Novell plans to release a beta for its Linux Desktop 10 including new features offering better interoperability with Microsoft Office and Open Office, said Ted Haeger, Novell’s director of user communities, at the Southern California Linux Expo. The beta, tentatively scheduled for release next month, will include a new feature, dubbed Xgl. Haeger said Xgl will allow users to jump between screens and multiple desktops. Targeted to CAD software users, Xgl has a practical side that allows users to have better window- and file-sharing capabilities.
Buy a copy of Novell Linux Desktop just to support Novell. They spend lots of money funding features like Xgl and compiz.
http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/
Here is the video demonstrating all of the Xgl features:
http://www.freedesktop.org/~davidr/xgl-demo1.xvid.avi (~50MB)
Buy a copy of Novell Linux Desktop just to support Novell. They spend lots of money funding features like Xgl and compiz.
No thanks. I only drink free beer.
So you wouldn’t give a credit or anything to someone who brews the beer you drink for free? Such ingratitude, it’s not about paying, it’s about support.
Who are you to question my integrity and motives for using free software? If you don’t want it to be free, commercialize it. Otherwise, shut the hell up.
I can’t speak for the other guy, but I’ll be buying the next version the same reason. To support Novell.
I’m sure we can all agree that what Novell is doing is great. They’re doing it for a few reasons, but one of them is to attract users. By attracting users they hope to glean monies. It’s the nature of business. And they deserve it for what they’re doing.
They’re doing a good deed, and doing good work. It’s not too much to ask that if you say you support free software, you SUPPORT free software.
I love Linux and gladly buy some Linux based software. But unfortunately it does not work the way you are saying. No people don’t buy anything just because the company is spending… Unless i see some value in their software i will not buy it…
I agree. I always buy my distros!
(you do not pay for the software but more for the package as a whole, documentation, support, dvds etc.)
The videos are stunnig!
Apple eat your heart out!
This really show what Linux is capable of these days.
Its not Linux that has to catch up here anymore!
I also agree. It seems that Novell is contributing more than anybody else to desktop linux these days.
Amen brother, if you want it to stay free vote with your wallet.
“Buy a copy of Novell Linux Desktop just to support Novell….”
Buy Suse Linux and do the same. Novell Linux Desktop is the business package, so if you are a business then maybe ues. Suse Linux is geared toward the home desktop more or less. Both are Novell products and support Novell if purchased.
use Xgl for “better file-sharing capabilities.” ???
This article demonstrates a thorough lack of understanding at even the most basic level of the subject matter at hand.
OSNews is better than this.
I was most interested in the fact that this article announces the beta is coming next month.
Well, obviously the files look much better with Xgl when you share them, hence “better file-sharing capabilities”. You know, in the very much same way as Xgl gives you much better file management, email checking, web browsing, and not to mention, coffee making capabilities. I also heard, but take this with a grain of salt, that Xgl actually will give you better gas mileage on your car, so don’t be surprised if you see it for sale on late night TV by som bearded shady guy. Don’t underestimate the awesome all-encompassing embetterment-factor of a shiny, flashy GUI!
You forgot security! Vista’s Aero Glass UI makes it secure *nod*
It seems that joking with something as serious as Xgl is frowned upon by people here, so we better stop. Unfortunately Xgl does not change the humor perception coefficient in its die-hard fans, but maybe in time there will be a software project that can address this very issue.
And, for those stuck firmly on the other side of the big sarchasm (no, not a typo), I actually look forward to using Xgl when it’s in an useable state.
Well, obviously the files look much better with Xgl when you share them, hence “better file-sharing capabilities”.
Probably a mistake in news article (at least I think so). NLD has included this totaly revamped iFolder
http://ifolder.blogspot.com/
so, my best guess is that they ment NLD10 will have better file-sharing capabilities
Novell has surely found an interesting way to get XGL development jumpstarted. By shipping the massive hack that is Xglx (its an X server that runs full screen inside another full X server), they could very well spur development of Xegl. It might very well break the deadlock that exists with Xegl right now, where there is little demand for DRI-EGL to be developed, because nothing uses it, and there is little incentive for XGL to be developed, because DRI-EGL isn’t ready yet. I’ll be interested to see how this works out for them.
