The team behind Kororaa, a Gentoo-based live CD, have released a live CD showcasing Xgl. “Today I am happy to release a Kororaa Live CD showcasing Xgl technology. If you would like to find out what it’s all about, then download the CD and boot up your pc! The Live CD comes with Xorg 7, Gnome 2.12.2, 3D support, and of course Xgl.” Download locations.
You can download a torrent for the Live CD here:
http://linuxtracker.org/torrents-details.php?id=1604
I started downloading using HTTP but the speed dropped to a crawl almost instantly.
This sure sounds interesting and I would like to applaud the developers of this live CD for their efforts. I’ve been wanting to try out XGL for quite some time now and this lowers the barrier tremendously.
Edited 2006-03-08 14:21
ftp link please
Can the ATI cards that use the fglrx drivers make use of XGL’s hardware acceleration?
From linuxtracker.org: “The Live CD comes with X.Org 7.0, GNOME 2.12.2, 3D support and of course Xgl. Supported drivers are ‘nvidia’ (NVIDIA) and ‘fglrx’ (ATI).”
That’s something that puzzled me: IIRC in the beginning ATi cards weren’t supported.
For example, read here:
http://en.opensuse.org/Using_Xgl_on_SUSE_Linux
Maybe they fixed it, any new driver release lately?
Would be a nice way of showing this amazing technology to friends, as getting XGL/Compiz to work with KDE seems to be a lot of hassle(and I don’t want to run both Gnome and KDE on the same box)
getting XGL/Compiz to work with KDE seems to be a lot of hassle
It should not be any harder than with Gnome, as long as you get the XGL bit working. You only have to replace Kwin with Compiz, just as you replace Metacity on Gnome. I think it’s as simple as adding ‘export KDEWM=compiz’ in .xsession or .xinitrc.
KDE apps have a habbit of not showing up in kicker/gnome panel among other things. I believe there was a patch to fix this however.
You’re going to notice zero differene without using compiz. It’ll just look like a regular X/KDE session.
Edited 2006-03-08 16:59
Back in February, in response to OsNews “Novell Releases Xgl Enhancements, ‘Compiz’ Compositing Manager”, I wrote:
“I look forward to eventually testing out a live-CD to see the difference in responsiveness as compared to standard, non-accelerated X.”
[http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=13589&comment_id=93713]
Just writing back now to say thanks to those who have made this desire become a reality. Thanks very much.
XGl/compiz work quite well with ATI cards. I recently installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake to try out XGl/compiz and I did not have a single crash.
There are some howtos how to set it up:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=131253
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=127090
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=131267
Probably there are others. Just google for ubuntu xgl compiz howto.
It wasn’t totally trivial to set it up and I had some problems, but if you want to invest an afternoon, you should be able to do it (if your hardware is supported).
I’m at work where using BitTorrent would be a good way to get IT police on you. And the link at getkororaa.com is hosed…so, any help?
Man! Even though almost nothing but xgl worked (keyboard layouts, hal, network), it was hard to reboot.
Couldn’t believe how stable and pleasant everything felt!
Some effects need some tweaking, but in general – man, is this sweet!
Great work Novell+RedHat for making this possible!
And kudos to Kororaa for getting the first XGL-enabled livecd out!
Keep up the good work!
Works great. I’m writing this from Firefox 1.5, included in the LiveCD. Everything I had seen in the videos works nicely and smoothly. Zoom in, zoom out, desktop cube, expose-like effect, transparency. Very impressive, even more if I add I run a quite modest nowadays P4 2Ghz and GF4MX with only 64MB.
I almost forget… there’s a handy .txt included in the Desktop, it teaches you every keyboard shortcut you need to play with the effects.
I’d advise anyone interested to try it out, this LiveCD seems to be the easiest way until now to see what all the fuss is about with your own eyes. Great work, indeed.
Edited 2006-03-08 23:22
I agree, it works wonderfully. Thank you Kororaa!
But one tiny question… The “Super-Key” is supposed to be the windows key.
I’ve tried on two different computers and can not zoom in/out. My windows keys seem to do nothing. Any ideas?
I just rebinded the zoom function to another key to make it work. You can do that using gconf, there are further instructions on the Key Shortcuts text file.
Great. And also the hardware detection was first class for my box, which has some unusual hardware.
Only no internet connection, but I need pppoe support and it doesn’t matter anyway.
Thanks everyone!
I am so sorry about the broken link!
