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X GUI Graphics Software

First Xouvert Milestone Released 404

Posted by timothy from the will-it-rock-your-world dept.
An anonymous reader writes " The first milestone of xouvert, the X-server replacement has been released. Xouvert includes MAS giving the X server its very own sound server. Nice. :) Also, just noticed that enlightenment quietly released an update to the 0.16 series. " (Here's a link to the Xouvert download page.)
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First Xouvert Milestone Released More

First Xouvert Milestone Released

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  • The things people complain about X... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ObviousGuy ( 578567 ) <ObviousGuy@hotmail.com> on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @06:05AM (#7666950) Homepage Journal
    People complain about X a lot, but when it's all boiled down there really isn't much to complain about. X is a great windowing system.

    • Re:The things people complain about X... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 10Ghz ( 453478 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @07:10AM (#7667123)
      We don't complain about X, we complain about Xfree.
    • Typically most people think X == XFree86 and so show their ignorance. If X is so bad how come SGI/IRIX still uses it for their visualisation systems. A client server architecture does not slow down a windowing system. Badly written software slows down a windowing system. Crippling the existing XFree implementation by coming up with a system that doesn't support any of the useful facilities of X is not an improvement. Hell even XP uses a client/server architecture. And then even inefficient XFree86 per

      • Re:The things people complain about X... (Score:5, Informative)

        by SQLz ( 564901 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @07:52AM (#7667286) Homepage Journal

        Well, you could have read the Xouvert FAQ before posting to educate yourself on what they actually plan on improving. That way, you wound't sound like you have no idea what you are talking about. Anyway, from the FAQ:

        2.5) So why is X so slow on my machine if not for network transparency?

        Yes, XFree86 /can/ be slow, especially on uniprocessor machines, but network transparency is NOT at fault. More common culprits appear to be toolkits, video drivers, and font rendering/render. Render really needs to DMA driven. Right now it pulls bits from the framebuffer using the CPU which with PCI is abysmally slow.

      • Re:The things people complain about X... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by fucksl4shd0t ( 630000 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @07:57AM (#7667309) Homepage Journal

        I'm afraid that Xouvert shows the worst side of Open Source. And that is that anyone can write OpenSource. Where's all the profiling data showing where XFree86 is slow. Why if you're trying to improve on XFree86 are they using a code fork and not starting from scratch? It seems to me this whole project is based on a gut feeling that removing all that socket code will speed it up rather than doing the proper research.

        Another poster already showed you their FAQ where they say they cannot remove network transparency.

        I think the Xouvert actually shows one of the best sides of open source. They are being non-critical of the fact that the XFree86 organization is slow, bloated, and more or less unable to keep XFree86 in a constant, modern state. Instead, they are providing a 'branch' of XFree86 that will focus on being bleeding-edge and providing fast turnaround for development and testing, so that they can interface with the slow, bloated XFree86 organization to improve XFree86. I think that says a lot of good things about OpenSource, taking care of our own, getting the job done, etc.

      • X is just a protocol. The whole problem is that most implementations of X are not particularly good implementations of a 2D windowing system. When you make remarks about those problems to an X proponent, you get the (correct) reply that it is not a problem with the protocol. He will then kindly request that you whine about your problems somewhere else.

        The problem with XFree86 is that it is developed by people who are not particularly interested in improving it (at least I have no other/better explanation f

  • Xouvert is... (Score:5, Informative)

    by roalt ( 534265 ) <slashdot,org&roalt,com> on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @06:06AM (#7666953) Homepage Journal
    For the non-french speaking under you: Xouvert means "X open".

  • Funny.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @06:11AM (#7666964)
    People were talking about XFree forking for so long and nothing ever happened. Now within the space of a few months, we have two!

    It seems at least to me that the freedesktop.org x server (kdrive) is where the interesting stuff is happening, but we'll see how the Xouvert guys get on.

    • Re:Funny.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by POds ( 241854 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @06:21AM (#7666990) Homepage Journal
      Well to quote:
      <quote>
      Eugenia (IP: ---.osnews.com) - Posted on 2003-12-09 01:21:59
      Xouvert: XFree86 fork with some code cleanups and addition of patches that the xfree86 guys were snobbing.

      freedesktop.org's X: Re-write of the core of their server (not a fork), rewrite of some of the extenstions, while reusing some xfree86 code mostly for some other extensions and drivers, but overall a new thing.