That was my reaction – how can Novell be so willing to ship a product that wouldn’t have had the necessary depth and breadth of testing one would require for such an crically important foundation to an operating system?
I would have thought the best thing to do would have been to ship Novell Linux Desktop 10 with the basic Xorg 7.0 server, then in the first service pack; around 4-6months later, bundle Xgl withit.
A good amount of XGL is already done (having had a look at the progress), but at the same time, it’ll also need a good amount of testing to work through any bugs and gotchas that don’t normally turn up in every occasion – aka, the random spontaneous bugs.
Depends on how you look at it. SUSE is being positioned much the same way that Fedora has been positioned.
Basically they’re using us as a large group of bug testers. Not that I mind, nor do I think that the large crowd of linux junkies/technology/whores mind. They’ll get a kick out of it.
That probably works out in all of our favors’. Novell is gonna need plenty of bug testing work on this, they only have so many resources. If we do the bug testing they can spend more time coding thus accelerating the progression of Xgl.
Unless I’m way off…………….. 😛
I would have thought the best thing to do would have been to ship Novell Linux Desktop 10 with the basic Xorg 7.0 server, then in the first service pack; around 4-6months later, bundle Xgl withit.
This is only a beta. This will give people a chance to take a look at it and give bug reports and fixes. The final release won’t be for at least 4-6 months, so I don’t really see an issue with what they are doing.
This is only a beta. This will give people a chance to take a look at it and give bug reports and fixes. The final release won’t be for at least 4-6 months, so I don’t really see an issue with what they are doing.
Actually, no, the scheduled release for NLD 10 is May. Assuming late May for the release and early March for the beta, that’s still less than 3 months.
And the problem is that if they’re releasing it as part of NLD (as opposed to something like openSuse), they can’t simply put a disclaimer on it saying “it’s experimental, use at your own use”. Corporate customers don’t like that sort of thing, and will expect NLD to be working and properly supported by Novell from the time it is installed. That’s what they’ll be paying for.
Novell has actually had this for a while, a buddy of mine saw NLD 10 first demo’d at their sales rally in January. He indicated even back then that the graphics and desktop were stunning, a big change from NLD 9 (which they’re all stuck using). Optimistically one would hope that they kept this under wraps as long as they did for semi-exhaustive internal testing and troubleshooting before public release; cynically, one could assume that they held off as long as they did just to make sure they were the first out of the gate with it.
The cospiracists point out that this was released just in time to miss Fedora and Dapper’s feature freeze but potentially make it into Opensuse, though in fairness they had announced all along they intended to announce and release it at the conference.
Nothing wrong with that considering the investment they made, but between that and the structural changes they made to the gnome desktop that are all being sprung on people with little notice, it’s a gamble that could pay off big or explode in their faces.
Still, I hope for the best.
Actually, no, the scheduled release for NLD 10 is May. Assuming late May for the release and early March for the beta, that’s still less than 3 months.
Can you show me where you got this information from because I was under the impression that NLD wasn’t going to be released until October.
Anyone know what the minimum requirements for all that xgl/compiz goodness is?
The way it’s being talked about it seems like this stuff is going to be in a default installation. Which would seem odd if you need a fancy graphics card for it.
It seemed to run fine when I tried it on my P4 laptop (geforce4 MX 440 with 64MB VRAM). That’s a three year old machine, so that seems reasonable. However, it was quite unstable and resizing was very slow. I’m sure the stability will improve, but I don’t have high hopes for resizing to get fixed without significant improvements to the underlying memory allocator.
The great thing about Xgl is that it actually speeds up things. The only requirement from the hardware is a video card with decent OpenGL accel support.
Driver information is available here: http://en.opensuse.org/Xgl
———-The great thing about Xgl is that it actually speeds up things.—————
That’s what’s supposed to happen when you involve *ANOTHER PROCESSOR* in whatever it is that you’re doing. In this case, you’re utilizing that GPU alot more and offloading the processing job away from the CPU.
