Golem.de has an wrap-up article on X11 and its new technologies (translation).
Swinging Windows: The New X11
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Interesting stuff, looks pretty sweet.
Will I be able to run this stuff for 6 months without an X crash?
anyone has a link to this on english, or spanish for that matter?
How about a referral to a German major and you can beg him to translate it?
I’ve seen plenty of videos with wobbly windows turned up to show it off. What I have yet to see is the feature turned down to where it looks like a good visual clue to draw your eye to what you’re moving around.
I’ve grabbed Xgl and Luminocity from CVS, I guess I should try them both out and see what there is to see.
I thought the translation was perfect: uber-funny! (need an umlaut there)
If you read this story on slashdot, there are links in the comments to similar articles.
@best:
They’re likely turned way up to show the rate it can be done at, i.e. to show off the efficiency.
It’s true, a while ago there was a blog posting posted on Slashdot from the guys at Red Hat who were working on this full time. According to them the effects are extremely exaggerated at this point because well they want to show off the power of the new X architecture.
this is all really, really, really new stuff, and what you see in the vids is more proof of concept then anything else.
honestly, i have yet to see the “visual effect” that i like, other then drop shadows. what i find real interesting is the cairo/glitzd gtk, and the ogl compositing (seth said even though the redraw is slightly slower, it feels much smoother and coheasive). but thats just me, personal taste and all that.
Luminocity is pretty cool…and yeah the effects are totally exagerrated just to show it off.
It was pretty cool seeing menus fold over as you open, and some of the expose type stuff
I just hope atleast one of Luminocity/XGL get’s release-ready soonish and wont just end up as some early proof-of-concept things that will take years to be properly implemented in X..
Interesting stuff, but as usual with Linux-related projects, this will be banished to CVS code for at least two more years before you see it working flawlessly on most people’s systems, let alone bundled as a standard option.
Longhorn already has it beat. 😐
Interesting stuff, but as usual with Linux-related projects, this will be banished to CVS code for at least two more years before you see it working flawlessly on most people’s systems, let alone bundled as a standard option.
Longhorn already has it beat. 😐
CVS stuff means that in a few months some distros could include it (think about last suse release, which includes beagle)
Longhorn should have been released months ago, ant it’s just been delayed again. I seriously doubt we will see it before 2007
A Novell exec already commented that NLD 10 (due at the end of 2005) will include XGL.
But then again you are just a stupid troll as evident by a previous post you made.
http://osnews.com/moderation.php?news_id=10363#364474
Very exciting stuff… all of it. I can’t wait for these projects to reach production quality!
Tha translation software has a long long way …
“Yes, it totally is. People state their opinions here 24/7. Why can’t I? :-)”
You can state whatever you want, you’ll just end up in the modded section again, and again……and again.
An opinion is one thing, intentionally trying to create controversy without even attempting to logically back it up is another. That is called trolling, you are a troll.
Interesting stuff, but as usual with Linux-related projects, this will be banished to CVS code for at least two more years before you see it working flawlessly on most people’s systems, let alone bundled as a standard option.
Longhorn already has it beat. 😐
Hehe…yeah…The funny thing is that people who already use Linux are getting more and more reasons that validate their choice every day, while the Windows platform is just not advancing right now in terms of the software actually on people’s systems. I recently went back to XP on a friend’s PC after not having used it for about a year…and it was like going back to the stone age. Seriously.
On the other hand, Windows users have TWO YEARS to wait for Longhorn, which has already been scaled back massively from what was originally presented. I will NEVER use another MS OS on a personal computer of mine, Linux offers too many advantages, especially now that I’m proficient.
And, yes, of course you can spout off your opinion just like every one else here, and every one will bitch at you for it, just like they bitch at everyone else. Especially with an opinion as stupid as yours.
I don’t see, though, how an OS that supports all of the most modern of hardware could possibly be called “stoneage”.
Like running AMD-64 CPU’s in 64 bit mode for majority of the applications and libraries on the system?
*snicker*
Upgrade one lib, *bam*, some app over here breaks. Update your kernel? *BAM* Unexplained filesystem corruption because the kernel just happened to break some ATA/FS driver.
Let me guess, rpm distro right?
Yeah, because Linux’s x86-64 is oh-so-stable-and-enterprise-ready, right? Give me a break.
And yes, it was an RPM distro, but the same thing happened on a source-based distro as well (Slack).
Fear is the path to the dark side (Windows). Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear (of Linux) in you.
Seriously tho, it seems to me you’re turning a blind eye to the huge amount of bugs and other problems (spam/viruses etc) that plague the Windows OS’s.
