OrangeCrate has an interview with Hideya Kawahara, of Sun Microsystems, the man behind the development of Project Looking Glass. Read the interview here.
An Interview with Hideya Kawahara of Project Looking Glass
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Wonder if looking glass will work with the BSDs without much hassle. As is becoming the trend increasingly, many open-source apps are becoming more and more Linux specific, which is a shame, really.
Well, there is nothing that is stopping Looking Glass from working on BSD, the only possible downside is its reliance on Java, but with that being said, with the improved threading of 5.x, I don’t see any reason why it would be a strickly Linux thing.
With that being said, SUN has said that they’re also going to make it available for Solaris, which will mean that there will be a nice unified desktop, from their Java Desktop System right up to SUN servers running Solaris being used in conjunction with the SUN Ray appliances.
A 3D desktop, running on today’s hardware, heavily using Java? Pull the other one. We’ll see Longhorn long before anyone uses this for anything.
I tried Looking Glass on a Centrino 1500Mhz IBM laptop. It was actually faster than I expected. Normal panning, moving windows was smooth – only when I madly spun the desktop (which is the insides of a virtual sphere) did I see lag.
Sadly, couldn’t test more ‘cos the keyboard didn’t work.
Some more thoughts in my linked URL.
BTW, does the URL linked to in the article work? It’s giving me a 403.
I am actually running Looking Glass right now and its “usable”
. YOu can do you normal work as you do right now and do not much pay attention to the 3D part. Its really nice. Slow? I depends on your hardware i guess i use a P 2.8 / 1 GB mem and a mx400 64 Nvidia graphic card. Its really is responsive and looks even nicer. I changed icons / backgrounds and the apps on the taskbar…mmm i love it already. Using build 4 for Linux.
Despite it’s alpha state it’s more stable, and also is usable with other desktop envrionments, so its a good way to get an accelerated, but still usable, desktop (think of 3d enhancements for kde :-D)
You are saying that just because its looking glass from Sun Microsystems.
Why dont you post something with a technical statement or at least some insightful point of view instead?
Regards
No i’m saying that because I tried both, the two use a different approach, looking glass is a 3D desktop Envrionment that sits on top of X like a normal DE, metisse instead: “It consists of a virtual X server called Xwnc, a special version of FVWM, and a FVWM module FvwmAmetista. Xwnc is a mix of Xvnc and XDarwin. It draws nothing on your screen; everything is drawn into pixmaps. Similarly to Xvnc, but with a different protocol, Xwnc can send these pixmaps (and other information) to a “viewer”. FvwmAmetista is such a viewer; it uses OpenGL for rendering the X desktop into a window of a “regular” 3D accelerated X server.” (from freshmeat description) with this approach 3D acceleration it’s avaiable for standard WMs like FVWM in this case.
Also being written in C makes it avaiable also to BSD and other *NIX where a native java isn’t avaiable
I think looking glass has potential and I am now involvrd with the open source project, BUT I know you can’t be posting from Looking Glass now as it is not stable enough for mozilla to function correctly, and firefox crashes it altogether. Only about 3 apps work with it right now. Leave the BS out of this as it doesn’t help the project to spread misinformation. It is NOT yet practically usable; the release is a developer release.
you know Looking Glass runs in managed mode too. So first get the facts
and than spread your own BS. Besides that i never said: i am currently posting this message from whithin Looking Glass but said: i am currently running looking glass…..could be on a different machine he? pffff