      Xouvert would be interesting to serve as the "middle man" towards the migration to fdo's X.
      </quote>

      So yes you'r right. I read on freedesktop.orgs site, or maybe it wasnt, and maybe it was old, but the server only needed less than 800k To run or it was of that size. Their server so far requires a compile for you to configure it as there are no configuration files. That alone i feel would cut out some bloat. The freedesktop.org promises a lot more i believe where as this one we're talking about just imporves on the current X server. But, any improvments are welcome ones.

      Thanx for the text Eugenia

      • X is not bloated! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by lokedhs ( 672255 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @06:31AM (#7667023)
        X isn't and never was bloated. People think it's large just because the framebuffer memory is included in the "ps" listing.

        Read the explanation on the freedesktop site. There they mention the fact that people developed X on really old VAX machines. I even ran X myself on an old VAXStation II which had several times less memory than your average palmtop computer, hardware which happens to run X as well [handhelds.org].

        • Re:X is not bloated! (Score:4, Insightful)

          by kinnell ( 607819 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @08:25AM (#7667481)
          The X server itself may not be bloated, but the XFree86 source distribution certainly is. Everything from client libs to Xeyes are included in the build system, and working out how to configure it to only build the parts you need is not an easy task. Not to mention the amount of cruft you have to download. This is a shame, because there is no reason why it has to be like this, but clearly the XFree86 people aren't interested in the problem. If Xouvert can modularise it well like they plan, this will be a massive improvement in itself.

  • One of the most important things here (Score:5, Interesting)

    by James_Duncan8181 ( 588316 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @06:15AM (#7666978) Homepage
    Xouvert represents far more then merely tranparent windows etc, it represents a move to a more recognisable OSS model of working. XFree86 is charterised by a fairly closed development process, long patch intergration times, and close control by the steering group. I am greatly looking forward to seeing a true open source methodolgy accelerate development.

    • Re:One of the most important things here (Score:5, Funny)

      by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @07:02AM (#7667091) Journal
      long patch intergration times, and close control by the steering group. I am greatly looking forward to seeing a true open source methodolgy accelerate development.

      Yeah, me too. I always hated how mostly stable XFree86 is, and how I don't have to upgrade every week to the lastest version. Thank goodness someone figured out a solution to that problem!

      • Haha! Now I know why javascript is such a bad idea. The only thing I can't figure out, I have my popup blocker in Mozilla disabled, how the hell did they get around it?

      • I always hated how mostly stable XFree86 is, and how I don't have to upgrade every week to the lastest version. Thank goodness someone figured out a solution to that problem!

        Choice is good, here's another alternative. [microsoft.com]

      • "I always hated how mostly stable XFree86 is, and how I don't have to upgrade every week to the lastest version."

        On the same token, some people hate how bloody long it takes to add new features and drivers to X.

        And if Xouvert's development model was anything like the Linux Kernel's dev model, then we'd see fairly rapid development, with a very stable tree which has a good release frequency (not too slow, not too fast), and then a dev tree if someone wants to do a daily CVS build. That'd be pretty good.

  • sounds nice (Score:5, Insightful)

    by axxackall ( 579006 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @06:16AM (#7666979) Homepage Journal
    Xouvert includes MAS giving the X server its very own sound server. Nice. :)

    Just nice? It's excelent! This is the biggest X Windowing achievement since first actual implementation of X Windows.

    It is in human nature to assotiate visual and audio information in the process of percepting it. Therefore video without audio mean seriously broken usability. That's why I think all these years X Windows has been developed in essentially wrong direction. The made in recent XFree86 versions transparency, which is really just a candy, while so important prime functionality was missed all the time.

    I am really happy that MAS in Xouvert now. I am going to switch to Xouvert as soon as possible. Good-bye, XFree86 - thank you for keeping me in the void silence all these years.

    • Re:sounds nice (Score:5, Funny)

      by popeyethesailor ( 325796 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @06:34AM (#7667032)
      I cant believe they dont have a web browser and email client in it yet.

    • Re:sounds nice (Score:5, Funny)

      by boaworm ( 180781 ) <boaworm@gmail.com> on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @07:08AM (#7667111) Homepage Journal
      I am really happy that MAS in Xouvert now

      Now they just have to rename the project to XMas and everyone will be happy :-)

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @06:21AM (#7666991)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • How's this going to work with KDE/gnome etc? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by carnivore302 ( 708545 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @06:26AM (#7667004) Journal
    Xouvert has its own sound engine, MAS. If Xouvert catches on, does this mean that the sound engines of KDE and gnome will become obsolete, or will they collide with MAS?

    If they collide, it basically means that KDE and gnome will have to support both X11 and Xouvert. I'm not sure if that is achievable. On the other hand, if they don't collide what's the use of MAS? I'm pretty happy with the way it works now. So I'll then continue working without MAS.