Interesting that the 3d desktop coming to vista slows things down, as a point of reference.
Apple’s(to my knowledge) will also speed things up. Does MS even care anymore?
Effects for which performing all of the calculations on the CPU would be prohibitive are not necessarily faster when done by the GPU than not doing them at all. You should be comparing performing the calculations on the host CPU to doing them on the GPU.
That’s not really what I was saying, but I understand.
———-Effects for which performing all of the calculations on the CPU would be prohibitive are not necessarily faster when done by the GPU than not doing them at all.———-
No, I’m not saying necessarily that they’ll be *faster* when done on the GPU as opposed to being done by the CPU, I’m saying that the whole OS will feel faster because those tasks(whatever they are) are not being done by the CPU. They’re being done by the GPU. The CPU can focus in on other things and get them done faster while the pass-off is done on graphical calculations.
This is the whole point(well one of them) of a 3d desktop. There’s so much horsepower in a GPU that goes unused, why not use it?
My point was that when comparing Vista’s performance with its effects, you must compare them as if they were being performed on the host CPU. Making the GPU do tasks is not necessarily going to make the experience ‘faster’ if what you are doing is just adding more ‘things’ and performing them on the GPU. If your comparison is between effects performed on the GPU and sans effects entirely, the comparison is loaded.
Based on the testing with my hardware, the lowest hardware it will run on decently is NVIDIA GeForce 2 Video card with a Pentium 3 processor (this is with a lot of affects disabled, but also some enabled). Most people should have that already.
well ive tried XGL just using the glx stuff and its not that impressive. I mean its cool, but its just candy. OSX can do this stuff in vesa, and its still fast. Linux and windows still have a LONGGGG way to catch up!
“Every great journey begins with a small step”
This is the first step. I dont believe it should be judged otherwise
What does in vesa mean? Both OS X and Linux are using OpenGL to accelerate the desktop.
BTW this is tech demo stuff, expect lots and lots of cool developments in the next 6 months. The code for this was released a few days ago and already we’re seeing enhancements from the community. When you give developers new toys they tend to go to town.
You can state your opinion in 6 months but all signs point to Linux being the most advanced desktop for at least a little while. We still have yet to see what Microsoft is going to do so it may not last long.
Nothing against OS X but it’s desktop technology hasn’t progressed in years. I mean it was definately ahead of it’s time but it can’t lead the way forever. Open source sometimes takes more time to get the latest technology but when it’s done, it’s usually done right.
Nothing against OS X but it’s desktop technology hasn’t progressed in years. I mean it was definately ahead of it’s time but it can’t lead the way forever. Open source sometimes takes more time to get the latest technology but when it’s done, it’s usually done right.
I’m a pretty big OSS fan, but even I have to cringe at this one. OS X is still ahead of both Vista and XGL, for a couple of important reasons:
1) It is mostly on a level of technical parity. Quartz 2D Extreme is out there, even though its not yet enabled because it is incompatible with Quickdraw. Quartz Extreme does the same compositing, distorting, and window synchronizatoin tricks that Compiz does. One potential thing XGL has over OS X is that it sends geometry to the server via XRENDER, instead of doing rendering client-side and just having the window server deal with the resulting bitmaps/textures. In theory, this could be used for some advanced effects like high-quality window scaling, though the fact that text is still represented as bitmaps greatly limits that approach.
2) It’s already out there, already mature, and already in wide use. Adium draws fancy anti-aliased chat window graphics, Growl gives me fancy anti-aliased semi-transparent notifications, etc. Lots of apps actually take advantage of OS X’s vector features, because it’s been out for so long. It’ll be quite awhile before the same is true for Vista and XGL.
