Submitted by The 4th beta of OpenSUSE 10.1 has been released. This beta has quite a significant amount of bugs (especially in the installer) so be aware. The OpenSUSE developers somehow refuse to post any release notes, so I cannot tell you whether or not Novell’s Xgl and Compiz are included. Update: In the meantime, check this page on how to get Xgl/Compiz running on OpenSUSE. RPMs available, so no compiling required. Happy experimenting.
I don’t care about Xgl. I’m worried about 3D support in linux/xfree86. Unfortunately, I bough a laptop with crappy SiS740, which has no support for 3D in linux. Not everybody has the NVidia or ATI graphics card.
You should send an e-mail to SiS asking them to open their specs or release drivers supporting OpenGL.
It also appears that SiS is supported by EXA: http://wiki.x.org/wiki/ExaStatus
IMO Exa is not as exciting as Xgl but it should be supported by more hardware.
(note: not only ATI and nVidia have 3D support, XGL should work fine on Intel i810 as well).
Some people tried (e.g. Thomas Winischoffer) and it didn’t work. If someone made wrapper for XFree86 to use Windows drivers, I’d pay for it (reasonable price of course).
From EXA website:
sis (sis/xgi; Solid() and Copy() hooks only)
which is nothing but copying areas and a few raster operations. SiS is also missing many nice OpenGL extensions, so many new games crash.
I don’t know what’s their point in hiding the specs. Even if they need to, I don’t care about driver sources. Someone could sign NDA and write the driver.
With each developer release the OpenSUSE team either attach release notes in a “read me” text file included with the download or post issues seen on the bug report page here http://en.opensuse.org/Bugs:Most_Annoying_Bugs#SUSE_Linux_10.1_Beta…
Unless you’re a developer working either on the code for SUSE Linux or third party applications I would recommend avoiding the Beta and Release Candidate stages of developement. These stages of developement usually have programers working out bugs which can cause headaches for end users. It’s better to wait till the final release and possibly even waiting till there are reviews posted online showing how the software behaves on a variety of systems.
Edited 2006-02-18 18:05
Unless you’re a developer working either on the code for SUSE Linux or third party applications I would recommend avoiding the Beta and Release Candidate stages of developement. These stages of developement usually have programers working out bugs which can cause headaches for end users. It’s better to wait till the final release and possibly even waiting till there are reviews posted online showing how the software behaves on a variety of systems.
True to a certain extent, but the reason for the beta releases isn’t just for developers to test. They need non-developers (ie. users) running it under typical usage, that’s the best way to find the real-world bugs.
So you’re right, I definitely wouldn’t recommend using any pre-release version in any sort of production (ie. necessary day to day use) environment, but for enthusiasts or casual users that like to tinker, they can provide valuable feedback the devs need in order to hammer out the bugs before final, as long as those users realize they’re not using a stable environment. It’s the easiest, and probably the most important, way for non-developers etc. to contribute back to open source efforts.
but for enthusiasts or casual users that like to tinker, they can provide valuable feedback the devs need in order to hammer out the bugs before final, as long as those users realize they’re not using a stable environment.
Exactly. Which is why OpenSUSE needs to work on their release information. No apparant changelog, no ready release notes… They have a lot to learn in comparison to ie. Fedora or Ubuntu.
for enthusiasts or casual users that like to tinker, they can provide valuable feedback the devs need in order to hammer out the bugs before final, as long as those users realize they’re not using a stable environment
And as long as they’re willing to try and reproduce the bug several times, create a substantial bug-report with these steps, and search the bug database exhaustively to make sure they’re not creating duplicate. Unfortunately a lot of enthusiasts don’t do this, making their input less valuable than they might think.
Beta release is for people like us, who always have either a dual-boot system or another system as a backup. This way even if the beta system becomes unusable ( for normal users absence of XServer means system is unusable) we still might get our work done on the backup system. For dualboot system I would recommend to always keep a Knoppix CD ready so that if the beta release corrupts your grub, you can boot by knoppix and rectify this error, for People like me who use two different systems — its a free world, do whatever we like.
As rightly stated by Bryan, we should always file bugs and if possible with re-create scenario. More experienced users might also try running an application which is crashing in gdb and send the gdb output. If you are asking what is gdb, please ignore this paragraph.
First (besides packages from page mentioned above) you’ll have to install libdrm (not available in OpenSuSE instalation) and few other Compiz dependences (inter alia control-center2 :/ ),
Then you’ll notice the following messages, while trying to run compiz on gnome:
compiz: GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap is missing
compiz: Failed to manage screen: 0
compiz: No managable screens found on display :1
(mesa too old?)
and kde:
compiz: Root visual is not a double buffered GL visual
compiz: Failed to manage screen: 0
compiz: No managable screens found on display :1
Finally success on Fvwm
AMAZING impression, realy amazing.
Edited 2006-02-18 23:17
does the opensuse installer support resizing hfs+ partitions? i’d like to try xgl and stuff on my imac.
I can personally confirm that Xgl/Compiz work on i810. I have a Celeron-M based laptop with integrated i915GM video. Compiz works reasonably well overall. Wobbly windows is a little slow, but according to the notes, its a driver issue that will be resolved soon.
You don’t need a badass GPU to take advantage of the sexy new interface.
glitz-0.5.3 rpm for opensuse ??????
I had a 6GB partition set up as “/” for this SuSE beta release and I’d selected, apparently, “5.86GB” of packages (and no indication that this was too close to the 6GB for comfort). Went through the 5 CD install, but it barfed mid-way through the 5th CD with a dialogue box warning that disk space was low. I continued and, sure enough, the partition filled up and didn’t install about 40 packages.
A good job I can re-use the CD-RW’s again 🙂 Better luck with the forthcoming Beta 5, eh SuSE? I’ll try again when that’s released…