X11 Archive

Adam Jackson has announced the availability of "the zeroth release candidate(s) of the next Xorg release(s)." The changelog is here. Before downloading, be warned, in the developers' words: "The RC number is not accidental. This is unpolished and rough, and is only just at the point where we can usefully have large numbers of people testing it and fixing things."

Ross Burton has written new entry on his personal blog with a good summary about X architecture these days. It's a great reading if you just became lost between so many new extensions, different X servers and ways to hardware accelerated it.

Some Trolltech programmers are doing some optimization work in the x.org RENDER extension. RENDER has been used with COMPOSITE to make "transparency" and "shadow" effects, and its slowness has stopped it from being widely adopted. Hopefully, this optimization work will make things better, although it's not clear in the email if this addresses the "XAA sucks, someone needs to take KAA to x.org" problem which is often said to be the real problem of render slowness. RENDER is also often used to do more things, like AA fonts, so this will be good for X desktop in general.

Periodically we hear someone say that Linux isn't suitable for graphic design work. One common complaint is its lack of an integrated system-wide color management system (CMS). Fortunately today's Linux systems have free cross-platform open source color management alternatives. Happy Note: On an unrelated note, this is our 10,000th story! Took us 3.5 years to get here.

FOX is a platform independent GUI toolkit by Jeroen van der Zijp. v1.4 has some exciting new features.

The X Window System, which is the foundation of graphical displays on Linux, Unix, BSD, and optionally on Mac OS X/Darwin, has long stayed submerged in the public consciousness just as it has been submerged under window managers and heavyweight desktops.