As for the “being done right”, I don’t know about that. XGL + the software above it is quite kludge-tastic at the moment. First, the whole “dual X server” thing harks back to the “dual kernel” marketing Apple had in the early days of OS X but quickly buried because everyone realized how ugly that sounded. On top of that, most apps aren’t yet ready to take full advantage of XGL. GTK+, even current versions, still draws half through Cairo and half through GDK. GNOME 2.14 will still mix core X and Cairo rendering because it’ll still use a non-Cairo’ed Clearlooks theme. The guts of the graphics layer are not really ready for XGL yet — all sorts of problems ranging from memory management to low-overhead GL context switching need to be addressed at the DRI level.
Now, I’m sure this will all get worked out eventually. By the time GNOME 3.0 rolls around, I’m sure we’ll be using a pure Cairo GTK linked to XCB talking to XGL running on DRI-EGL. However, while all those pieces are there in various forms, it’ll be quite awhile before they come together into a well-integrated graphics stack. Since I don’t think Vista will make it out in 2006, I don’t think its a big deal in the context of competing with Windows, but relative to OS X its still an issue.
What I’d really like to know… Will Ubuntu Dapper ship with this? That’d be nifty.
It’s in Dapper’s universe repository.
SWEET! I knew it wouldn’t be in ‘main’, but I had no idea it’d be in ‘universe’. Now, yer sure about that? I’m not gonna be disappointed come April?
I tried actual Xgl and compiz (x.org CVS) on my machine (ArchLinux) and have to say, well, it’s nice, but also very unstable.
I doubt it makes much sense to get it shipped in March. They should wait some months for it to get mature.
Agreed. I’m playing with it in kubuntu (couldn’t wait for debian to get modular xorg) and it has some rough edges. I can do everything from the videos, but there were certain things you didn’t see in the videos
Wine apps have no windecos, last I checked java apps (using Sun’s JRE) are a blank window (IBMs JRE works), and little oddities like not being able to open kontact and konqueror at the same time. It needs a little time.
The smoothness of it is nice though. Even if you don’t like wobbly windows, not forcing windows to redraw when you move another window from in front of them is golden. One hopes they can get the driver situation ironed out better too. http://en.opensuse.org/Xgl
How is it too early to release a beta? They are not realeasing a final version in March, they are releasing beta. This will help people test it so that all of the kinks can be worked out before they ship the final version. Isn’t this the point of betas?
Well and good. SuSE usually do six-monthly releases so this one seems well on schedule after version 10.
Personally I am more interested in two things other than the Xgl stuff. The first is YaST/YOU and packaging/repos. SuSE 10 used various different methods of package management including apt if you wanted. I’d much prefer it if SuSE settled on just one method for their future needs and then tweaked it up to perform extremely well.
Second, there is the seemingly perennial SuSE problem of speed and responsiveness. Debian Unstable here runs much faster than SuSE 10, with both using preloading. Firefox on Debian opens in about three seconds whereas SuSE takes noticeably longer, for example. SuSE has always been a little sluggish, imho, and perhaps it’s time they dealt with that. Whatever the reason – conservative compile/kernel settings? – it is starting to make SuSE look a little flat-footed these days.
I’ve noticed that myself. I went from fedora to suse primarily because of YaST, but the speed difference I’ve noticed is significant.
Hopefully OS 10.1 will raise the performance bar.
Edited 2006-02-16 14:23
Goodness. Is there anyone at Novell who can’t talk crap, or a CTO somewhere that actually knows what’s going on? Small wonder Alan Nugent left.
Haeger said Xgl will allow users to jump between screens and multiple desktops.
Yay! Oh, hang on. I’m doing that now.
Targeted to CAD software users
Yay! Oh damn. Where’s the CAD software?
Xgl has a practical side that allows users to have better window- and file-sharing capabilities.
Yay! Err, better filesharing capabilities?
The planned Novell desktop package, which incorporates OpenOffice, includes support for Visual Basic macros used in Excel.
So no OpenDocument promotion then?
Better integration with OpenOffice will allow Linux Desktop 10 to use what Haeger described as “native theming.” That means OpenOffice will automatically adopt the use of icons similar to that of the native operating system…
Yay. Oh, already have that.
