Xorg 6.8.0 released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Someone made an unauthorized announcement. According to the xorg mailing list 6.8.0 has not been release.
Hi,
Sweet! Can’t wait till this is in Slackware-current. The Skippy project (XD build) shows what sort of cool eyecandy stuff you can do with this. Also, speaking of eyecandy, does anybody have any idea what themes/gdesklets/apps etc. were used in the following screenshot (they’re from the x.org post a few days ago):
http://img38.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img38&image=screen_lynucs_1759409500…
http://www.gnome-look.org/content/preview.php?preview=1&id=14958&fi…
http://www.gnome-look.org/content/preview.php?preview=1&id=14958&fi…
Also, does anybody have any experiences with the performance of some of the new features (XD, Composite etc.)? I believe Rasterman did a comparison with his EFL’s a month or so ago.
Bye,
Victor
whats new in this release?
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/supplementary/X/XFree86/Xorg/Xorg…
Did someone check the source link in the story? The sources are not there. But here you go: http://www.x.org/pub/X11R6.8.0/tars/
Raster made a comparison between Render and imlib2. The new technology here is Composite and Damage. To recap:
Render – Alpha-blending and trapazoid-drawing API
Composite – Redirecting of windows to off-screen buffers
Damage – Tracking of window modified regions
imlib2 – Image manipulation and alpha-blending library
> whats new in this release?
Read /. if you want to know ;-)… Distributed Multihead X, newer freetype etc, XFixes, XDamage and XEVIE extensions, experimental XComposite extension, improved RandR, more ATI chips supported, render support for older Radeon chips, …
http://www.freedesktop.org/bin/view/XOrg/XorgReleasePlan#New_Featur…
The biggies are DMX, XFixes, Damage, Composite, and XEvIE.
thank you
where would the X Window System be today if XFree86 hadn’t hobbled, err umm, stewarded it for so long?
how long since there has been an X release half this impressive?
When will this be ported to FreeBSD?
After the ports tree is defrosted.
I pulled it from CVS as soon as I saw the story on Slashdot, and built it. I had to replace the freetype that came with it, because for some reason, it wouldn’t compile… it was an older version anyway. But anyhow, composite is very unstable still, I can trigger the X server to stop taking input by dragging and dropping in GTK apps. The transparency was fun to play with for a few minutes, but it’s just not useful. This release is a good incremental release, but it’s not all it was hyped up to be.
“composite is very unstable still”
That must be the reason why it’s marked as ‘experimental’. Maybe. Just maybe.
Yes, and this is what everyone has to remember. It’s not usable yet. All the hype seems to be around it, when it’s not even close to usable.
Composite is considered to be very experimental in this release. They were debating even including it at all, but I suppose they want to give people who code apps like kwin and metacity time to add compositing support before it becomes supported in the official release.
Got the whole shebang X11R6.8.0-src1-7 last night from
http://freedesktop.org/~xorg/X11R6.8.0/src/
apparently they moved it to
http://www.x.org/pub/X11R6.8.0/tars/
as seen from http://www.x.org
for the gtk2 theme go here:
http://www.users.monornet.hu/linux/index2.html
and look for “milk2”
don’t know about the rest…
I’m using it and the Composite Extension is usable in my book. I get shadows on everything which are real pretty. The only problem is from time to time you get artifacting, but the artifacts are easy to clean off the screen and are simply a minor annoyance at this point. Your mileage might vary, but with a Geforce MX4, a 1.8 Ghz Athlon XP, and 512Mb of RAM, I have it running beautifully
I had a cvs build running last week, but it would crash after about 10-15 minutes of use (with xcompmgr running). Seemed seriously unstable to me. I might try this latest, but I’m not holding out much hope (hope I’m wrong).
Matt
Looks daft to have it all way around the window. In press drop shadowing was relational to center of object it was being applied to with an x and a y offset. This usually gave a cornered shadowed effect not this allway round effect they have implemented here. I hope it improves cause I think it doesn’t look that good, more like edge feathering than drop shadowing.
Oh well, oneday.
I just want that acceleration with my laptop’s ATI Rage Mobility. Used to work with Slackware 9.1 (Xfree86) with “accel”… upgraded to Slackware 10.0 (on xorg) and puff… it’s gone.
Does anybody here knows if this release solves it? Thanks.
I vote for that to! My laptop has an ati rage lt pro (in linux listed as ‘ati mobility’. I’ve never got hardware acceleration to work with that card
Maybe someone can give me a few tips, thnx!
This is enlightenment-0.16 with ‘winter’ theme.
