Wayland Archive

Preview: Beryl 0.2.0

"Beryl 0.2.0 will be released shortly and I spent time the last week testing out Beryl 0.2.0 RC2 on Kubuntu's Edgy Eft. The improvements found in 0.2.0 are simply amazing. Improvements in usability features, improvements in the pure 3D eye candy, and even the Beryl Settings Manager has been improved (the layout has become much more logically laid out). As you read through this preview of Beryl 0.2.0 and see some of the screenshots, I think you will get a firm grasp on how impressive Beryl can be. Basically, Beryl makes OS X and Vista look old and antiquated."

Has the Desktop Linux Bubble Burst?

In 2002, both KDE and GNOME released their last major revisions; KDE released KDE 3.0 on 3rd April, while GNOME followed shortly after with GNOME 2.0 on 27th June. For the Linux desktop, therefore, 2002 was an important year. Since then, we have continiously been fed point releases which added bits of functionaility and speed improvements, but no major revision has yet seen the light of day. What's going on?

Compiz Fork: David Reveman’s Side of the Story

"Compiz is the compositing window manager that works on top of Xgl or AIGLX to enable Desktop Effects. Recently, a community developer named Quinn Storm announced that she would start a Compiz-based fork project called 'Beryl', citing frustration with Novell regarding getting her code fixes accepted into the Compiz upstream source tree. We called Compiz/Xgl maintainer David Reveman to get his side of the story."

Compiz Forked: Beryl

Just when you thought fancy effects on Linux desktops started to get remotely understandable, focussing on Aiglx/Xgl with Compiz, a fork of Compiz is announced: Beryl. This is the logical continuation of the popular compiz-quinnstorm branch, used by many Ubuntu users. "During this summer, and during the last few weeks, some major additions were done in compiz-quinnstorm, bringing a whole new decorator, cgwd, which was designed to be fully themable, and a new settings backend, csm, which intended to drop most of the gnome deps - there were other reasons for this, but this is not our current subject. Consequently, we reached a situation where it's quite impossible to come back." The main reason is general unwillingness to work with and unresponsiveness to the developers of the -quinnstorm branch from the official Compiz guys.

Overview of Modern Fancy UNIX Desktop Systems

"In the last few months, there has been a lot of talk about Xgl, compiz, AIGLX et cetera. It seems that 'Xgl' has become a synonym for fancy desktop on Linux - but no one seems to talk about the alternatives or how it all works. I have had a little look into this and am going to summarize it for y'all. I will explain where the following come from and how they work: Xglx, Xegl, Luminocity, and AIGLX."

Cairo 1.2.0 Released

"We are very pleased to announce this release, the first major update to cairo since the original 1.0 release 10 months ago. Compared to cairo 1.0, the 1.2 release doubles the number of supported backends, adding PDF, PostScript & SVG backends to the previous xlib/win32, and image backends."

X.Org 11R7.1 Released

"Five months after release of X11R7.0, the modularized and autotooled release of the MIT Licensed X Window System source code, the X.Org Foundation has issued its first modular roll-up release. X11R7.1 supports Linux, Solaris, and BSD systems. It includes important new server and driver features for embedded systems, 64 bit platforms, enhanced operating system support, and accelerated indirect GLX support. It most importantly demonstrates to developers and industry immediate benefits of modularization."

Xorg 7.2 Release Schedule Revealed

The schedule for Xorg 7.2 has been posted to the Xorg announce mailing list; Xorg 7.2 is planned for 17th November 2006. The mail also says xorg 7.1 is planned to be released on 22nd May. "7.1 is basically done at this point. The release won't actually go out until probably Monday, due to press release timing and (hopefully) doc updates, but excluding the server and the badged tarballs, everything else is pretty much in place. So, woo."

Kororaa Xgl Demo Live CD Released

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.