A demonstration of the next release of Novell's Linux for desktops drew cheers and applause Wednesday, although the final version of the software is not expected for some months. Nat Friedman, the company's vice president of Linux desktop engineering, showed Novell Linux Desktop 10 playing videos and MP3 music files, and exchanging music and photos with an iPod and a digital camera, in a keynote presentation at the Solutions Linux conference and trade show on the outskirts of Paris.
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Agreed, thus far nothing in the Linux world is honestly on par with Windows Vista or OSX's graphics system, so it will be most welcome to see a linux distro that comes with XGL running for regular users, no compiling needed.
Just because they showed off Xgl doesn't mean its ready and it doesn't mean that it will be shipped by default. You will probably be able to install it from a package (just like in other distros like Ubuntu) but Xgl is at least a year away from being shipped by default on the desktop of a major distro.
In fact, its obvious why Novell didn't release any Xgl code for so long- they wanted a neat demo to show off that nobody else has. Oh well, they pay for it so its ok.
Member since:2005-11-11
So, one week until we find out if the pending code bomb is acceptable to the X community. Not having seen it I really can't comment on the odds of course, but there are a few possible hang ups with licensing, coding standards, who knows. I hope there are none, but if there are there will be extra effort redoing things, effort that would not have been necessary with a little openness. If anyone from the outside had at least been able to look at the code as it progressed, I wouldn't have these worries.
On the other hand, if people had been able to look, there would surely have been complaints and requests that Novell do such and such a trivially different way, and it would likely have taken them longer.
Of course, if something needs to be redone for integration into X, that will be time wasted anyway. In a week, I guess we'll know if their methods worked out (they obviously did for Novell, I mean for FLOSS in general).
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The code for XGL developed at Novell will be made available next week, Friedman says. However, Reveman has already returned some of it to the open-source development community, according to bulletin board postings.
This could be the most interesting part of the article... Perhaps the world will now see all the XGL goodness created at Novell...