You’re actually stating that Windows has less problems than Linux? Give me a break.
If you like Windows, go for it. To each his own.
As far as your “supports all of the most modern of hardware” comment. Here’s a fact:
When I use ReiserFS on a Dell Dimension’s brand new hard drive and set the BIOS for ‘quiet’ mode, the drive is silent, and VERY fast.
When I install XP on an NTFS partition on the same computer with the same drive (still set to ‘quiet’ mode), the drive makes the same level of noise as the drives in my (much older) Win98 machines.
Is this what you call ‘support’? Give us a break.
XP is a shoddy OS put together by the world’s greediest programmers to fulfill the ‘vision’ of a rich moron. When was the last time you were in Staples and actually witnessed someone buy the retail box version of XP?
Reading your comments, I don’t want you anywhere near Linux. You don’t seem to understand the seriousness of where personal computing is headed.
Enjoy your XBox.
You wrote :
“the same thing happened on a source-based distro as well (Slack).”
Slack is NOT a source-based distro.
Case 1 : you did really use Slack, and then you *knew* that it is a binary distro. You can’t be _that_ stupid. In this case, you intentionally lied.
Case 2 : you didn’t even use Slack. So why did you say you met problems with Slack ? In this case, not only did you lie, but you spread FUD.
It’s a source-based distro (IMO) in the sense that you basically have to compile most non-Slack-provided software from source. It’s not RPM, it’s not DEB, it’s not whatever else people use. That’s all I meant.
That doesn’t make any sense, as you were talking about using Slack on x86-64.
Slack does not have ANY x86-64-packages (and Slamd64 does not yet pretend to be stable, it’s unofficial and experimental).
If you did try to recompile Slack by hand for x86-64, that may be a very good reason for why you had stability problems, as this requires a lot of experience — this is basically equivalent to making a LFS install.
If you compiled only non-Slack-provided packages by hand for x86-64, that’s a bad idea. If you want x86-64, get a fully x86-64 distro, don’t compile x86-64 software against a x86-32 system.
Finally, if you compiled x86-32 software, I don’t see where is your problem. I have a lot of experience with 32-bit Slackware on AMD64 CPUs, compiling a lot of (x86-32) software on it, and it works very fine. No stability problem at all.
I wasn’t talking about x64. I was talking about 32-bit Linux on a 32-bit CPU.
Oh, I re-read your posts and indeed, you weren’t talking about x86-64, you wrote
” Update your kernel? *BAM* Unexplained filesystem corruption because the kernel just happened to break some ATA/FS driver.”
That’s impossible, because the ATA driver and the FS are provided *inside* the kernel. You can’t break them when updating a kernel, because the new kernel will come with the appropriate version of them. The only way you could corrupt your FS when upgrading a kernel is if you compiled your own kernel with experimental features, but then, as you know, “make *config” always tells you when a feature can be dangerous, so you’re warned. Honestly I don’t know what RPM distros you tried, but at least with Slack, I’m 100% that if you don’t make a serious mistake yourself, you can’t corrupt your FS.
“the same thing happened on a source-based distro as well (Slack).”
Slack is NOT a source-based distro.
I am writing this on a Slackware machine.
The previous comment is a double-post, sorry. My internet connection keeps going down tonight.
You have to realize that your opinion will be regarded as mindless flaming if you just make the same tired, unsubstantiated claims.
So you had a bad experience with Linux. Fair enough, Linux is not for everyone. What you are not realizing, is that a lot of people are not having that experience with Linux, therefore the statement “Linux doesn’t work for me, therefore it is a piece of poo” is completely stupid. I’m quite sure that I would be 100% miserable trying to run IBM AIX, or QNX as my primary OS, and yet these are both good operating systems with millions of users.
For me, Linux works better for me that Windows overall. I installed Debian over 4 years ago, and haven’t had any major problems with it. Can you keep a Windows installation running for 4 years without a reinstall, and have it running just as fast as it was at the beginning? I highly doubt it. I use Windows XP all day at work, and its a good OS, but Linux is just more functional for me.
I strongly suspect you were screwing around with stuff if you messed up linux that badly. The reason Windows still works for you is that it won’t let you do that kind of stuff. I’ve been using Linux for several years without a single problem (and it’s an rpm distro, which get complained about WAY too much).
RE: the Longhorn already has it beat comment.
Umm, let’s see, when is Longhorn due? 2 years? And you were complaining that it would take that long before this comes out? I’m not saying Longhorn won’t come out first, but saying it’s already won is wrong – even if it’s only in CVS, this is the only code available now. Longhorn won’t be available to anyone for a long time.