For people to start adopting Linux [on the desktop], it’s not just about the applications; it’s about the feel as well as the applications…
Err, no actually. It’s about the applications.
All this is meant to be more personal so that people get an attachment to the desktop. And that can help drive us forward [with] more and more apps and lower prices.
Stunning strategy there. Where are these lower prices going to come from?
AppArmor — which Haegar called a “prophylactic for your applications”
Oooohhhh….
Microsoft documents sealed with Microsoft encryption can be opened on OpenOffice.
Cementing Microsoft Office more. What happens when Microsoft starts using a TPM for this stuff?
Cementing Microsoft Office more. What happens when Microsoft starts using a TPM for this stuff?
I guess then OpenOffice will too. There is already a TPM module in the kernel. TPM is not a MS-only technology.
There is already a TPM module in the kernel. TPM is not a MS-only technology.
If you knew what that meant you’d realise that Microsoft can tie a Word document exclusively to Word, or more tantalisingly, to a version of Word.
Goodness. Is there anyone at Novell who can’t talk crap, or a CTO somewhere that actually knows what’s going on? Small wonder Alan Nugent left.
I’m not quite sure what your animus is. Novell aren’t delivering anything different from most other Linux distros, though arguably they do it better than a lot of folks. So why don’t we write off, say, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Mepis and Fedora while we’re about it? And in terms of underwriting open source development, Novell are probably doing more than all those others added together.
Given the whole Novell group’s financial problems, I’d agree that announcing some changes in their next release might amount to shifting around the deckchairs, if that’s what you were getting at. Or perhaps that Novell might be better off it they did do it all differently. For all that, SuSE has always been and still is a topflight distro, imho.
So why don’t we write off, say, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Mepis and Fedora while we’re about it?
Because they actually have people using them.
Given the whole Novell group’s financial problems, I’d agree that announcing some changes in their next release might amount to shifting around the deckchairs, if that’s what you were getting at.
Well not really. It’s just there’s nothing compelling in there, and at least, there’s nothing in there that’s going to make Novell any money. A lot of the desktop work can actually be used to give their servers top-notch graphical tools to make Novell’s software really compelling, but alas, there is nothing.
I really wonder who modded you up.
Your knowledge is very limited and biased.
Cad software for Linux:
(and please look deeper into things before making stupid comments)
To name a few prof. applikcations..
– Varicad
– Microstation
– Synergy
There are also lot of free and open CAD/CAM programs.
Looks like you yourself a full of crap to, i did not bother to read the rest of your statements…
Cad software for Linux:
(and please look deeper into things before making stupid comments)
To name a few prof. applikcations..
– Varicad
– Microstation
– Synergy
There are also lot of free and open CAD/CAM programs.
As for lack of knowledge, go and read up about what applications are missing in terms of Linux support and you’ll find CAD in general, and particularly AutoCAD, high on the list in terms of the features some would miss.
Goodness knows how XGL would improve the above applications anyway.
Looks like you yourself a full of crap to, i did not bother to read the rest of your statements…
Probably because you don’t want to look.
Edited 2006-02-16 20:16
>As for lack of knowledge, go and read up about what
>applications are missing in terms of Linux support and
>you’ll find CAD in general, and particularly AutoCAD,
> high on the list in terms of the features some would
>miss.
Again where is the source for that?
some other CAD examples wich are on par or higher than
Autocad.
Cycas:
http://www.cycas.de/
Arcad: http://www.lx-office.com/LX/products/architektur/arcad/index.html
Autocad would be a warm welcome but its nonsense to say that Linux lacks CAD applications or support.
Edited 2006-02-17 00:24
Had a look at the demo and I must say I was impressed with what I saw.
I would feel happier with the technology if it actually does speed up windows operations. I didn’t see much functionality that takes advantage of Xgl from WM point of view. Lot’s of schnazy wobbly effects that don’t exactly increase my productivity…
There’s no point in using Xgl if it allows you to go slow “in style”.
Sigh… we’ll see what happens then