So who''s tried the Freedesktop Xserver yet? I''ve successfully gotten it compile and run, just not with any actual window manager yet (I''ve been too busy with school, and now I''m at my parents'' for spring break, so I can''t work on it). If you''ve gotten it to work, what do you think? Comments, questions, concerns! Let''s hear ''em! http://chaos.webhop.org

I talked about it with a friend on IRC, and it looks like an interasting thing. He has it installed, but I dont yet - I plan on installing it soon once I get around to it.

I heard it supports true transperincy... like in OS X, is that true? If so, then that is really sweet. I use my terminal all the time, I usually have around 4 open at a time, and they are transperent. Fake transperency though.

He also told me it is quite buggy, it crashes a lot. Is this true? If it is really buggy, I might not even give the effort to try it and wait until they improve it a bit more.

quote: Original post by aftermath
I heard it supports true transperincy... like in OS X, is that true? If so, then that is really sweet. I use my terminal all the time, I usually have around 4 open at a time, and they are transperent. Fake transperency though.

Utilizing some of the extensions Keith added to it (XDamage, et cetera), he added a "compositing manager" (much like a window manager in connection to the server; in fact, I think it he proposed that in the future window managers may also fill the role of compositing manager) which can do various forms of inter-window alpha blending to create the "final output". I''m not sure if it''s hardware accelerated yet (I think it uses XRender), but Keith hopes to make composition (among other things) optionally OpenGL accelerated in the future. Since the alpha blending is based on the unused alpha channel that''s always been part of X11 colors, some applications and parts of widget toolkits still need to be updated to use 1.0 there instead of 0.0, as well as provide more general support in the future (meaning that taking advantage of it requires extra work and that certain applications, like Metacity, have pieces that disappear without more changes, for now).

I haven''t given it a try yet, as I''m too lazy. It doesn''t have very many drivers as of now, making it easy to procrastinate doing so. I do read too many mailing lists though, so I''ve picked up some information on it . I''ve considering trying to help out, but there''s projects with less steep contributor learning curves and graphics really aren''t my favorite thing to program (instead, I''ve been trying to pick up some DSP related things recently for some reason).

There is some hardware acceleration, as a matter of fact. If you look in the bin directory, there are various binaries: Xvesa, Xnvidia, Xati (I think), etc. The only problem is that only certain hardwares are supported with them. For example, I have a geForce2 MX (yes, I have an old computer), and the Xnvidia binary wouldn''t work because it claimed it couldn''t find the correct hardware (i.e., it didn''t support it).

That said, one of my friends tried it, and he said that Xvesa (the un-hardware accelerated one) actually ran faster than the normal, hardware accelerated XFree (of course, when he turned the composite manager off, it ran incredibly slow).

So, there''s still a lot of work to be done, but so far, it''s looking really nice.

http://chaos.webhop.org

Come on, people! Let''s get some discussion going!

http://chaos.webhop.org

FreeBSD is better then Linux and Windows. Discuss

Seiously though, discuss about what? Xserver? I dont think many people here use is, concidering that not many people visit this forum anyway.



EDIT: The first sentance of the XserverInstallGuide says "It is surprisingly difficult to follow this type of instruction set. You'll have to concentrate and double-check yourself constantly. Good luck!," which is like saying "This is going to be hard, error-prone, and will take you an eternity to acomplish. L8ter sucker..."

Um, but no.

[edited by - aftermath on March 16, 2004 6:05:18 PM]

Fair enough, but I don''t really necessarily expect everyone to have tried it, but rather at least have heard about it and looked into it. I just want peoples'' opinions on it and what they think about what they''ve seen or heard.

Personally, I think that if Xserver can be brought up to a level of high stability, all unices will have desktop graphics that can rival that of any other operating system. This could just be the next step necessary to making desktop Linux a possibility.

http://chaos.webhop.org

Compiled...on windows?

That would be sweet, I''ll have to check it out.

I''ve been using a Java Xserver to play freeciv from my windows computer. Alas, the graphics updating is slowish... network lag or java slowness, I''m not sure.

Apparently it even supports full alpha transparency... I havn''t dared try that yet however.

I''ll post a link when I get back home.

I used it some time ago, and I found it very usable, but without acceleration it''s kinda useless.

You can always look at this thread on the gentoo forum:
<a href="http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=106391"> http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=106391</a>.

@MaulingMonkey

There is an Cygwin/Xfree port that runs (I have used it) on Windows (XP for me) fine. I am not sure if Xserver would work with that. I dont think compiling will be extremely trivial if you use Cygwin, but not extremely hard too.