Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 15th Sep 2003 20:37 UTC
Today we feature a very interesting interview with Havoc Pennington. Havoc works for Red Hat, he is heading the desktop team, while he is well known also for his major contributions to GNOME, his GTK+ programming book, plus the freedesktop.org initiative which aims to standardize the X11 desktop environments. In the following interview we discuss about the changes inside Red Hat, Xouvert, freedesktop.org and Gnome's future, and how Linux, in general, is doing in the desktop market.
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The technical issue which needs to be resolved, is enabling full use of pbuffer from OpenGL or other DRI applications.
Work is being done on this, see http://www.mail-archive.com/dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg1264...
By using pbuffers in the windowing server, be it XFree86's X11 server, XDirectFB, or just the multiapp core in DirectFB, one can enable hardware accelerated drawing (2D or 3D) to onscreen and offscreen textures (pbuffers). These can then be combined on screen using translucency. Combined with storing the window content either in graphic card memory, or by saving content to main memory using the AGP bus, one can have a similar responsive windowing system as OSX has, without flickering due to applications having to respond to expose events due to opaque window moves.
This is the approach that is taken by the transluxent server as well, but the author didn't have hardware support for pbuffers on his development machine, so he used software rendering to textures instead. Yet he was able to get translucent rendering going fairly well. See http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~unk6/transluxent/