Don’t forget that xcompmgr is really only a technology proof of concept. It’s the job of WMs like metacity and Kwin to use the composite extension directly. When they do, you can choose your own drop-shadows. Don’t spread the idea that X.org has ‘hard coded’ duff looking drop-shadows.
as usual i am only interested in the font-rendering.
This looks very good, good hinted, as crisp as possible using anti-alias ! – is this quality only possible with x.org ? i dunno too much about linux.
Can anyone point me to Suse9.0 rpms
as suse9.1 dont work.
Or at least point me to Xorg source mirrors that work (their ftp server & official mirrors are down!)
I am comfy with linux, but will it build with linux easily, or does it need some wizardry?
I am comfy with linux, but will it build with linux easily, or does it need some wizardry?
—
xorg building from source in non trivial and you dont get the benefits immediately. do wait for your distro to bundle it.
what do u mean by ‘you dont get the benefits immediately’? Still if someone has a working mirror, plz post it.
http://www.x.org/Downloads_mirror.html
There was a branch of DRI supporting the mach64 chipset (found in the lower edge Mobility ATI cards, M1 and friends). I think that they’ve merged that code into the current x.org release:
http://www.freedesktop.org/XOrg/XorgReleasePlan
…
Merge Mach64 DRI support (Eric Anholt, July 23)
…
I’ve also a Thinkpad using that graphic chipset and will give it a try. Anyway with 4Mb of RAM, I’m not expecting miracles.
I know that they should still work, but does anyone tested the NVidia drivers with this new release ?
Here are a couple good links to compile from CVS and also shows how to use xcompmgr and transser…
http://www.grebowiec.net/archives//2004/09/xorg_68rc4_a_si_1.html
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=204593&st=0
Does anyone know what WMs there are out there right now that support the new features of this release well? I use FluxBox right now, and prefer to keep my WM light…
How is support amongst the WMs right now for drop shadows, transparency, etc. as implemented in x.org 6.8?
How is support amongst the WMs right now for drop shadows, transparency, etc. as implemented in x.org 6.8?
—
kwin and metacity has experimental code. metacity is like to ship in fedora core 3 using this. you might want to look at
http://freedesktop.org/Software/waimea
Morever vino which is the vnc component developed by redhat guys and included in gnome 2.8 uses damage extension to avoid polling.
Read the Slashdot thread. There is a way to change the offsets so that shadows only appear along two edges as you desire. Someone details it there.
It’s impressive that someone at SuSE built and posted RPM’s so quickly. However, SuSE does not support any code posted as “supplementary” and these files are specifically labled as completely untested.
I am running this with the nvidia driver and it works here. As to the guy who said he had it running for about 10-15 minutes and it would crash — I am not having that problem, however, it is a very good idea to run xorgconfig after installing the new version of X and overwrite your current /etc/X11/xorg.conf. A lot has changed what’s turned on and off in the file.
Thnx for your answer mteira!
You’re right, with 4 or in my case 8mb gpu memory, you can’t expect much. Nevertheless, it should be a bit faster (no idea how fast, maybe I can even install quake3)
You’re right, with 4 or in my case 8mb gpu memory, you can’t expect much. Nevertheless, it should be a bit faster
Sorry, but ATI Mobility is not a GPU. GPU was first used by NVIDIA to describe its GeForce 256, the first 3D chip with T&L for standard market. ATI and I think 3DLabs used instead the acronym VPU.
If I’m not mistake, Mobility chips are based on the earyl Rage cores, which where unable to run Quake 3. I think that even the original UT and Unreal suggested to use the Software Renderer if you have a Rage accelerator, so I would not put my hopes on that thing running Q3.
The quality of fonts on Linux/*BSD is determined entirely by the version of Freetype you are using. The fonts you see are the same level of quality Freetype has been rendering for at least a year or two.
im using suse 9.1 with the latest xorg xserver build. love suse. save me some times without compile it myself!
i have suse 9.1 personel with a nvidia card, i know u can get the rpms from ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/supplementary/X/XFree86/Xorg/Xorg…
but i have xfree86 at the moment i think, how would i upgrade?
The quality of fonts on Linux/*BSD is determined entirely by the version of Freetype you are using. The fonts you see are the same level of quality Freetype has been rendering for at least a year or two.
Wasn’t this version the first to rely on freetype2, though? I’m not exactly sure where I read it, but I’m sure that this version has a greatly upgraded freetype, which would cause SOME people fonts to look much better.
It’s a bit complicated. X.org *does* include a version of Freetype. However, it’s not necessarily the one that is used. Xft (which every modern GTK+ or Qt application uses to render fonts), will link to the version of Freetype you already have installed on the system. X’s Freetype, if it is used at all, will only be used to render Truetype fonts for core (non-antialiased) rendering.
