The XDarwin project announces that a hardware-accelerated version 4.3 is on the horizon which contains significant font integration functionality with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar.Discounted pre-orders are now being taken for the final release of XDarwin 4.3, for anyone who wishes to receive the final version on CD as soon it is available.
Notable improvements will include:
* Hardware accelerated GLX in rootless mode
* Ability to use all native Mac OS X fonts
* new -configure X server option
* Faster 2-D drawing in rootless mode
* Much faster full screen mode 2-D drawing, comparable to rootless mode
* New font configuration library (fontconfig)
A feature-complete pre-release version 4.2.99.901 is available immediately for testing by advanced users and beta testers. This snapshot is a release candidate for final version 4.3.0, which is expected to be available later this month. Prebuilt binaries for Mac OS X 10.2 of the prerelease are available for download here.
Installation of the pre-release is only intended for the adventurous and those who can afford downtime and the risks associated with pre-release software. All others are encouraged to place an order for the CD which will be available in late February. Instructions for manually installing are available and instructions for using the XInstall script.
It is anticipated that the libraries and X clients from 4.3.0 will be included in Apple’s final release of X11 for Mac OS X. Testing of this snapshot, particularly by Darwin users not running Mac OS X, is encouraged to shake out any final bugs before the 4.3.0 release. Fink users can currently access this release in the unstable packages, but note that a dependency on the xfree86 4.2.1.1 packages will necessitate building XDarwin twice. This will be removed once XDarwin 4.3 is released.
In the meantime, XFree86 4.3 is expected around at 20 February.
http://www.xdarwin.org , *.com does not seem to have much information.
I tried Fink and XDarwin in the past on my 500MHz iBook and obviously it could use some speed improvements… but I tried Apple’s X11 implementation and it was great for running the gimp & all… so honestly I’d like to know what this new XDarwin version could offer over Apple’s X11… any thoughts?
… since apple’s x11 _is_ xdarwin with a name change… im not quite sure what your asking..
Definitively more info it’s needed
with any possability of getting open sourced for XF86 on x86?
XF86 on x86 is already hardware accelerated, if that’s what you’re alluding to. It consists of fairly basic 2D primitives, but the ones that are there are quite fast. Of course, in this day of lickable, gradient filled interfaces, pretty much the only things that get used anymore are blitters (window scrolling/moving) and overlays (video).
(It pisses me off that the store where you order the X Darwin CD has a .asp page formating.)
– If you like hardware accelerated buy an ATI Fire GL 8800 (350 euros) and install (or download)the ATI driver under XFree 4.1 or 4.2 on a x86 PC machine. It’s an amazing card + environment.
> It pisses me off that the store where you order the X Darwin CD has a .asp page formating
It shouldn’t. The people at XDarwin did business regarding the store, with whoever saw fit. And these people happen to run NT servers. So what? 25-35% of the servers on the net run NT/2k. What’s the big deal that made you pissed off? Stop hating technologies and people please. I am advocating this on osnews since day 1. Love and embrace technology, no matter where it comes from. It is all made from developers, and developers, are just all the same, everywhere.
(I have to say that You are fast Eugenia.)
OK, but it just doesn’t feel good.
Windows NT5 (advanced) server family are quite fine; but .asp ? it’s weird to promote XDarwin.
I like all technical people and it doesn’t matter what they use, as long as they are nice people.
… but they should have used other partner/hosting.
Hardware accelerated is nice for http://www.moonlight3d.net,
and http://www.softimage.com/corporate/press/pressreleases/010914_ibc_x…
Eugenia, not all people are the same. Believe it or not, there are certain things that are morally right and things that are morally wrong. I’m not one of those people who believes all corporations are automatically evil, but I do believe that certain corporations overstep their bounds. Loving all technology blindly, simply for the love of the technology is something that would be wonderful in the ideal world, but in the real world, is simply blindness. As much as we’d like to avoid it, morality is tightly integrated with technology, just as ethics is tightly intertwined with science. Discussions of science without regards to ethical implications would be silly, and I hold that discussions of technology without regards to moral implications is equally silly.
Morality is something that changes from person to person. It is something based on conviction (religious beliefs, culture, etc.). Ethics on the other hand is more universal. For example, being a nudist is nothing wrong with ethics, but parading yourself nude to people that don’t want to see you nude goes against ethics.
Just a note…
not all people are the same. Believe it or not, there are certain things that are morally right and things that are morally wrong. I’m not one of those people who believes all corporations are automatically evil,
This might be out of subject but as far as I heard, Microsoft people (employes) made a big money contribution to http://www.vim.org development out of their salary, simply because they love it down at Redmond-Microsoft.
It’s wonderfull just to think about it, considering gvim is a windows editor.
(gvim is my favorite windows editor)
I meant considering gvim is a unix/linux editor.
“Believe it or not, there are certain things that are morally right and things that are morally wrong.”
Actually, there is no proof at all for this statement.
Personally, I don’t think morals or ethics exist at all. And science has *nothing* at all to do with morals or ethics. Science has to do with evidence, facts, and theories. Granted ethics and morals are theories, they lack evidence and facts. The only facts we have are that ethics and morles have something to do with socioligy.
I agree, love technology for what it is and don’t go on about your personal moral an ethical opinions. This site is about technology and it’s technical pro’s and con’s. If you want to discuss morals and ethics please go to a philosophy site.
This might be out of subject but as far as I heard, Microsoft people (employes) made a big money contribution to http://www.vim.org development out of their salary, simply because they love it down at Redmond-Microsoft.
They probably did it because it’s one of the few good editors on Windows – if not the only one.
