little different from everyone else. Some say this is the free software's greatest strength. Now that I know the personal and technical toll of fragmentation, I see it as its greatest weakness." Wed, 09 Jan 2013 00:48:23 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) X11, Window Managers 49 http://www.osnews.com/topics/56 News the_randymon http://www.osnews.com/story/26588/What_Wayland_means_for_developers/ http://www.osnews.com/story/26588/What_Wayland_means_for_developers/ "For two decades, X has been the foundation for Linux graphics. Ubuntu's decision late in 2010 to switch to Wayland shakes things up all the way to those roots. Just over a month ago, the official 1.0.0 release of Wayland appeared, as well as its associated Weston project. How will these milestones affect working GUI programmers? What will happen to all the existing toolkits - Qt, wxWindows, Tk, and others - on which so many graphical applications already depend?" Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:56:46 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) X11, Window Managers 40 http://www.osnews.com/topics/56 News estherschindler http://www.osnews.com/story/26493/Wayland_1_0_released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/26493/Wayland_1_0_released/ Wayland 1.0 was officialy released on October 22. Wayland is a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. The compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel modesetting and evdev input devices, an X application, or a wayland client itself. The clients can be traditional applications, X servers (rootless or fullscreen) or other display servers. Tue, 23 Oct 2012 22:02:56 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) X11, Window Managers 59 http://www.osnews.com/topics/56 News martini http://www.osnews.com/story/26348/The_Linux_graphics_stack/ http://www.osnews.com/story/26348/The_Linux_graphics_stack/ "This is an introductory overview post for the Linux Graphics Stack, and how it currently all fits together. I initially wrote it for myself after having conversations with people like Owen Taylor, Ray Strode and Adam Jackson about this stack. I had to go back to them every month or so and learn the stuff from the ground up all over again, as I had forgotten every single piece. I asked them for a good high-level overview document so I could stop bothering them. They didn't know of any. I started this one. It has been reviewed by Adam Jackson and David Airlie, both of whom work on this exact stack." Introductory or no, still pretty detailed. Thu, 06 Sep 2012 22:41:47 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) X11, Window Managers 28 http://www.osnews.com/topics/56 News Hiev http://www.osnews.com/story/26247/CDE_released_as_open_source/ http://www.osnews.com/story/26247/CDE_released_as_open_source/ We have some very good news for those of us with a love for the Common Desktop Environment. I'm a huge fan of CDE - I've even dedicated an article to it - so I'm excited about this. CDE has been released as open source under the LGPL, and can be downloaded as of today for Debian and Ubuntu. Motif will follow later. Mon, 06 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) X11, Window Managers 109 http://www.osnews.com/topics/56 Feature http://www.osnews.com/story/26101/Using_xmonad_to_transition_kids_from_CLI_to_GUI/ http://www.osnews.com/story/26101/Using_xmonad_to_transition_kids_from_CLI_to_GUI/ John Goerzen, Debian/GNU Linux developer, transitions his kids from bash to xmonad: "I'd been debating how to introduce GUIs for a very long time. It has not escaped my attention that children that used Commodores or TRS-80s or DOS knew a lot more about how their computers worked, on average, than those of the same age that use Windows or MacOS. I didn't want our boys to skip an entire phase of learning how their technology works." I decided long ago that my kids - if I ever have them, I'm undecided and way too young - will learn computing the way I learned it: with a CLI. I never realised an xmonad setup would form a good transition phase into GUIs. Thu, 21 Jun 2012 22:40:57 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) X11, Window Managers 21 http://www.osnews.com/topics/56 News http://www.osnews.com/story/25608/Wayland_beyond_X/ http://www.osnews.com/story/25608/Wayland_beyond_X/ "Although current discussion of the Linux desktop tends to focus on the disharmony around Unity and the GNOME shell, the true revolution on the desktop is taking place out of sight of users. The Wayland display server is expected to reach version 1.0 later this year, and is seen by many as the long term replacement for the X Window System, with real potential to improve and transform the performance of the desktop for Linux users." Mon, 13 Feb 2012 23:44:11 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) X11, Window Managers 30 http://www.osnews.com/topics/56 News http://www.osnews.com/story/25603/Wayland_Weston_0_85_0_released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/25603/Wayland_Weston_0_85_0_released/ "This is the first real release of Wayland and Weston. Wayland is the protocol and IPC mechanism while Weston is the reference compositor implementation. The 0.85 branch in both repositories is going to be protocol and interface stable. We have a series of protocol changes on the table before 1.0 but this branch marks a stable point before we jump into that." Change is coming to the Linux world. And yes, I get the irony of using this particular icon, but it's the closest I could find. Fri, 10 Feb 2012 23:46:32 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) X11, Window Managers 104 http://www.osnews.com/topics/56 News http://www.osnews.com/story/25107/X_Org_Server_1_11_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/25107/X_Org_Server_1_11_Released/ "X.Org Server 1.11 was officially released this Friday evening. X.Org Server 1.11 was originally planned for released in mid August, but then the unfortunate passing of Keith Packard's mother (the X.Org release manager) led to a one-week delay. Our condolences go out to Keith Packard and his family. After numerous belated releases from X.Org in the past, a one week delay is nothing to complain about, especially considering the sad circumstance. While this is a new major X.Org Server release, it's mostly about bug-fixing. X Input 2.1 was delayed (with its touch-related features) to the next X.Org Server release (or later), there isn't any RandR extensions (after RandR 1.4 was restarted), and just nothing to get too excited over, besides addressing outstanding issues. Regardless, it's an improvement that incorporates six months of enhancements." Sun, 28 Aug 2011 20:50:11 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) X11, Window Managers 38 http://www.osnews.com/topics/56 News Michael http://www.osnews.com/story/22760/Poor_Man_s_Multitouch_Using_Multiple_Mice_with_Xorg/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22760/Poor_Man_s_Multitouch_Using_Multiple_Mice_with_Xorg/ "On Jan. 13, 2010 Xorg version 7.5 has landed to Debian unstable; one of the most notable additions to it was the XInput2 system, which incorporates the MPX efforts. So I hooked up a second USB mouse to my machine and started playing with it." Tue, 19 Jan 2010 22:19:27 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) X11, Window Managers 2 http://www.osnews.com/topics/56 News Antonio Ospite http://www.osnews.com/story/22637/Linux_Multitouch_Advancement_the_X_org_Way/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22637/Linux_Multitouch_Advancement_the_X_org_Way/ As a result of the MPX integration in the mainline X.Org Server, the French-based ENAC Interactive Computing Lab produced a new video showing off the new multi-touch capabilities using Fedora 12 with its X Server 1.7 and Linux 2.6.31 kernel. Sun, 20 Dec 2009 19:08:08 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) X11, Window Managers 29 http://www.osnews.com/topics/56 News boulabiar http://www.osnews.com/story/22398/X_org_7_5_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22398/X_org_7_5_Released/ X.org 7.5 has been released. This version includes DRI2, Multi-Pointer X, Input device properties, X Input Extension 2, RANDR 1.3 (adds support for panning and for Projective Transforms, which can be used to scale the screen up/down as well as perform projector keystone correct or other effects) and video and input driver enhancements. Here are the release notes. Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:23:17 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) X11, Window Managers 23 http://www.osnews.com/topics/56 News diegocg http://www.osnews.com/story/21999/Editorial_X_Could_Learn_a_Lot_from_Vista_Windows_7/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21999/Editorial_X_Could_Learn_a_Lot_from_Vista_Windows_7/ Over the past couple of months, and especially over the past couple of weeks, I've been working very hard to write and complete my thesis. I performed all the work on Windows 7, but now that the thesis is finally done, submitted, and accepted, I installed Ubuntu - and immediately I was reminded of why I do not do any serious work on Linux: the train wreck that is X.org. Sat, 15 Aug 2009 17:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) X11, Window Managers 375 http://www.osnews.com/topics/56 Editorial http://www.osnews.com/story/21768/A_Root-less_X_Server_Nears_Reality/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21768/A_Root-less_X_Server_Nears_Reality/ "Due to now living in a KMS-enabled world, at least on the Intel and ATI side (the NVIDIA side is still slowly but surely coming via Nouveau), it's rather easy to get the X Server running without any special rights. Intel's Jesse Barnes explains on the X.Org mailing list that only a small patch is needed for the X Server and then a trivial one to the Direct Rendering Manager in the kernel." Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:33:28 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) X11, Window Managers 10 http://www.osnews.com/topics/56 News diegocg