From Slashdot: Waimea 0.5.0 was released after about a year from the developer disappearing. It turns out he was just working on getting the OpenGL backend for Cairo completed. Waimea is the first window manager that uses Cairo for rendering.
Waimea Developer Returns From Beyond
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Holy fuck, I gotta try this, it was one of my favoirite WMs, later replaced by Kahakai.
As i know the cvs is online about a couple of months, but the project’s new page is now under freedesktops.org and the 0.5.0 is still extremly buggy. So never change the old good waimea!!! 😉
I’m linux-stupid and can’t get Waimea to “make” after running ./autogen.sh as per it’s cvs README. Did anyone else get the error:
Make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.
also running simply $ ./configure, throws:
configure: error: can not run
.. will it even work with a Mandrake distro? it’s just a window manager, yeah? screenshots look great, hope I can try it out.
If you got it from CVS, you need to run autogen.sh first and then “make”. Try this:
./autogen.sh –prefix=/usr; make; make install
BreakMyGentoo.net has devel snapshots in its portage-overlay if someone wants to try
Cheers, Eugenia. I tried your suggestion but it doesn’t appear to make any difference…
[root@localhost waimea]# ./autogen.sh –prefix=/usr; make; make install
./autogen.sh: running `aclocal’
./autogen.sh: running `autoheader’
./autogen.sh: running `automake –add-missing’
automake: configure.in: installing `config/install-sh’
automake: configure.in: installing `config/mkinstalldirs’
automake: configure.in: installing `config/missing’
automake: configure.in: installing `config/config.guess’
automake: configure.in: installing `config/config.sub’
./autogen.sh: running `autoconf’
./autogen.sh: running `./configure –enable-maintainer-mode –prefix=/usr’
creating cache ./config.cache
configure: error: can not run
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.
make: *** No rule to make target `install’. Stop.
[root@localhost waimea]#
… not to worry.
The screenshots over at freedesktop are pretty impressive. How is it using Cairo though? My understanding is that the GTK would be the place where Cairo is implemented. Is this wrong?
I haven’t even heard of Waimea, but I like the sound of it.
Could this perhaps be replacing Metacity as the default window manager for Gnome someday?
Yeah configure doesn’t works since it can’t find config.sub
Free Software/Open Source programs have the worst names. All I can say is that I hope the programers find beter names for their kids then for thair programs.
I used to use Waimea awhile ago. And I kept checking the site for updates, I’d tried 5 when it first came back before the site went to the new freedesktop site.
The original was great, had a really small footprint, insanely extensible configuration, and was fast fast fast! There were two occasions where I e-mailed david before 5 came out wondering when he figured it would be ready, although he had never mentioned that he was bringing it to be based on cairo and everything.
For those having configuration and compilaion problems I have a version of 5 here that seems to compile fine (which I got before the switchover to freedesktop hosting). Right now it’s built and ready to run, although I’m not sure what cairo it’s built against and what not. If anyone is really interested e-mail me. Although I’d prefer not to have a flood of e-mails if someone can host it they can e-mail me for the tar.gz and then post a link here too.
http://www.dotink.org/~gent/Images/screenshots/waimea5.png
The 255 blue stuff if a video playing… GIMP doesn’t capture the images on mplayer, just the blue.
If you compile from source use /usr/local since it is much more clear what you’re using from a distribution’s package (ie. a RedHat RPM) or what you compiled yourself. I suggest to use that instead of /usr. Doesn’t fix your problem though.
“The 255 blue stuff if a video playing… GIMP doesn’t capture the images on mplayer, just the blue.”
That’s because mplayer is playved with XVideo extension. If you use mplayer -vo x11 it cptures just fine but then you’re also using software rendering.
Secund that!!
I successfully compiled Waimea 0.5.0 on Debian unstable. Here are the steps:
apt-get install build-essential automake pkg-config gettext libcairo1-dev
./autogen.sh
make
make install
This installs Waimea to /usr/local/bin/waimea.
So far, so good. Cairo is a little slow here, since I don’t use Glitz yet. But it is as preety as in the screenshot.
Glad to hear others have had luck as well.
I got it goinging with no problem on archlinux as well (with nothing extra to install other than X and a few basic libraries that where already installed with my minimal desktop) except for fd.o stuff.
Here is what I compiled in order IIRC — all from cvs.
libsvg
libsvg-cairo
glitz
libpixman
cairo
waimea
wampager
Its been running perfect actually, no problem what so ever. Not super fast, and there are a few anoyances, but not actuall bugs, just preference issues.
Its definatley georgeous though. awsome work.
-adam.