One can argue about the userfriendliness of vim’s command syntax, but it offers powerful editing features I have yet to see in any GUI text editor.
The MS developers prefer the Linux vi/vim version.
They are quit happy about it for its stability
preformance and scalability. I even heard
there are some Linux servers/workstations inside
Redmond…i guess they use them only for test purposes
From what I gather, morals are the psycholgical sense of right and wrong; whereas, ethics are a scale on which proper behavior is measured. I would agree that there is no such thing as universal morals. However, I would also argue that there is no such thing as universal ethics, either. Only when all parties agree upon the scale on which the behavior is to be judged can it be said that the behavior is unethical.
That said, I don’t believe anyone meant to imply that we should blindly hate developers or technology. I think chicobaud probably associates, too closely, the technology of ASP with the objectionable business tactics of Microsoft. I can understand this. I boycott Microsft and enoucrage others to do so as well (for the little good it does) because of my moral objections to the way the company behaves.
I think chicobaud perceived a hypocritical behavior from the XDarwin group in patronizing a company that uses a non-open source application (which also indirectly supports Microsoft and their objectionable behavior). However, I think that view is flawed because it assumes at least one of two points: 1)The maintainers of XDarwin believe that ASP should be open source 2)The maintainers of XDarwin object to supporting Microsoft. I don’t know if either is true, so I won’t comment about that.
If it were the case that the XDarwin developers subscribed to belief that all software should be open source, then I could see the hypocritical nature of supporting a company that uses ASP technology. In which case, I could see why chicobaud would be “pissed” about XDarwin using the services of a company supports ASP.
Apple’s X11.app is NOT a renamed XDarwin. There are some subtle differences between the two, incuding right now X11.app has hardware accelerated OpenGL.
so they got xdarwin for osx, but when do we get “osx for darwin”
i mean,
u can download darwin for x86 from the apple developers site,
but when do we get to see all those funky graphics on the x86 system?
i think if mac customised their linux for x86 – it’d be the greatest distro in the world! (except for redhat 🙂
While there’s nothing wrong with packaging up XFree86 and selling CDs (it is a big download), it seems kind of weird for the only announcement posted here to be the one from the guys who are taking money it…
As for Apple’s X11, it’s currently based on a snapshot of XFree86 4.2.0, but they are working on bringing it up to date with the latest XFree86 code right now. Truthfully, XFree86 4.2.99.901 is as fast (or faster) than Apple’s X11. The only thing not there is Apple’s quartz-wm.
So yes, they are all related. All of the X11 releases on MacOSX are in some way based on XFree86, and the work being done by the XonX folks (http://sf.net/projects/xonx/), which is where the credit is *really* due.
Well, weren’t all ms-dos versions and early windows builds all programmed in vi and built on unix machines? (Sorry, I don’t remember which unix was Microsoft’s)
Jeremy
AFAIK windows is still developed on Unix…but that may have changed since win2k. and the Unix JSYO was Xenix
can we now run Office X in X11 all in the same window?
What I see here is a person with a loss of respect to the people making XDarwin – just because of an NT-server serving ASP-processed html. This makes no sense, guys!
Even though some of you hate Microsoft, it makes no sense to hate those persons who might be forced to use it. In my opinion – and that might be somewhat liberal – Microsoft serves nice software for developers. I recently started looking at ASP.NET – and you know what? It doesn’t bite your head off or make you an ultra-capitalist like Bill Gates (*sarcasm*) as some of you might claim.
I like Open Source Software, *BSD, GNU et cetera – but I’m not idealistic. I’m not in the same business as the GNU-fanatics proclaiming software communism – it simply isn’t realistic. From my point of view, the software world may turn into a place where open souce licenses and proprietary licenses live side by side – and that’s also why I promote the BSD- and MIT-licenses.
Please – be nice to the developers at XDarwin. They make free software for your Mac at home – so stop bitching just because of some Microsoft-technology!
—
Anders
so .. can you run X with Aqua as the window manager and run both Mac apps and linux apps all on the same desktop?
Is this hardware accelaration the same as Quartz Extreme, where quartz gives *ALL* 2D/3D rendering to the GPU?
According to Apple’s own technical documents, Quartz Extreme does *not*, I repeat, does *not* accelerated *any* drawing at all. It uses OpenGL only to accelerate window compositing. OpenGL is used to accelerate the process of combining the semi-transparent windows into the final buffer. All Quartz2D rendering is still done by the CPU!
Wow. Unbelievable how much misinformation is around about Quartz, QuartzGL, the “unixness/linuxness” of MacOS X and Aqua.
Alone this sentence
i think if mac customised their linux for x86
(no offense, Fortis) makes me wonder where to start, and it doesn’t even touch X11, Aqua or Quartz.
have font acceraltion… ?
1. What is the improvement of this over the previous version.
2. Does apple use (by default) X11 as the Desktop Enviroment (with Aqua as the WM)?
> (It pisses me off that the store where you order the X Darwin CD has a .asp page formating.)
What pisses me off more is that the website is broken. I can’t add anything to my cart, and although a secure website is available for shopping, it keeps linking to http:// URLs. This is just broken.
Anonymous, you are dead wrong. Apple does not use X11 as their windowing server in any way, shape, or form. They use their own home-rolled windowing system based on PDF graphics (derived largely from the PostScript-based windowing system in NeXTStep). Ever since the initial release of Mac OS X, people at the XonX project have been working hard to make an X11 server that runs inside the OS X windowing server, with a certain degree of success. Recently, Apple released their own version of an X11 server which runs inside the OS X windowing server.
No, font integration. All native MacOS X fonts will be available to those X11 applications that use the system XDarwin will use.