The filesystem comment is legitate hardware support. It discusses how the FS and OS support the HARDWARE feature of ‘silent’ mode.
Wine/Cegeda are a “hack” but how is that a bad thing? The whole linux kernel is a “hack”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker#Hacker:_Brilliant_programmer
Slackware is a binary distro. When you say it has been comiled from source, well okay, most distros are compiled from source.. then put into binary packages. Fedora is recompiling their own binary packages with gcc4.0 right now…
Everything is compiled from source at one point or another.
Congrats: You’re a sucessful troll, you have sidetracked an entire comment thread with nothing more then flaming crap.
Yeah, because Linux’s x86-64 is oh-so-stable-and-enterprise-ready, right? Give me a break.
Sun seems to think so. I believe they’d know.
Everyone needs to just shut up about this mindless Windows ( > or < ) Linux
BOTH OS’s have their faults. Both have their strengths. That’s not what this article is trying to show.
It’s talking about a future capability of Linux, just as there are articles on OSNews about the future capabilities of Windows.
Let’s talk about this new feature: Will distributions be making it easier to install the NVidia drivers in order to take advantage of this? Will ATI ever release a fully functional driver that could do this?
Thanks,
Greg
It depends on the distro. If the distro has a good package manager, installing software is a breeze, at least for Nvidia drivers.
I wonder if the animation is done relative to the position of the mouse pointer or if it’s just relative to the top-left corner of a window..
The way to go is GPL’d drivers. For instance, if you use the free ‘radeon’ driver, you don’t have to install or upgrade anything manually, because everything is included in the kernel and in xorg. That’s a nice example to show that the mythological ‘painfulness’ of linux is only due to lack of good will from vendors.
Already today, you have an excellent free ‘radeon’ driver that even does 3D acceleration for cards up to Radeon 9200. The free ‘nv’ driver reportdedly works fine for old Nvidia cards. I hope the hackers who reverse-engeneer these cards will continue doing this great work.
Another source of hope is the “Open Graphics Project”, aiming to make a Graphics card with full documentation and free driver. (search Google ; also an article has been posted on OSnews IIRC). If this succeeds, then it’ll put more pressure on ATI, Nvidia and Intel to release free drivers.
And finally, when the Desktop/Workstation linux market share will be high enough, the vendors will start to consider being more Linux-friendly, that’s good commercial logics. For instance, if 5% of the market runs Linux, perhaps 1% of the market cares about 3D acceleration under Linux, so a Linux-friendly vendor can hope for 1% more market share. That’s already a lot of money.
Probably a big obstacle toward that will be non-disclosure agreements binding these vendors to other industrials.
Huh.. I didn’t know that the gpl’d ati driver has hardware accelerated 3d. That’s really cool. The (gpl) nv driver that I’m using right now doesn’t seem like it does
glxgears gives me 318 FPS on a geforce 4200 with dual AMD 2800+. When I’m using the non-gpl nvidia driver i get something like 8,000 fps..
I wonder if the animation is done relative to the position of the mouse pointer or if it’s just relative to the top-left corner of a window.
When windows and menus appear, the animation is done relative to the top-left corner of the window. (I think this is especially appropriate for menus.) When you drag a title bar, it’s relative to the mouse pointer. You can check out Theora and MPEG4 videos of it in action (yes, it’s extremely cool) at http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/xshots . Check his two or three most recent posts; they have some very exciting info about the future of X and GTK+.
I just upgraded to a nvidia 6600.. didn’t even look at ati because of the reports I’ve heard that they work poorly under Linux.
Glad to be a part of that 1%
And yes, it was an RPM distro, but the same thing happened on a source-based distro as well (Slack).
Slack isn’t a source based distro
i’d rather for the linux community to work on kde/gnome ui and iconset that can match up with os x.
i understand the benefits of opengl desktop. let’s hope all the transparency shadow swinging stuff wont turned on by deefault…
there are at least a dozen look alike themes for both kicking around. Really, unless you’re running OSX, whats the point of a look alike theme?
Its not like KDE and Gnome don’t have thier own good looking themes available that are professional quality and on par with OSX. I don’t understand the urge to make one thing look exactly like something else. It only serves to confuse people when the app that looks the same, doesn’t work the same.
I don’t think you have to worry about this being on by default for quite a while. But then, I think they’ll be ready in under a year.
These X effects look impressive… but too much of it will be tiring. I really hope the effects we’ll see are *extremely* subtle, so that it looks cool while not affecting usability. My fear is that it will feel like touching a point in “wabbling” jelly.
