Daniel Stone writes over at Slashdot: “A short time ago, freedesktop.org xlibs 1.0 was released. Simply put, this is the collection of libX11, libXext, and other little-used libraries that kind of power your whole desktop. The xlibs team at fd.o are now maintaining all these libraries, and more, and we’re going to be making releases as part of the fd.o platform, which is far more wide-ranging, but it still forms an important part of the platform. Share and enjoy!”
freedesktop.org xlibs 1.0 Released
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So the answer for the latest news from Xfree86 is:
“the choise”.
i am glad.
I love the way he started off the email
“Hey dudes,”
And of course I’ll choose Keith’s way for my desktop
Does this bring true alpha-blending etc (eye-candy) now to the Desktop?
Will someone please explain the project a little more.
Also, does freedesktop currently (and in the future) support remote X?
I think that this should explain a lot
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/12/0026208
No, these are the libraries that interface to the X server. Some of these libraries (like Xrender) do provide the APIs for doing alpha-blending, etc, but it is the X server that implements them.
Freedesktop.org is also working on an advanced X server that will implement OpenGL-accelerated drawing, compositing, etc. The new X server is just a regular X server (you can run KDE or GNOME completely unmodified, for example) and like all X servers, it supports remote X.
“And of course I’ll choose Keith’s way for my desktop.”
And ofcourse you say that w/out the slightest bit of knowledge of what that actually means.
keep it up!
My favourite feature however would be 32-bit support (XFree86 currently has 24-bit). Sweet.
“And ofcourse you say that w/out the slightest bit of knowledge of what that actually means.”
That means, that (for my desktop PC) I prefer fd.o’s kdrive based xserver,rather than XFree86’s solution.
“My favourite feature however would be 32-bit support (XFree86 currently has 24-bit). Sweet.”
And ofcourse you say that w/out the slightest bit of knowledge of what that actually means.
“the choise”??
And… what’s happened with the drivers? Will nvidia release drivers for xserver?
I hope it.
There is no need for drivers. This is release of the libraries, not the server. What this enables is simple point for toolkits to depend on, instead of the monolith that is XFree86 (libraries+server+misc+cruft).
But I too hope that vendors will adapt and write drivers for kdrive/xsserver, once it reaches final like Xlib.
Take a look at this link.. you might rethink your complaint against xfree86.
http://plug.org.in/pipermail/plug-mail/2002-December/006125.html
It seems 24 bit is the same as 32 bit, minus a compatability layer.
Thanks for reusing my exact wording 😛 you really confused me there!
Its not so much compatibility as preserving 32-bit alignment. Doing unaligned reads/writes is a performance disaster on x86, and downright illegal on MIPS and other RISC chips. However, this isn’t what rajan r necessarily meant. Some display systems do support > 8-bits per pixel color depth. 256 shades of a color isn’t nearly enough. Consider a pure-blue gradient across a 1600×1200 screen. There would be stripes 6 pixels wide all with the same color. People would definately notice banding in that case. For this reason, some display systems (Sun, SGI) go up to 48-bit color, for maximum precision and fidelity.
Aah..
I thought, it was 36-bit color because of RGBA (4x8bits)
(Yuck). Anyone tried this with the NVidia drivers? Which version? When i installed it on Gentoo i had something like XNvidia but that didn’t work out after some tries.
Take a look at this link.. you might rethink your complaint against xfree86
XFree86 has not previously implemented 8-bit alpha channels or alpha blended compositing. The extra byte for every pixel merely served as padding which was useful for 64-bit cleanliness as the existing 24bpp code was not 64-bit clean in the slightest.
The mailing list post you linked mentions both of these.
“The last 8 bits from the 32 bits are really reserved for compatibility with host processor and for future enhancements.”
The “future enhancements” section quite obviously refers to full 8-bit alpha channel support and alpha blended compositing which has been implemented in the new rendering engine in both Keith’s kdrive and the freedesktop server.
Hmm, come to think of it, it could have been that. Though, “I want 32-bit support” is an odd way to say “I want alpha channel.”
@dpi: Eh? Are you talking about the xlibs or the xserver? They are two seperate components. The new xlibs might not work with the NVIDIA drivers. The new xserver definately won,t — it has a completely different driver API. If you want to test the new X server with NVIDIA acceleration (Xnvidia) try looking at this months freedesktop.org XServer mailing list. A couple of days ago I posted a message showing how to fix the “no cards found” problem the Xnvidia server gives you.
Hmm, come to think of it, it could have been that. Though, “I want 32-bit support” is an odd way to say “I want alpha channel.”
@dpi: Eh? Are you talking about the xlibs or the xserver? They are two seperate components. The new xlibs might not work with the NVIDIA drivers. The new xserver definately won,t — it has a completely different driver API. If you want to test the new X server with NVIDIA acceleration (Xnvidia) try looking at this months freedesktop.org XServer mailing list. A couple of days ago I posted a message showing how to fix the “no cards found” problem the Xnvidia server gives you.