    • Re:How's this going to work with KDE/gnome etc? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Amiga Lover ( 708890 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @06:41AM (#7667043)
      If Xouvert catches on, does this mean that the sound engines of KDE and gnome will become obsolete, or will they collide with MAS?

      There's a few places Linux has failed miserably for me as a desktop, and consistent audio has been one. If I get KDE audio working, six other non KDE apps suddenly go silent, If I get those working, KDE audio apps error on me. Same story sadly. Now, perhaps it's just me not knowing what to futz around with, but to repeat a cliche, "I shouldn't have to do that".

      Perhaps kernel level device sharing would work, but I don't know if adding another sound engine would help much

      • Re:How's this going to work with KDE/gnome etc? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @07:11AM (#7667125) Journal
        Perhaps you should look at FreeBSD? It contains kernel-level sound mixing, and exposes several virtual /dev/dsp devices (/dev/dsp.0, /dev/dsp.1) which are mixed together to produce the final output. I have the KDE sound daemon pointing at one, the Gnome one pointing at another and leave `legacy' apps and games (which can't tolerate the latency imposed by one of these daemons) to use /dev/dsp (which is a symlink to /dev/dsp.0). In the 5.x series, this is handled automatically, and each request to open /dev/dsp returns a new mixer channel, rather than the device.

        Having said that, MAS is not a replacement for /dev/dsp. For one thing, it is network transparent (so I can run a MAS enabled MP3 player, for example, in a remote X session, but still hear the sound.) MAS is cross platform, so I can (in theory) post the sound between any combination of machines that run an X server, as I can with X11. MAS uses a stream/filter graph-based model, and so is very flxible. I regularly use a remote X session, and audio is one of the things I have been missing. MAS should provide that, and this is the first real implementation I have seen. Hopefully it should make it into the main XFree86 trunk soon...

    • If they do it right, everything will be interchangeable.

      I also noticed that it's happy handling mp3 streams. I hope someone with the skills can be pursuaded to do the same for ogg, as streaming my oggs in wav format would impose an unacceptably high network load, and decompressing ogg to wav and re-encoding to mp3 on the fly for streaming would be as obscene a waste of system resources as it would be of sound quality.
    • I'm pretty happy with the way it works now.

      So you are happy when you ssh-connect cross a network and run xmms in abosulte silence? I am not happy with that. That's why I applaud arival of sound to networked X windows.

      I think esd and arts will collapse to sound event dispatchers for legacy applications (those, which do not speak MAS API).

  • MAS or NAS (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @06:50AM (#7667062) Homepage
    I've used NAS for quite some time now. many apps are already compatable with it. (madplay mpg123 xmms gnome sound server) and it works great for X terminals to get sound (and hogs network bandwidth like no tomorrow)

    is MAS anything like NAS? is it compatable?

  • Sound server? Why not use ALSA's own native Dmix ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by phoxix ( 161744 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @07:00AM (#7667088)
    The subject pretty much says it all ...

    Read this [alsa-project.org] or this [opensrc.org] for more info.

    Death to ESD/ARTS today!! (and maybe even JACK, if we can low enough latency).

    Sunny Dubey
    • OK for your input, I approve totally the lack of esd, arts, ...
      However, Jack is useful if you need syncing several sources : jack is not a mixer (but can host one), it's a high end synchronisation framework.
      The ouput of jack is often alsa, but could be ardour for example. How can you do that with dmix ?

    • JACK and Dmix seems to have entirely different aims.
      JACK can be a 'pipe' for audio applications - so you can have an mp3 player and an effects processor and you can pipe the audio from one to the other. It allows them to access the sound HW also, but that's not the main feature.
      Dmix seems to be focused on accessing the sound device, although with nice additions, e.g. sample rate conversion, which is handy if you use the digital I/O of your card and want to play something other than 44.1/48 kHz files.

    • Dmix/Jack (Score:4, Interesting)

      by po8 ( 187055 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @01:46PM (#7670794)

      You have correctly identified the competition to MAS: JACK. Some of my colleagues and I have been wondering aloud whether one could build a nice interface to JACK for network audio. It looks like the answer is yes.

      As you correctly note, the real issue is latency. Servers like MAS cannot generally promise reasonable latency on the local side: latency matters there (indeed, it's all that matters).

      Dmix looks cool too, but as folks have pointed out, it's going to be tough to get it to work with the range of systems X runs on. Unless it's optionally layered atop JACK...