Mac OS X is a good (even brilliant) reference point… as long as GNU/Linux doesn’t just imitate it.
And about ATI… I have a 9600 Mobility Pro Turbo with 128Mb on a Dell Inspiron 8600. I *do* care about 3D hardware acceleration (I paid for it). Then, why do I have to choose between (crappy) hardware accel and ACPI features (supend and hibernate)?
Come on!, if you are using slackware then you should have some degree of experience on Unix/Linux systems, or at least to want to learn. With slackware you configure things with minimal tools, that means no Control Center or YaST for you. Even that, slackware works very well out of the box, but your milage may vary, as soo does with ALL Linux distros out there and soo with Windows.
Why do I affirm this?, well I own an HP Laptop, I had to delete the WindowsXP Home partition because the damm thing won’t get resized by either Mandrake tools or even Partition Magic, either way, I installed XP Pro, and downloaded all the damm drivers from HP, guess what? it dosen’t work as well. Windows needs to be installed from fabric to run Good, and soo can any linux distro.
Just for the record, i run Slackware 10.1 on this laptop, custom kernel (2.6.11) with everything working: 3D, Wireless (via ndiswrapper), LAN, Modem (WinModem), etc. So it does work, still I’m an experienced user and have no problem with fiddling with the system even tought i don’t like to waste my time, it dosen’t take long if you know what you are doing, but you are using slackware, you know what you are doing right?
I’m using translucent windows with KDE 3.4 on a nvidia card with binary drivers.
It’s fast, it’s reasonably stable, but it’s still a bit flaky, e.g. when resizing, windows don’t always get updated properly.
In spite of that I already got so used to transparent windows that I miss them when working on a machine without them.
They look great, especially with slow fading. More importantly though, I actually find them quite useful.
With inactive windows faded out, it becomes much clearer which one is the currently active window, also letting you concentrate better on that window. This works great with focus-follows-mouse, making it less likely that you accidentally type to the wrong window. Also, it helps a bit with finding windows obscured behind other ones.
Still, transparent windows of course are a bit of a toy, but with all that graphics power around, why not use it?
by Edward :
“Upgrade one lib, *bam*, some app over here breaks. Update your kernel? *BAM* Unexplained filesystem corruption because the kernel just happened to break some ATA/FS driver.
Let me guess, rpm distro right?”
I don’t really see why you answered that, Edward. This problem doesn’t only affects RPM-based distros.
Yes, sometimes when you try to install a RPM package, a message appears to inform you that you need to install other packages (needed libraires) to solve the dependancy problems.
But if I am a bit surprised by your comment it’s because this not a “RPM-based distro” problem only. It also happens under Debian or Ubuntu with dkpg (I tested these distros). “dpkg -i” and “rpm -ivh” aren’t that different.
I don’t understand why people always flame RPM-based distros, that’s very annoying.
For years now, all big distributions feature package managers such as apt-get, apt-rpm, urpmi, yum, and recently Smartpm.
If you meant for example, that Debian (a DEB-based distro) doesn’t have dependancy problems anymore thanks to apt-get, ok but that’s also true for all other RPM-based distros thanks to their native package managers..
Installing or removing packages (or updating a whole system) has never been so easy. And if you guy have problems with packages or dependancy problems, I suggest you to try Smart (http://smartpm.org) which is compatible with all DEB and RPM-based distros, and solves problems that apt or yum can’t.
Saying “RPM-based distros” suck because of RPM dependancy problems is.. well…
I *know* that ATA/FS drivers are integrated into the kernel. What I meant was that some bug is introduced in a new kernel release which leads to corruption. This has happened more than once in the past with Linux.
I hope you aren’t trying to say that whatever goes in the kernel stays stable indefinitely. Hell, 2.6 is a freaking developer’s playground, with constant regressions in performance and stability. The whole dev process is a fucking *joke* right now.
Until the day that installing hardware and software, using hardware and software, and customizing the machine doesn’t require hours upon wasted hours of work, hackery, and Googling, Linux will always be a hacker’s OS, and not taken seriously as a desktop alternative.
Okokok…I know this is a bit late, but I have to say…
I can setup my Linux box, with all the software I’ll ever need all in its newest version, configured how I want, all hardware working properly and be staring at a GUI in 40 minutes.
So there’s obviously a disconnect between my experience of Linux and yours. Could it be that I am proficient and you are not? I stated in my original post that I was comparing the experience of a proficient Win users vs. a proficient Linux user. I’ve actually found that since I’ve switched to Linux (a little over 2 years ago), time spent maintaining my computer has been drastically reduced.
I do love to theme and mess with my WM/X setup, though.