Hopefully, this silliness (as well as other silliness, like including a copy of Mesa in the X source!) will go away when the X source tree is reorganized to use automake/autoconf.
Just to clear up my last post — since Xft links to the Freetype you have on your system, font quality will be dependent on the version of Freetype in /usr/lib. Most distros ship Freetype 2.1.x, which is reasonably modern. The reason fonts look so different between distros is:
1) Different quality fonts. I’m a very big fan of RedHat’s Albany AMT fonts, and Bitstream Vera Sans is also quite good. Luxi is bearable, and any of the other stock free fonts are crap.
2) Different configuration options for Freetype and Xft. In particular, enabling the bytecode interpreter isn’t necessarily a good idea anymore, because in many cases, the auto-hinter gives better results for anti-aliased rendering.
The situation can be quite complicated, but at least RedHat, Fedora, and SuSE (don’t know about Mandrake), seem to do the “right thing” out of the box.
Thanks for the tips. Very informative. I didn’t realize that X didn’t use the freetype it includes…hmmm…
Thanks for the info.
Try a radical approach: Read the README.
I just installed all the RPM’s just like the README said, rebooted, and still have just plain old XFree86… so the README would seem to be incomplete/inadequate.
If I’m not mistake, Mobility chips are based on the earyl Rage cores, which where unable to run Quake 3. I think that even the original UT and Unreal suggested to use the Software Renderer if you have a Rage accelerator, so I would not put my hopes on that thing running Q3.
Actually, the mach64 family is really big. Only the Rage GT subfamily has 3D features, of course, very limited compared with today cards. Anyway, I remember to play Q3 with 3D hardware acceleration. You need to disable a lot of detail, but it was playable (don’t expect 60fps). The Mobility cards based on this chip are the Mobility M/P/M1. Higher denominations were based on rage128 chips and later on radeon ones.
The release notes states that the build defaults to the version of freetype2 that’s already on the machine.
Is it sufficient to just install xorg 6.8.0? Or are there configurations to tweak? Does the window manager have to have support for this? If so, are there patches for Metacity?
I’ve xorg 6.8.0 running on my system and would like to know how to test/sample these new features.
mdk also does the “right thing” – stock freetype is an up-to-date 2.1 series release, and stock fonts are bitstream vera. The bytecode interpreter is disabled in the mdk rpm.
You have to get xcompmgr too. Just run it after compiling and it will add the shadows. Also grab project looking glass (should work much better in a stable x server–not the cvs unstable prerelease they give you), transset, the ARGB aware versions of the freenode clock and other demos. (a lot of them on fd.o have it i think).
A note for when you get xcompmgr working. If xcompmgr freezes the screen will not update. You will be able to change the music etc, press keys etc and it will know it but you cant see it. If this happens do ctrl+alt+f1 and ‘killall xcompmgr’. Then you can start it over and try again!
lol.
X.org doesnt build for me yet but I used xserver a while ago (quite unstable). It seems X.org deletes the makefile during make World and immediately complains that running ‘make Makefile.boot’ didnt work. Well of course it didnt you just deleted the makefile… hrm maybe its supposed to be make -f Makefile.boot. Ill see if I can change it.
> I just installed all the RPM’s just like the README said, rebooted, and still have just plain old XFree86.
That impossible because installing/upgrading the Xorg RPMs replaces the XFree86. Also you don’t have to reboot.
ATI once again shafts everyone with one of their cards. Dammit… I want to do business with them but they’re really getting on my nerves.
…so when will Apple start using freetype2 instead of Blur-O-Rama-Quartz?
At least they could borrow the better autohinting features…
and thanks 2 raynier for explaining the font/freetype-situation.
Im on Slack 10, I did a make World and make install and this is what I got for freetype:
(II) LoadModule: “freetype”
(II) Loading /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/fonts/libfreetype.so
(II) Module freetype: vendor=”X.Org Foundation & the After X-TT Project”
Does anyone know which freetype comes with Slack? I couldn’t find any freetype package in /var/log/packages
And for ATI, I have an ATI M3 in the Dell C600 I have, this latest X fixed the seethrough walls problem I was having playing RTCW! Woot!
Couldn’t agree more, going back to my Linux box recently after being on my Powerbook with OS X for a few months I really began to appreciate the smooth but crisp look of freetype2 rendered fonts (I use the standard gentoo compile of freetype). OS X just smooths them way too much IMO, and yes I have the lightest font smooth setting on in System Preferences.
Freetype looks great.
However, the problem here for me is the 9700 Pro I have. If I open a 3D app (or even glxinfo), X11 immediately disappears – ATI’s driver simply dies.
Wow, thats unfortunate…
Are you using AI driver, or Xorgs’ built in driver?
Supposed to read “Are you using ATIs driver” sorry…