  • Does MAS collide with ALSA (assuming a Linux box), or it works above ALSA?
    • I believe your right, It works *abobe* ALSA. ALSA will do the hardware bits while the MAS will back into it, or if your XWindow is running on OSX, back into the Darwin equivelent, or Windows, back into ActiveDirectX.NET(?)
      Im not certain, can someone verify?

  • Who really wants all that garbage? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nichademus ( 34098 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @08:09AM (#7667372) Homepage
    After checking out the following screenshot: http://freedesktop.org/~keithp/screenshots/sharp_s hadow.png and then reading the contents of the X-Chat window, specifically, "I'm hoping to do things that won't be fast enough with 2D/3D hardware as it exists today.", I have to ask: Who really wants all this shadowing, and translucent windows, and animated desktop graphics? I mean seriously, what's the point? Does it help you get you work done? Does it increase your productivity? I see it being more of a nuisance and distraction.

    It certainly shows that Mr. Packard works for HP, what with him writing software that would require users to purchase new hardware just to have the next generation desktop. Hell, the desktop might as well be free, if we have to shell out the dough to purchase a new video card.

    • Re:Who really wants all that garbage? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:21AM (#7668440) Homepage Journal
      Who really wants all this shadowing, and translucent windows, and animated desktop graphics?

      I do. I really don't know how they'll benefit me, but I guarantee that someone will make a newly-possible feature that, once you see it, you'll wonder how you lived without.

      OK, here's a tiny example. What if your window manager used translucency to indicate window selection: the window with focus is opaque. The one you just left is slightly less so. The one before that is starting to become transparent. I think that'd be a much stronger (and faster) visual indicator than "window with focus is dark blue, windows without focus are lighter blue".

      Is that a trivial example? Sure. But the point is that we don't know what will turn out to be the productivity enhancing killer feature that we've been waiting for until we try it. These new features may very well be useless and unused, but they could also change the way we use our systems. New functionality is good.

  • We all know that X is designed to be network-transparent..

    So what I am wondering is whether or not this new sound extension will work across the network?

    Can I log into my machine from another and have the sound come with it?

    This could be a serious step forward for projects like LTSP that rely on kludges to get network-transparency for sound..

  • I like X and I've used it for 12 years now and have been programming at the Xlib level for about 5 years but EVEN NOW I still have to get out
    my venerable Xlib programming reference when I'm writing an app that requires liberal use of sophisticated colour. Read only , read write colourmaps etc, all these different types of
    visuals , Oh My God , who the hell designed this colour system?? Why the hell do I need a visual? Just give me colour X or the nearest equivalent , I don't give a damn HOW many colours

  • Enlightenment release (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sirReal.83. ( 671912 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @09:14AM (#7667816) Homepage
    "Also, just noticed that enlightenment quietly released an update to the 0.16 series."

    uh... that was over a month ago [enlightenment.org], on November 5th. It was a good little bugfix release, though.

  • Arch (Score:3, Informative)

    by truth_revealed ( 593493 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:13AM (#7668345)
    I'm pleasantly surprised to see that Xouvert is using the Arch revision control system.

    Does anyone know if you have to create individual UNIX user accounts for Arch users as you do with CVS? I've always hated that about CVS.

  • Enlightenment is a good example of.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bnavarro ( 172692 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:17AM (#7668388)
    Why keeping a project in an alpha/beta state is a bad idea. I used to use E a long time ago, but they never went 1.0, and all the distros just started ignoring it, so now I use Sawfish.

    This is a real pet peeve of mine. There are many OSS projects that do this. OpenSSL, anyone? The question is, why?? There must be a stable enough "beta" version of E that could be considered production quality, and should have been bumped up to 1.0 release status. I know that this is the case for OpenSSL, and a lot of other OSS projects out there. The fact is companies and non-hackers don't like adopting software that's advertised as "beta" quality. If you wan't your project recognized in the Real World, step up to the plate.

    I know this sounds like a whining rant, but I belive that the plethora of OSS projects forever stuck in a "beta testing" phase is one reason for hesitation for mainstream adoption of Linux.
    • There are plenty of 1.0, stable window managers out there. E16 has never gone gold because the developers (i.e. Rasterman) want to turn it into an entire desktop environment, not just a window manager. They launched on a massive rewrite (and then another, and another).

      E has become a place for experimental ideas that just wouldn't be accepted into a more stable project. Check out Rasterman's research into software vs OpenGL hardware rendering [slashdot.org] for Evas.

      We already have enough stable window managers (es

  • X-MAS (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tin Foil Hat ( 705308 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:52AM (#7668728)
    Xouvert includes MAS giving the X server its very own sound server.

    Just in time for X-MAS. How convenient.

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