The ISO appears to have been extremely popular.
As such my hosting provider had to turn the ISO off because it was utilising too much bandwidth.
I am currently in the process of arranging some mirrors. In the mean time, if people can download via bittorrent, there file here:
http://linuxtracker.org/torrents-details.php?id=1604
Once again, I’m sorry for the inconvenience
I hope you enjoy the Live CD once you can get it
Cheers,
Chris
Edited 2006-03-09 01:10
I am currently in the process of arranging some mirrors. In the mean time, if people can download via bittorrent, there file here:
http://linuxtracker.org/torrents-details.php?id=1604
The bittorrent’s speed has been steadily increasing all day. I say leave the direct download out until the torrent slows down. For now, the more people on it, the better.
Thanks for your work.
Yeah, good idea. I’ll need to put something somewhere though as people have mentioned they can’t use Bittorrent. I’ll see what I can do.
Cheers,
-c
This is an excellent livecd. It worked amazingly on my wife’s Dell 1.8ghz P4 (4 year old box) with old Nvidia card.
It worked so well I signed up on this site to offer congratulations!
Awesome, thanks!
Glad it worked well for you
-c
See
http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/XglHowTo
This is really nice! It looks and behaves wonderful, does anyone know when this great eye candy will become commonplace in most distros? I am looking forward to it! Excellent work on this live cd. Congrats.
It seems I am more productive using this as well. It’s easy to see what windows are active etc…
The torrent file isnt connecting for me…
Other torrents work fine though. Are there any other torrent files available?
Im having the same problem.
For those with bittorrenting issues, there are a few mirrors available now. Check out the website again
-c
Using an Acer Aspire T140 (Athlon 64 3200+, ATI X300SE
card), most of the stuff on the live CD seemed to work, but clicking on the “Show Desktop” on the bottom left of GNOME desktop locked my machine up solid straight after shrinking the windows down, forcing me to power cycle. Anyone else see this? Loved the live CD though and let’s hope future distros include this as standard.
BTW, it would be nice if the Intel family of graphics chips were included in the fun too – a lot of business Dell desktops use them nowadays and why shouldn’t they have bling too?
Apparently it doesn’t like the two machines I’ve tried this on.
My machine at home with a radeon 9600 boots, and mounts the CD. The first time I tried, they mouse was very stuttery, and the keyboard didn’t work at all (at least, hitting ‘a’ gave me ‘ggggggggggggg’ in a terminal). The next time I tried, the mouse wouldn’t even move.
So I brought it in to work… But it won’t even get past the point where it’s supposed to mount the CD (in a very typical IDE cdrom drive).
Oh well… Guess I’ll have to wait till xgl becomes mainstream.
The iso finished downloading overnight and I’ve just gotten the chance to fire it up. I’m now back on my mac, and the interface feels dull and rigid 😛
Is there anybody who would benefit from dmesgs of people for whom this does or doesn’t work?
I posting this from my work computer (for some reason – probably the ATI chipset – it froze on my laptop) and this is incredible.
One little gripe: the inability to have higher resolutions than 1024×768. My monitor/card can go up to 1600×1200, and currently it looks a bit blurry.
As a tech demo, however, this is incredibly awesome…too bad I have to reboot into Windows after posting this!!
Go into /etc/X11/xorg.conf, fix up the resolution portion, add whatever resolution you require, and restart X.
Thanks, I’ll give it a try!
This absolutely blows it out of the water for responsiveness, indeed I’ve never seen firefox so responsive off of the mark!
I would say that this has to be one of the most sprightly GUI’s I’ve ever come across on any platform. I never thought I’d ever say this, but it even gives BeOS/Zeta a damned good run for its money on the same hardware!
I can’t wait for this to fully stablise. 🙂
I gotta agree with the smoothness, it was great.
This one just blew me away… I have been following the whole cairo, glitz, accelerate the window manager or X thing… and then, all of a sudden this! and it just works! no all-the-time-crashing alpha stage software that just could be nice! I think this is a major jump fordward for linux in it’s conquest of the dektop!
Just one funny thing I have to report.. afer running the live-cd i rebooted into (really dull looking) windows and my network card just would not work anymore! tried booting back to Kororaa and there it was working again… tried a lot ot ofther things until I found out the cd was completely blocking my network card during the halt process… had to boot to Kororaa and then switch off the computer using the power switch to get the card running again!
I think the problem is nForce4 LAN with older LAN nforce kernel driver