Hi!
Following Gnome for a while now (since 1.2 I think), it is very nice to see how it has evolved… Using the X Render extension should really help to make GTK faster (I hope). IMHO, Speed of GTK has become a factor for Gnome acceptance, as well as fonts… I think fonts should be better, the spacing between caracters are sometime weird (two letters are so close while the other one is a mile away). Also, Bold looks ugly and squared.
Don’t think I am negative there, I just wish gnome fonts would look like ClearType (WinXP), then I’ll be an happy boy!
Good night!
Martin.
Font rendering really depends on your settings. My fonts render better than on Windows under Fedora2
You didn’t have any problems with automake and friends? which version are you running?
>> I just wish gnome fonts would look like ClearType
In fact, fonts on gnome look *much* better than on xp…
I cannot get it to compile here either.
I think it has something to do with $ac_config_sub not being set in the configure script, but I haven’t been able to solve it :/
Well, I managed to get it to build by copying the config* stuff from the snapshot. But it’s not the proper way…
Oh my god, that is a very sad statement. Why must it look like cleartype, because that’s what your eyes are used to? Everywhere I see cleartype, it just hurts my eyes. I’m not sure what kind of algorithm they used, but it’s far from optimal. In fact, GNOME fonts (and KDE’s, too imho) look a *lot* better and sharper than cleartype.
Look, I’m open to suggestions, and I won’t call a statement a sad one without that damn good reason. The *only* think that Windows does better with fonts is the spacing. But it has NOTHING to do with cleartype, because the spacing is the same when cleartype is disabled. The only thing cleartype does is subpixel rendering, and it does it very bad.
What are the chances that Gnome 2.8 will use Cairo ?
Is it possible ?
This article made me wonder how cairo is so i build CVS HEAD with Glitz support. demos work great and Glitz gives me a nice speed boost. Those demos alow switching of the backend with “-xlib”, “xrender” or “-glx”. can the current waimea use glx/Glitz too? How can I tell which rendering backend I currently use?
Cairo is already moving into GNOME-but this procss will take time. In all likelihood we will first seee cairo fullscale in GNOME around 2.10/3(?)-2.8 is only 4-5 months away. The cairo developers are currrently working with the pango developers-this is going to be a large and complex transition which in and of itself will probably take 6-8 months to get stabilized. A cairo gtk+ theme has been floating around for about 6 months-unfortunately it proved not to be horribly stable. If I understand things correctly cairo will be overtaking the role libgnomecanvas. Also work is ongoing to integrate cairo into QT4. Th effects of the pango-cairo transition will already be felt in 2.8-but not the full functionality. Probably beta testers will get their hands on this stuff witht the 2.9 development series. Recent threads on the cairo mailing list indicate that they will use PS to generate PDF-thereby being able to produc both PS and PDF output. Glitz is comming along nicely-although I cannot get the glitz demos to run for the life of me. My burning question is what is needed in the way of NVIDIA and ATI support for successfully bring Keith Packards composite extension into X and when such will be available.
Figured it out:
WANT_AUTOMAKE=1.7 WANT_AUTOCONF_2_5=1 ./autogen.sh
enjoy!
when Mozilla will start working on integrating cairo into Gecko-I have seen rumours that this going to take place-will be interesting to see. Also work is ongoing to get cairo working on windows….
Karl, for me to get cairogears/glitztest to work, I had to use glitz CVS.
It turns out he was just working on getting the OpenGL backend for Cairo completed
…but when you put it that way
Well done, Waimea developer guy!
@Anonymous
do you have waimea working with glitz? anyone?
i have waimea working with glitz on arch linux. everything compiled perfectly.
-adam
Is this statement correct:
Glitz is an openGL hardware accelerated implementation of Cairo.
@ adam
how can you tell that your build is really using glitz? or can you configure waimea to use glitz if it is available?
i have the latest cairo and glitz from cvs and glitz demos work just fine…
By Mike (IP: —.wchstr01.pa.comcast.net) – Posted on 2004-06-03 15:55:25
Is this statement correct:
Glitz is an openGL hardware accelerated implementation of Cairo.
Yes, in a way.
Glitz is an openGL hardware accelerated rendering system that Cairo can use. But it is also intended to be used for much more than just Cairo. Right now I think the plan is to get an entire X11 implementation running on glitz.
will the fd.o X Server be built using Glitz/Cairo?
Will Metacity be replaced with Waimea for Gnome?
i got it working on 64bit system on gentoo
with the help of some people on the irc channel 
Snake
I tried to get cute and pass “enable-threading” to ./configure (I do have an SMP system) and make failed.