Wayland Archive

Fun with X.org

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-14 Wayland 36 Comments

"Chapter 5 of the FreeBSD Handbook provides an excellent overview for understanding and configuring the X Window system. Today's article goes beyond the Handbook to demonstrate some of the cool things you can do with your FreeBSD system and other systems running X."

Complete Sourrce Code to SciTech SNAP Graphics for Sale

Submitted by Daniel Kruse 2006-11-17 Wayland 11 Comments

"SciTech Software, Inc. today announced that it has ceased further development of its SNAP device driver technology in favor of a new line of web and business logic technologies. SciTech also announced that it would begin looking for a buyer for the company's existing core technology, SciTech SNAP."

Compiz Fork: David Reveman’s Side of the Story

Submitted by J. 2006-10-07 Wayland 32 Comments

"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."

David Reveman: Technical Reasons for Beryl Fork Incorrect

Submitted by notig 2006-10-01 Wayland 43 Comments

"All technical reasons (alternative configuration system, alternative decorator, xinerama...) for this fork are incorrect and I know that at least Quinn Storm is aware of this, based on a phone conversation we had last week. With a few notable exceptions, most of the code I've seen going into what is now beryl is not high quality code that would be considered for compiz."

How XGL Works

Submitted by elsewhere 2006-09-26 Wayland 22 Comments

A non-technical overview of the Xgl implementation, and how it relates to Compiz and the nVidia driver, has been published by Emanuele Tamponi. Interestingly, the article mentions that Compiz requires Mesa to implement the infamous GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap function; but since the new beta driver from nVidia implements said function, you can now have Compiz in 3D glory without Xgl or AIGLX (howto).

Compiz Forked: Beryl

Submitted by SEJeff 2006-09-19 Wayland 54 Comments

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.

Mandriva 2007 To Feature Xgl/AIGLX

Submitted by darkmind 2006-08-23 Wayland 11 Comments

Mandriva 2007 will have support for 3D desktop effects through Xgl/AIGLX. The choice between AIGLX and Xgl will be made automatically according to the graphic card driver possibilities. The support is currently being tested in Mandriva Cooker, and will work for both GNOME and KDE through Free as well as proprietary drivers.

Overview of Modern Fancy UNIX Desktop Systems

Thom Holwerda 2006-08-19 Wayland 68 Comments

"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."

XGL Tutorials for Popular Distros

Eugenia Loli 2006-08-18 Wayland 14 Comments

Some tutorials geared towards the three most popular distros: Ubuntu, SuSE and Fedora Core (1, 2, 3).

A New Acceleration Architecture for Xorg: Glucose

Submitted by Joël Cornuz 2006-08-16 Wayland 58 Comments

Trolltech's Zack Rusin today introduced Glucose on Freedesktop Xorg mailing list. Glucose is a new "OpenGL based acceleration architecture" that "uses XGL code". It does not require any change on the drivers side, except a call to glucoseDriverInit.

Cairo 1.2.0 Released

Submitted by trevor 2006-07-01 Wayland 46 Comments

"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

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2006-05-23 Wayland 34 Comments

"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

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2006-05-20 Wayland 19 Comments

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."

Xfree 4.6.0 Released

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2006-05-17 Wayland 40 Comments

Xfree 4.6.0 has been released. New features include security updates, driver updates and fixes, input driver enhancements, Xinerama improvements, and much more. Read the release notes, readme, and installation notes.

Homeland Security Audit Flags ‘Critical’ X Bug

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-03 Wayland 44 Comments

An open-source security audit program funded by the US Department of Homeland Security has flagged a critical vulnerability in the X Window System which is used in Unix and Linux systems. Coverity, the San Franciso-based company managing the project under a $1.25 million grant, described the flaw as the "biggest security vulnerability" found in the X Window System code since 2000.

Kororaa Xgl Demo Live CD Released

Submitted by Chris 2006-03-08 Wayland 36 Comments

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.

Compiz on AIGLX

Submitted by Rahul 2006-03-07 Wayland 20 Comments

Kristian Hogsberg (Red Hat) has been hacking on Compiz and AIGLX to run them together and has managed to do it with impressive performance. "With a bit of hacking, I managed to get compiz (and glxcompmgr) running on aiglx. I'm running it on my i830 laptop, and the performance is actually quite impressive."

XGL To Adopt AIGLX Changes

Submitted by Rahul 2006-03-02 Wayland 46 Comments

The cooperation between the XGL and AIGLX projects to bring better interfaces for the Linux desktop continues as David Reveman (Novell) of XGL has agreed to adopt many changes from the AIGLX project sent in by Kristian Hogsberg (Red Hat).

Accelerated X11 Flame Wars! — Maybe not

Submitted by fsmdave 2006-02-27 Wayland 37 Comments

3D graphics on X11: XGL vs AIGLX. This article delves into the inner workings of XGL and AIGLX. It shows that there are many similarities between these two competing/co-operating "rivals" and plenty of room for growth.

David Reveman on AIGLX, Metacity, nVidia, Xgl

Submitted by GhePeU 2006-02-23 Wayland 62 Comments

David Reveman of Novell shares his thoughts on Xgl, Metacity, and more."I've been getting a lot of mail from people asking me about my thoughts on AIGLX, the GL compositing work being done on Metacity and nVidia's xdevconf paper. Instead of replying to everyone individually, I though I'd send a mail to the Xorg list."